political arabic music
 

I'm sure most of you already know this but the Middle East is full of dictators, oppressors and a**holes so naturally there are also a lot of angry people. A lot of underground Arab musicians criticise politicians, rulers etc. and well, most of them end up either in jail or fleeing the country. I decided to start this thread because I'm really passionate about this kind of music and I believe it makes a difference and hopefully gets us a little closer to freedom. I'm willing to translate/explain songs if a translation is not available but I don't know if anyone's even going to be interested in this but that's okay! Even if I end up just talking to myself, I am fine with that. I just really love writing about this stuff and I really admire these artists.

Zeid Hamdan was arrested about 18 months after this song was released but I believe he was released in like a week or so. He's from Beirut and the maximum sentence for insulting the president in Lebanon is 2 years. The song was written and recorded in English and although he's not the best English speaker, the message is pretty clear. He's telling all the warlords and corrupted politicians to gtfo of Lebanon. I actually really like this song and video because it's so catchy and despite the somewhat angry message Hamdan is trying to get through, it's an upbeat song and ironically everyone in the video looks very happy. It captures the Lebanese people well.

Sounds great! I used to live in Tunisia (post revolution) and got pretty interested in the rapping scene (people like El General etc). Although I was learning Arabic, I found some of the vocabulary really tough to translate as the songs are obviously full of slang, so I used to ask friends etc and do a lot of googling to find English translations of slang words etc.