Author: Freedom

El Rass’ signature style is an animated fusion of classical Arabic — an idiom seldom employed in rap — and contemporary wordplay gleaned from the Lebanese streets and elsewhere.
“We are all made from the same steel, but the blacksmith is rotten.”

Shadia Mansour a British rap singer of Palestinian origin found a special outlet to express “the pain of the Palestinian people. My music sometimes sounds hostile. It’s my anger coming out and it’s resistance. It’s non-violent resistance.”

The first Palestinian rap crew and among the trailblazers of early Arab rap, DAM overlaid hip-hop beats with Arabic melodies and lyrics that brought their music back to the genre’s 1970s roots: protest. Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948, many remained on the land that became Israel and now live as citizens of the Jewish state. “Israelis don’t like us because we’re Arabs, and the other Arabs don’t like us because we have Israeli passports, because we are citizens,” Mahmoud of DAM told the Independent.

checkpoint 303 is inspired by the sounds that pace the daily lives of millions of people in the middle east. screeching sounds of bullets. echoing injustice. uproar. revolt. dispair and sadness. and still amidst all this the soothing sounds. of hope. of normality.

TOOT ARD (Strawberries) is a “mountain reggae” band from the majestic mountainside village of Majdal Shams in the Occupied Golan Heights/ Syria.