How the Libyan war intersects with debates about multiculturalism in the EU. The second installment of my weekly column, in Monday’s edition of Souciant.

Well, not exactly. But you get the idea. To Germans, Italy is the south. Imagine an Egyptian-Italian hip-hop MC coming up here from Rome, and it seems that much further away. That Amir’s identity is already wrapped up in a different kind of ‘south’ makes him seem that much more foreign.

Even though Italian hip-hop artists will play outside the country (for example, the legendary Assalti Frontali played in Berlin last summer) despite backing from majors, the idiom has not been picked up abroad, in the same way that, for example, Baile funk, or African rap, have been noticed.

That is, picked up by hipsters. Nevertheless, I’d imagine there are plenty of Italian autoworkers here who’d go out to see Amir. Even if they hadn’t heard him before (he’s not exactly a household name, like the omnipresent Fabri Fibra), the Italian flag at the top of the flyer is an obvious lure.

The high point of our year in Milan was discovering its longstanding hip-hop scene. Not just any artists, but the brilliantly-named MCs Marracash and  Karkadan. Routinely employing cheeky oriental signifiers, both musicians attack typically racist fantasies of predatory Arab outsiders.

Charlie Bertsch wrote an in-depth piece on Karkadan in Zeek on Tuesday, reflecting on the singer’s significance as a multilingual Tunisian immigrant, playing the role of the ‘Post-European.’ Check out the videos. They do a great job of embellishing the complexity of the MC’s music.

Irrespective of how many times I’ve commissioned articles on Arab musicians, in context, it still feels precedent-setting to run these pieces. Part of that has to do with the poor state of music criticism, in general, in Jewish publications. And part of it has to do with identity politics.

The ideological link, for me, is the original  experience of otherness that Jews once had in Europe. The situation of Arab Europeans is unbelievably close. Because of the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, it’s something we tend to forget, precisely when it needs remembering.

Getting ready to leave London. Living room table, March 19th.

Hip-hop shop sign, Brixton Market. Lunch break, last Thursday.

2007 was an astounding year for dubstep and Indo-Arab impacted American hip-hop. Chicago’s long gone Los Crudos finally made it back into print, while baile thug funk and Tuareg guitar rock reminded worriers about the world music category that it’s not just about happy natives penning primitive campfire songs. Thumbs up to Pressure Sounds for putting out the best dub reissue of the year. As usual, Sublime Frequencies outdid everyone by coining the term ‘jihadi techno.’

In light of these observations, here’s what we played the most:

Burial, Untrue (Hyperdub)

The Revolutionaries, Drum Sound (Pressure Sounds)

Los Crudos, Discography (Lengua Armada)

Oh No, Dr No’s Oxperiment (Stones Throw)

Shackleton and Appleblim, Soundboy Punishments (Skull Disco)

Tinariwen, Aman Iman: Water is Life (World Village)

Madlib, Beat Konducta India (Stones Throw)

Omar Souleyman, Highway to Hassake (Sublime Frequencies)

Various Artists, Box of Dub Volume II (Soul Jazz)

V/A, Proibidao C.V: Forbidden Gang Funk From Rio de Janeiro (Sublime Frequencies)

Oh No‘s new American take on Middle Eastern hip-hop is not without similarly single-minded precedents. In terms of actual full-lengths, Mutamassik‘s 2005 LP, Definitive Works, is of equally subversive significance. For anyone familiar with post-war Egyptian pop, from the sampled string sections to the galloping percussion, the influence of Om Kholtum‘s band looms large on this Brooklyn DJ’s debut album.

Listening to Definitive last weekend, like a lot of records of its kind, I was struck by the ways in which Mutamassik almost plays with Western clichés of oriental music. Particularly the popularity of specific types of orchestral arrangements, and belly dance signifiers popular during the early ’60s, when cities like Los Angeles boasted of a number of Arab-themed club bands.

I don’t mean to suggest that this album intentionally stakes out a critical position in relation to these long forgotten artists. However, if you’re hip to the phenomenon (think guitar-driven mini-orchestras with fez-wearing, Arab-American and Armenian band leaders, not shriners), its hard not to place the new engagement with Mideast music in American hip-hop in relationship to them.

I own a number of out-of-print recordings by several of these groups, but they’re hidden somewhere deep inside my office closet. This weekend, I’m going to do some serious excavation work, and slap them straight back onto my turntable. I imagine that I’ll find them a bit more ideologically complex than I did before.

Not long after 9/11, my favorite local record store began stocking up on European reissues of Turkish psychedelia from the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps the third wave of musical imports from the greater Middle East that I can remember being taken up by American hipsters (beginning with their adoption of Ofra Haza in the mid-nineteen eighties,) the timing was entirely appropriate. Amidst the wreckage of the World Trade Center, American music fans were instinctively finding themselves drawn to the sounds of the Islamic equivalent of New York, London, or even San Francisco.

Indeed, if one wants to take a sampling of what makes the music of the eastern Mediterranean so unbelievably great, you can’t do any better than listen to what’s been coming out of Istanbul over the course of the past fourty years. Thus, I was reminded, as I delighted in the strangely familiar sounds of an American album whose arrangements epitomized what’s best about Middle Eastern pop. The second full-length to be issued by Madlib‘s younger brother, Oh No, Dr No’s Oxperiment is the closest thing that one will get to an archetypal Lebanese or Israeli Arab hip-hop record like Clotaire K‘s Lebanese LP, or DAM’s more recent album, Dedication.

Relying exclusively on regional source material, if there is a recording that reflects a Middle East-impacted American zeitgeist, this album is ground zero. Opening with the Turkish fuzz guitar of “Heavy”, to the mournful Arabic vocal part of “Down Under” near the it’s end,  Dr No is an excellent example of how organically Middle Eastern music and American hip-hop speak to each other. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s the political metaphor implied by that conversation’s fluency that’s so crucial. Think back to the pretense of the album’s title. It’s like a book report about the positive things Americans may have learned from their Iraqi sojourn. Baghdad Calling, anyone?

Between the fall of 1999 and the summer of 2001, I spent an untold number of hours capturing field recordings of anti-capitalist demonstrators from around the world. Posted to an assortment of websites ranging from Indymedia to the BBC, once I’d start playing a file, I’d record it in real time to a Phillips 765 CD-R dubbing deck.

The best example of these recordings is a montage I pieced together of a demonstration in front of the IMF HQ in Washington DC, in April 2000. Cut and sequenced manually, and then placed over a heavily edited hip-hop percussion track, the song, What’s Your Badge Number?, ended up on the first Elders of Zion record, Dawn Refuses to Rise.

Today, at the request of a listener, a community radio DJ posted the piece to her blog. Click here to read the entry and download the track.

By now, you’d think that a beats and Bollywood synthesis would be the stuff of nineties cliche. Indeed, it most certainly is. Witness all of the lazily titled ‘Buddha Beat’-style anthologies issued by exotica imprints on the one hand, and the ‘sitar and bass’ records once the province of boutique ethno labels like Outcaste on the other.

Finding a copy of this new Madlib disc for only four bucks, I decided to make the plunge. When this kind of work is done right, absolutely nothing beats it. Luckily, my intuition proved correct. Sampling both film dialogue and music, with Beat Konducta India, the legendary Oxnard DJ takes the idiom in an entirely new direction.

What makes this record work is how it inverts the experience of world music. Instead of making the listener imagine they’re somewhere else, it helps you figure out where you already are. Like my block, where sometimes I can hear Bollywood soundtracks blasting out of an Indian restaurant, while cars idling in front pump out loud hip-hop as they wait for the light to change.