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‘An “A”: not adjusted to life in our society.’ The clock starts ticking and a young blonde gives a little start as she hears herself spell out ‘a-l-i-e-n’ in front of the nation’s television viewers. As snickers rise from the audience, the contestant realizes what she has just said on live Dutch television. This is the TV game Get the Picture. The quizmaster had expected to hear the word ‘asocial’ and is dying of embarrassment. It is not at all strange that this painful slip was made, however. Considering the daily dose of media reports on the asocial behaviour of foreign immigrants, the Netherlands is slowly becoming overfed with, and even used to, negative portrayals. When no attention is paid to context and nuance, the word ‘asocial’ soon becomes synonymous with ‘alien’ in popular parlance. What’s more, the next time the answer could equally well be ‘Arab’, ‘Antillian’, or ‘asylum seeker’.The social debate on immigrants as problem cases within Western society finds its way into living rooms around six o’clock in the evening, when we are fed the rabble-rousing with which the media earns its daily bread, according to rapper Salah Edin. In reaction, he has made the rap video Het Land Van… (The Land of… ), a fierce parody on the similarly-named track by the rap duo Lange Frans & Baas B. (2005). That duo may well have rapped about hip-hop being a child of thirty, but in the meantime, a new generation of rappers has arrived, one that grew up with trance and gabber instead of hip-hop, but now has discovered the possibilities of rap as a medium for communication. Salah Edin’s video clip was given lots of attention by the media. Made in collaboration with the progressive communications agency Waanzee, the idiom of the clip differs from that of customary hip-hop videos and raises many questions. It even led to the SGP party’s bringing the matter up before the Dutch government. People wondered whether the brand-new TAX Foundation (set up to stimulate collaborations between image makers and pop artists) should have given money to this project, feeling felt that the clip would arouse hate and foster radical ideologies and terrorist sympathies in young Muslims.In the video clip, the rapper, a Moroccan Muslim, expresses his dissatisfaction with Dutch politics and touches on the underdog position of Moroccans and Muslims. The clip zooms in on a virtuous Dutch household. Mother and daughter are playing Scrabble; a copy of Van Gogh’s De Aardappeleters hangs on the wall. The images on the television screen make it clear that the scene is taking place in the present. The television is the only source of light in the living room. There seems to be a bit of poverty, as father comes home with a box from the Food Bank. Salah Edin: ‘Most people work from nine to five, come home, eat at six o’clock, put on the TV and then the brainwashing starts. As soon as the TV goes on, that inarticulate feeling is nurtured.’ The rapper, clean-shaven but with a dark look, comes on screen. Edin turns the achievements of Dutch tolerance, freedom and openness inside out, giving his view of the real morality. Darling daughter goes and sits behind a window with a red light (a reference to the rising number of single teenage mothers, prostitution and traffic in women) and we see how an endless stream of negative news images flows into the living room from the permanently blaring television. Offensive statements by politicians, opinion makers, and special experts ring like a mantra throughout the track.Various confrontational scenes from Edin’s daily life pass in review. Old folks see a praying Muslim as a terrorist; the rapper meekly submits to a body search under the disapproving gaze of bystanders. In the meantime, his beard steadily grows. Switching identities from neighbourhood youth to criminal, he ends the track wearing an orange suit, a reference to Guantánamo Bay. The message of the clip is clear: the rapper portrays himself as a martyr of media over-simplification. Edin is not ashamed of expressing himself so emotionally or taking a moralistic tone. He finds it nonsense that people think he is advocating radicalism: ‘What I am doing is exactly the opposite – showing how it comes about. The moment Geert Wilders announces that you should tear up the Koran, you recruit twenty new radical people in one blow.’ According to him, the moral of the clip is: ‘Investigate, read a book, use the Internet. Don’t accept everything that people (and the media) say to you. That also goes for Muslims.’Without the clip, the track probably would have attracted very little attention. The brouhaha surrounding the clip gives him the chance to tell his story. But the text of the track is polarizing and chock-full of ‘we/they’ clichés. In an episode of PREMTIME, he takes a provocative stance in reaction to the uproar. He is evasive when the Holocaust is mentioned and when asked whether he thinks Osama bin Laden is a terrorist or freedom fighter, he answers: ‘a freedom fighter’. It reveals the cultural dilemma in which Edin lives. Edin: ‘This is pure hip-hop: it’s about the message. Look at hip-hop bands like Public Enemy or Dead Prez; they all foster rebellion. When there’s great pressure, you get revolt. This is my way of rising in revolt.’CriticalHip-hop has always been socially engaged, but the current revival is more political and direct than ever. Since the 1970s, hip-hop has created an Afro-American social consciousness, not only amongst blacks but also amongst whites in Western society. While commercial hip-hop still babbles on, the more intelligent ‘conscious rap ‘ and ‘independent rap’ are now linking up with movements in hip-hop that are rougher, more radical, and unambiguous. Engagement has been given new life that, surprisingly enough, comes from the less sophisticated hip-hop.Video clips play an important role in this. Run-of-the-mill rap videos are known for their bling bling, sex and decadence and not really for their inventiveness. Everything that is different causes a sensation, such as rapper Eminem with his anti-Bush clip Mosh (2004), made by Ian Inaba from Guerrilla News Network. In France, rappers have been making critical video clips for some time now, such as the professionally made clips in which shocking world news images are inserted randomly ((Akhenaton in collaboration with Shurik’N, La fin de leur monde) and the almost documentary-like clips in which a story is told through shots taken from daily life on the streets (IAM, Demain c’est loin). This crossover between handycam and sophisticated video techniques also influences films like La Haine (Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995), a film with an almost prophetic view of the riots in the French banlieues in 2005.In Algeria and Morocco, rap is the new rai. Whereas rai conceals its messages in sugary-sweet Western love songs, North African rap directly voices the political dissatisfaction in these countries and also maintains a strong North-African identity. The Internet offers a safe refuge for such protest clips. This movement is also propelled by Nederhop, the Dutch hip-hop. Call it reality rap. No frills, no extra poetry. No Fabeltjeskrant (similar to the Muppet Show), but a rhyming Jeugdjournaal (News for the Youth) in broken Dutch. The street – with more street cred than ever. Listening through the eyes. This development is happening lightning fast, due to the possibility of distributing clips through YouTube and MySpace. The only engaged hip-hop that appears on TV is Postbus 51 rap (rapping ministers, Ali B., Lange Frans & Baas B.) but this is not really very much admired amongst critical rappers. The Internet brings anarchy, emancipation and democratization. Now that the television channel The Box has gone off the air, the do-it-yourself generation is finding what they want on the Internet, putting together their own videos that feature friends from the neighbourhood. Or fans make their own clip for a track and put it on the Internet, like the 18-year-old fan who made a confrontational clip using Internet material for the track Conflict Diamonds by Kubus (NL) & BangBang (GB). OptimisticIt is not easy to separate the wheat from the chaff in these underground scenes and to predict who is going to make the most interesting music videos. The world in which this rap develops changes as fast as it produces clips. The roots of hip-hop and the requisite origins of rap are no longer important. As far as that’s concerned, it could be called the (black) punk of this era. Musically, the bar is not high; all that matters is the purpose of the rap. This is music from the street, primarily made by Moroccan and Antillian youths. Smooth beats, corny rhymes and cheap visuals. Yet these kids are fighting a battle of emancipation; they are enterprising and making themselves heard. As of yet they have been preaching to the converted, heavily putting the emphasis on ‘we’ (Moroccans, Antilleans) and ‘they’ (the Dutch). A survey of this development reveals that there are only a few really outstanding rappers in the rap-loving, multiculti, CD-making Netherlands. They are Appa, Kempi and Salah Edin. Whereas Salah Edin is the most professional – very well-spoken, with an international touring reputation and shrewd press campaigns – Kempi is the toughest of the three. A young Antillian from Eindhoven, Kempi has regularly spent time in jail and openly says he deals to make a living. Whereas the older generation (Extince, Raymtzer, Duvel and later Typhoon, Opgezwolle) raps in salonfähige street credibility with inventive linguistic acrobatics and shows their good Dutch upbringing in references to VPRO’s programmes for children and the comedians Van Kooten and De Bie, Kempi spends not a word on this. His generation did not grow up with that culture. The new generation of rappers gets down with tough, pointed, slipshod language. Word craft hardly matters; what is important is getting their story across. In Kempi’s Zoveel stress (so much stress), the words are swallowed and presented in half-rapped, half-sung sentences. Yet in all of its simplicity, the track cuts through you like a knife. Kempi is not a hip-hopper, but a hustler who earns his money with rapping in order to stay out of jail. He made the video clip Zet um op baby (do it big, baby) about a 16-year-old girl from a deprived neighbourhood who is pregnant and on her own. Kempi shows himself to be a new style of crooner when he raps: ‘I hope your boyfriend comes back to his chick.’ Pictures of young mothers and their babies (and their other children) flash across the screen.This rap is directed at a relatively closed community that includes both the makers and their audience. This is a new kind of activism that is not expressed live in huge public demonstrations and silent marches or graffiti and pamphlets, but through protest performances in video clips. The communities that spring up through the Internet are formed in an individual, less visible way – until a clip has been seen a million times and people talk about it. Just as Chuck D. (Public Enemy) called hip-hop the black CNN, this young Dutch rap movement is the street NOVA. Clumsily rapping politicians could learn a thing or two by listening to it.The young Appa from Amsterdam formulates his words beautifully. This linguistically promising rapper says: ‘It is time the politicians stop using rap to reach young people and instead listen to the young people who are rapping in order to reach the politicians.’ Appa became known for his clip Schuif aan de kant (move aside). This track starts with the quiz scene from Get the Picture, described above. By now, it has been seen on YouTube around 860,000 times. Appa raps about morality in the Netherlands, about Lebanon, about kids who get into trouble and about the role of Moroccans in deprived neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. ‘The dudes in the hood support us.’ Children from the neighbourhood shout in the background. One of them is wearing a T-shirt with ‘Hamas’ printed on it, another is carrying a Palestinian flag. ‘I do what I must do, this is my day, I stand up for my people and enter the fray. I feel Moroccan and that’s what I’ll stay.’ At the end of the clip, the rapper and his following tear through Amsterdam North on their scooters – brandishing axes and waving Palestinian flags.No matter how much these clips seem riotous and superficial at first, the force of the rebuttal works. They make you think. Seen from the viewpoint of cultural history they are fascinating; seen artistically, they are not all that interesting. Yet it is evident that the simple roughness of Kempi’s Zoveel stress produces a moving and sensational aesthetic, which is totally different than the slick films of American gangsta rap. Clichés, ‘gummo’ and trash are not concealed. The clips are natural and unaffected. The question is whether there is a referential awareness of clip aesthetics, and whether this is being pursued. It seems as though only Salah Edin is aware of it and also wants to stand out in this respect. Het Land Van… is an admirable attempt, but certainly would have to be reinterpreted for a larger audience in order to be truly interesting as an autonomous clip.The newest generation of rappers explicitly reverts to traditional culture, with Islam offering something to hold onto for rappers such as Salah, Edin and Appa. It’s remarkable how nuanced, idealistic and even optimistic these rappers are. Appa: ‘My dream is to realize all my dreams. No difference between natives and immigrants – I know, forget it. But I keep hoping that we’ll get there.’ Seemingly traditional in tone, the clips offer special stories of emancipation that appeal to their own social group. You have to be worldly-wise in order to make these self-aware steps, to take on this engagement with the rest of society. However one dimensional they may appear, these clips can now spread that same awareness amongst a new generation of young people, just like hip-hop did earlier amongst the somewhat older generations. As far as that’s concerned, the American rapper Nas is wrong with his Hiphop is Dead CD. The need for rap is back. Video clips are necessary in order to be heard. Appa: ‘I am chosen, stepped out of that deep life, I am blessed, cause now I can say it in rhymes.’ linksSalah Edinwww.salahedin.nlAppawww.appaman.nl Kempiwww.tiskempi.nl