Since the emergence of anti-colonial nationalist movements in the 1950s, Arab protest music has channeled the aspirations and anxieties of singers-songwriters as they navigated a troubled path towards emancipation. Throughout their trajectory, politically committed singers, from al-Sheikh Imam to Marcel Khalifeh, confronted foreign and native coercive powers, all within socialist, nationalist, and secular frameworks. Akin to the writings of politically committed intellectuals of their generations, their music evoked, to borrow Foucault’s terms, “conscience, consciousness, and eloquence.” In the last decades however, Arab authoritarian regimes have engaged in acts of patronage and coercion of artists whose music became incongruous in a political landscape of increased purges and unprecedented violence. As such, on the eve of the 2011 uprisings, Arab protest music had lost its political potency and ability to inspire emerging artists looking for new modes of expressing their dissent. In this paper, I suggest that contemporary Arab protest music has grown new aesthetic and political skin. I examine the ways in which spoken word poets, hailing from peripheral cities and refugee camps in Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon, have turned, not to the legacy of Arab protest music, but rather to Rap in search of new possibilities for critique and political change. I discuss the poetry of artists such as Watar, El Ras, El Darwish, and Far’i, particularly the ways in which they draw on traditional Arab poetics of dissent on the one hand, and the critical power of early American hip-hop on the other. I demonstrate how, as they reject the limits set by binaries such as East/West; secular/Islamic; tradition/modernity; and authoritarianism/chaos, they relocate the political from a teleological, nationalist, and secular discourse, to an anachronistic, transnational, and non-secular one. In so doing, these artists redefine the parameters of “conscience, consciousness, and eloquence” in protest music today.