This paper investigates the burgeoning scene of Arabic hip hop as political art in Beirut since roughly 2011. I situate the growth of this artistic expression within that city’s recent history as a “host” cosmopolitan space, home to various demographic flows and stasis and read the growing political enthusiasm around and within the subculture of hip hop materially within specific venues and spaces in Hamra, Ashrafieh, Bourj el Hammoud, and downtown Beirut. In so doing, I articulate an analysis of hip hop culture that is significantly rooted in the spatial dynamics and embodied affect of consuming live performances, a factor often overlooked in linguistic readings of rap lyrics or visual readings of tagging (graffiti) culture. In approaching performances of rap in Arabic in these venues, I also consider the choreography between MCs – often arranged as international and/or interdiasporic artistic collaborations between two or more artists – and their audiences. This look at movement and choreography of the live event is significantly distinct from the examination occasionally included in hip hop studies that looks at “break dancing” –often assumed to be the most significant embodied aspect of hip hop culture. My spatial, embodied, but most of all, material readings of recent hip hop in Beirut significantly diverge from much Anglophone literature on hip hop culture in the “developing world” or of popular culture in the Arab world in that I do not consider these performances to make up a uniform wave of resistant creative expression in Beirut and its environs. While I do argue that the significant growth of energy and enthusiasm around hip hop in Beirut in the past few years constitutes the veritable explosion of a new politico-aesthetic subculture, I use these material readings to argue that the new trend opens up the space for diversion, dissension, disagreement, and debate.