This paper posits yearning as an affective schema through which to understand the political potency in practices of distinction among producers and listeners of experimental Arabic rap in the Arabic-speaking Levant. In doing so, it directs attention to shifting structures of feeling in Ramallah, Amman, and Beirut -- cities that largely did not witness paradigm-challenging protests during the years 2010-2013. Proposing an alternative framework to the expectation for resistance or agentive empowerment this musical subgenre in particular has been assumed to provide in the wake of the short-lived Arab Uprisings, this research explores how experimental rap music produces stillness. That is, this paper examines emergent political formations when live music does not seem to excite, rouse, or “hype” a gathered audience. How to understand the aesthetic and political innovation and the invitations to polyphony in rap music that renders them quiet, pensive, or in tears? Tracing the development of lyricism and rhythms that refuse strategies to “hype” or keep audiences in a “shouting place,” this paper explores how musicians address and relate loss to gathered listeners. Building on testimony from listeners about the kind of music and lyricism they seek, this paper is grounded in a proposal to trace an aesthetics of istfza/istifzaz, or provocation or surprise, in the lyrical work of the Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese rappers boikutt, El Rass, Al Darwish, and Nasser al-Touffar. Building on recent suggestions to map an aesthetics of glitch in electronic music onto the these rappers’ work, this paper pushes these aesthetic readings by situating the affinity for surprise, noise, and istifzaz in affective frameworks and geopolitical frustrations that link audiences in Ramallah, Amman, and Beirut. In theorizing yearning as a potently political condition, this paper works to re-positions the listener as entrenched in and interpellated by moving constellations of heterogeneous bodies. The proposal I build interprets political processes not in the performance of noticeable activities that distinguish unique individuals as having agency, but in the affective experiences that allow alienated individuals to recognize themselves in shifting coalitions and structures of belonging.