Abstract
Since the 1980s, Morocco’s adoption of neoliberal policies has transformed the state into a selective advocate of “free” markets. The first generation to mature under these policies and their effects, the "jil jdid" or “new generation,” also hosts the nation's first hip hop musicians. Many scholars of non-US hip hop have depicted the spread of the genre as a drive towards greater freedoms of expression in political or cultural arenas. Commentators frequently describe the explosion of Moroccan hip hop since the early 2000s as similarly ground-breaking, citing the ascension of King Mohammed VI in 1999 as a key moment in the liberalization of national dialogues. While I agree that the constitution of Morocco's public sphere has radically altered in the last decade, and that hip hop's visibility and audibility plays a role in this reorganization, I suggest that the focus on cultural liberalization has obscured other, equally important effects of economic neoliberalization. The state has simultaneously reduced its presence in certain spheres, including the telecommunications sector and the labor market, and increased its presence in others, most visibly in construction of a cultural tourism industry. This forces musicians to take greater responsibility for their own livelihoods, even as they are encouraged to redeploy their energies within the cultural tourism sector.
This paper draws on Jocelyne Guilbault's formulation of musical entrepreneurship (2007), which I use in considering musicians as heads of their own capital-forming projects, to make two related arguments. First, it depicts the efforts of hip hop musicians from different cities in order to show that, regardless of the expressive content of their music, their entrepreneurship illustrates and reinforces the effects of growing class inequality under Morocco's neoliberalizing policies. Second, it considers one aspect of their entrepreneurship, the integration of Internet-based social media, as both a condition of entry into translocal hip hop networks and a transformative mode of self-conduct and subjectivation. Using data drawn from interactions, performances, and recorded media, I attempt to show that, as on- and off-line self-representations converge, musicians are encouraged to think of not only their music but also their selves as products of their visibility and successes in an informal musical marketplace. Together, these arguments elaborate upon the role of transnational popular culture in Morocco’s neoliberalization, and serve to problematize the frequently unquestioned association between hip hop products and (locally) oppositional politics.
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