Good Shit

We remember watching Slingshot Hip-hop last year for one of our classes, which marked the beginning of our Narcycist/Lowkey obsessive mania after we chucked out Enya/All American Rejects/other god awful shit-but never Backstreet Boys- and concluding that Arabic rap isn't that bad. But then we saw a video for one of DAM's songs which had a lot of girls in tight clothes flipping their bouffants and dancing, so we stopped listening to them for a while. That was when we were still going through the "open-your-mind" phase, where naturally after years of crap school indoctrination we believed that anyone (well a Palestinian mostly) who spoke in favor for the cause had to be a respectable knowledgeable prayer-of-5-times-a-day type. Oi, Noura Erekat, your skirt is too short!

We were so judgmental. We feel like slapping our past 17, 18 year old selves. Still, that DAM video was awful, and when we found out that the girls were commissioned from our very own Birzeit University's Business college, that really explained a lot. Ya3ni we were not surprised :). Shoot, we're STILL judgmental.

The other rap group were from Gaza called PR, Palestinian Rapperz. They're mostly defunct now, with the lead rapper following his destiny in making less than satisfactory songs somewhere on a visa in the US. Or is it a green card hmm.

DARG Team, which stands for Da Arabian Revolutionary Guys, probably came after Jackie Salloum's shooting of the movie, since apparently they are the best known hip hop group in Gaza. The above video is their own rendition of the popular poem by Tariq Ziad turned song "Ounadekum" (Calling You) as a tribute to the slain Italian activist Vittorio Arrigoni, which was his favorite song.

We Love It.

Oh, here we are, a lot of information on their Facebook page...

• Did the sound track for Aisheen “Still alive in Gaza” a documentary about the impact of the Gaza offense on people which was filmed in Gaza strip on February 2009 directed by the Swiss director Nicolas Wadimoff.

• The first Palestinian hip hope group to film a music video using the green screen and graphics designs “Rebuild by us”.

• Film the third music video Long Live Palestine featuring Low Key an MC from UK.

• Summer 2010 were able to leave the strip to Switzerland to work on the Gaza Meets Geneva project that took place for three months and were invited by Ville De Geneve were the team was able to record the third album titled Gaza Meets Geneva Vol. 2 featuring lots of hip hop and R&B artists from the EU.

• Presented the Palestinian and Gaza hip hop in EU in a six months tour played in Switzerland, France, Denmark, Norway and Sweden after nine months of failure trials to get out of Gaza.

• The first Palestinian and Gaza hip hop group to play in Syria and in AL Nerab the Palestinian refugee camp in “Aleppo” last summer.

• Won the first place on the first national hip hop competition that took place in the West Bank and had more than 50 participants from all over Palestinian territories and the lands of 48

We can't help but be finicky though. TARG doesn't sound that different from DARG, so would it have killed them to be "The Arabian Revolutionary Guys"? Yeah, we're showing our major right there.