Tonight Cal State Long Beach will “Celebrate Arab Hip-Hop,” but sex and bling will not be on the itinerary. Instead, lyrics of social injustice and creative cultural resistance will reign supreme.
The History Students’ Association (HSA) will be collaborating with the Middle Eastern studies program to promote multiple events over a two-day period to promote “Arab Hip-Hop,” which is a scene that has recently been gaining recognition in the mainstream media. The two-day event will be broken into four different sessions and are free to the general public.
Houri Berberian, a history professor and the director of the Middle East studies program, said she feels it is important to have events such as this on campus for a variety of reasons.
“It brings to campus people, films and artists with whom our own diverse student body who has grown up with rap and hip-hop can relate, thus bridging gaps,” Berberian said.
The festivities start today, with the documentary film “Slingshot Hip-Hop.” The film was an official selection at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and will be shown at 6:30 p.m. in LH-151.
The film braids together the stories of young Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and inside Israel as they discover hip-hop and employ it as a tool to surmount divisions imposed by occupation and poverty, according to the film’s website.
Wednesday will feature of a live performance by Omar Offendum, previously one-half of the rap group N.O.M.A.D.S. as he begins to promote his upcoming solo album.
Offendum is of Syrian-American descent and is known not only for his rap skills but also for his charitable activities where he has raised thousands of dollars for various humanitarian relief agencies. His performance is scheduled to begin at 3:30 p.m. in the University Student Union Beach Auditorium.
HAS President Andrew Banderas said he is thrilled to be a part of the event. Banderas said he considers himself a throwback artist in terms of styles of hip-hop.
“Hip-hop was social discussion. It was social commentary in raw form, served with a slap in the face,” Banderas said. “Arabic hip-hop is the return to true hip-hop, and for those students that don’t like or appreciate American hip-hop today for what it is, might appreciate this return to old school hip-hop and learn a lot about Arabic culture and history in the process.”
Following Offendum’s live performance, H. Samy Alim, will be discussing “Hip-hop in the Middle East and North Africa.” Alim is an assistant professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles and is the author of “Roc the MIC right: The Language of Hip-hop Culture.” Alim’s discussion will be held at 5 p.m. in LH-151.
The two-day event concludes with another documentary, “I Love Hip-hop in Morocco.” The film documents a determined group of Moroccan hip-hop hopefuls as they try to create their country’s first hip-hop festival. The film immediately follows Alim’s discussion at 7 p.m. in LH-151.
Berberian said, “Ultimately, programs such as these provide us with an opportunity — if we want to take it and pursue it — to explore the sometimes obvious and other times subtle connections between peoples, cultures, politics and music, with the hope of bringing us closer to informed thinking, mutual understanding, and peaceful coexistence.”
