Filling the Head

Discipline-bending study of Arabic-language rap poised to reframe how we think about youth and resistance.

An ethnographic study of Arabic-language rap music and the trans-national communities central to the genre’s enduring popularity.

Based on ethnographic research in Ramallah (Palestine), Amman (Jordan), and Beirut (Lebanon), Rayya El Zein explores making and listening to music as an active navigation of shifting geopolitical landscapes.

In Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic, ordinary motion and emotion are treated as political when spectacular political movements like protests, strikes, or revolutions feel far away, forced, or otherwise impossible. Threading reflections from fans, rappers, DJs, producers, and venue owners with thick descriptions of live concerts, El Zein offers new insights into what it means politically to be moved by music.

Filling the Head challenges existing narratives that equate rap with popular political resistance against oppressive regimes. Through an affective engagement with istifzaz—provocation or surprise— and the refrain shared by fans and performers that the music "filled their head" (Arabic: ‘abba rasshom), this analysis attends to a music that is political in the relief it offers from cynicism, resignation, and disgust with contemporary politics and society.

El Zein explores the political promise in artists' refusal to confine their lyrical or musical experimentation to an ethos of resistance.