Street language and experience

Ramallah Underground’s most active members – DJ Sotusura, Boikutt, Stormtrap, and Aswatt – may all hail from the same Palestinian town, but they have never all lived in the same country at the same time. Amman-based DJ Sotusura, Ramallah-based Boikutt, and Vienna-based Stormtrap evolve their beats, samples and raps in cyberspace, before they’re delivered to Dubai and sound engineer Aswatt. In the 12 years they’ve known each other, the closest proximity these childhood friends have known is right now, in front of NOX’s tape machine.

 

Despite the miles between them, Ramallah Underground continue to assemble their songs with an impressive fluidity; DJ Sotusura mixes together the sounds of his 1,000-plus records, spinning out Arabic-flavoured hip hop, electronica, jazz, and trip-hop, with the raps bursting over the top without compromise. 

 

Love of music was the motivation to form Ramallah Underground; politics is the impetus that keeps them going. “We don’t want people to think we’re using Palestine to listen to us,” says DJ Sotusura. “We’re not using the Palestinian cause as a platform for our music.” Politics are, though, unavoidable, particularly for rapper Boikutt, whose influences on his MySpace page include Intifada I & II. “90 per cent of what I rap is political because 80 per cent of life in Palestine is political. If you live in Palestine you breathe politics, you live politics. That’s the main reason why our music is mostly political – because our lives are political. I may not see my girlfriend cuz of politics; I may not eat cuz of politics. I don’t watch the news anymore. I just look out the window.”

 

Stormtrap, who writes, produces beats and maintains Ramallah Underground’s website, has a more pragmatic approach. “Music has helped us get by a lot in our lives, and without it we wouldn't have much hope for the future. We don't want to end up leading boring office lives. We're looking for something beyond that – and music is the key.”

 

But there’s no anger in Boikutt’s words, no pessimism in DJ Sotusura’s quiet tone, and certainly no stereotypical “yo yo bling bling money, whores, and cars” commercial rap in their songs. Just the plain, simple truth of their feelings about living inside, and outside, their occupied homeland. Some of wider Ramallah Underground crew – there’s more than ten, including producers, mixers and fixers – are not even out of their teens, and none are out of their twenties, yet they carry a humorous optimism that belies their serious demeanour. But then they have a serious demeanour that transcends their age. Though they want to be heard, sure, but they refuse to go the way of many independent artists and compress and mould their rap to fit into the big-label, mass-market pigeonholes created for hip hop in recent years.

 

In keeping with their music-making dynamic, Boikutt takes it one step further. “We want to represent Ramallah; then Palestine, then the earth. We’re all from the same planet aren’t we?”

And DJ Sotusura wraps it all up. “Music is the ultimate response to politics”

 

For the full version of this article, see NOX01.