Tunisia’s banned rappers step out

TUNIS:

Stars on Facebook but banned from performing live, Tunisia's most popular rappers — one of them deeply religious — are able to step out of the virtual world and onto the stage with the old regime gone.

Hassled by the authorities and scorned by producers, the artists who gave voice to the anger that spilled into protests that toppled Zine El Abidine Ben Ali are now courted by music houses and making videos in plain sight.

Hamada Ben Amor, better known on the web as The General, was arrested at his parents' home in the southern town of Sfax on January 5 at the height of the wave of unrest that has come to be known as the Jasmine Revolution.

He had shot to Internet fame with the song "President, your people are dead", a dig at Ben Ali's corruption-accused authoritarian dictatorship that became an anti-establishment anthem for thousands.

The 21-year-old says his aim was to draw Ben Ali's attention the misery and repression suffered by many in Tunisia.

In several days of detention at the interior ministry, the police "were trying to find out if I belonged to any political group" and "told me to drop political subjects," he told AFP.

The transitional government in charge until elections can be organised has loosened the grip of the previous regime, allowing unprecedented media and political freedoms.

Amor said he has since received recording offers from international and national production houses.

"I plan to concentrate on rap and expand my musical repertoire of more than 30 songs," he said excitedly.

The young rapper has also been invited to perform on Saturday at the 10,000-seater El Menzah stadium close to Tunis.

Also billed for the show is another performer who had until recently been only virtual, the thoroughly more inflammatory Mohammed Jandoubi, alias Psyco-M, who was Tunisia's number one 'Net rapper last year.

Psyco-M, 24, caused a stir with "manipulation", in which he tears into symbols of secularism and Arab nationalism in a religious analysis of the 20th century in which he pushes the theory of a US-Zionist plot to destroy Islam.

He questions the morals of Tunisian television and cinema personalities, attacking those in "miniskirts dressed like Naomi Campbell" and has already earned himself a charge of defamation earlier this month.

He also rejects the Personal Status Code which was introduced at independence in 1956 and outlaws polygamy, also laying the legal foundation for equality between men and women.

The code has replaced Islamic Sharia law, according to the rapper.

Claiming to "fight religious and secular extremism at the same time", the young artist condemns "intellectual and political Westernisation".

Under Ben Ali's repressive but determinedly secular regime, Psyco-M was barred from performing in concert or on television, despite his thousands of Facebook fans.

"I have had threats of prison or death," he told AFP.

Tunisians attached to the country's secularism wonder if Mohammed Jandoubi poses a "public danger" — a term he plans to use for the title of an upcoming CD that he says will respond to his detractors.

The rapper said he too had received offers from record companies in Tunisia and France. Then he cut short the interview: "I have to go and scout out the location for my first video," he said.

The site — the long-feared interior ministry, which enforced Ben Ali's strong-armed tactics that ultimately failed to save him.


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