Values That Pay - Complicity, Sincerity, and Hip Hop in Contemporary Moroccan Life

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press-s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Today, Morocco's hip hop artists are vital to their country's reputation as diverse, creative, and modern. But in the 1990s and 2000s, teenage amateurs shaped their craft and ideals together as the profound socioeconomic changes of neoliberalization swept through their neighborhoods. Values That Pay traces Moroccan hip hop's trajectory from sidewalk cyphers and bedroom studios to royal commendations and international festivals. Kendra Salois draws from more than ten years of research into her interlocutors' music and moral reasoning to frame this institutionalization around the constitutive tensions of hip hop aesthetics and neoliberal life. Entrepreneurial artists respond to their unavoidable complicity with an extractive state through aesthetic and interpersonal sincerity, educating their fans on the risks and respons