A night with DAM
They are Palestine’s front-page rap band, and one of the most interesting groups gatheringinternational attention today, but yet, its their first time performing in an Arab city. For you see, Tamer Nafar, Suhell Nafar, and Mahmoud Jreri were born in Il-Led (Lod), descendants of the Palestinians or “Israeli Arabs” who stayed after the forced exodus of their brethren in 1948, and thus have Israeli citizenships, making them unwelcome in the most of the Arab world.
That says a lot about the sort of music they were singing, “We’ve been like this more than 50 years, living as prisoners behind the bars of paragraphs of agreements that change nothing… You won’t limit my hope by a wall of separation, and if this barrier comes between me and my land, I’ll still be connected to Palestine, like an embryo to the umbilical cord.” Musically, DAM’s is a unique mix of East and West, fusing Arabic percussive rhythms, Middle Eastern melodies and urban hip hop/rap, as well as parts of popular music from both worlds. They’re also extremely creative and very charismatic. The sound system at Al-Hussein Parks really needs some tweaking though.
It has been almost two years from when I first blogged about DAM, and I’m really glad I got to hear them live, as a part of the now annual Fete De La Musique (one more reason to love to the French). For more on DAM, check out their homepage or the MySpace page (which also has some samples).
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