Throwing Money at Emirati Hip Hop Doesn't Mean Anyone's Going to Listen

Luxury cars outside the People by Crystal nightclub.

The sun, sand and skyscrapers of the United Arab Emirates aren't an environment you'd typically associate with hip hop. There just aren't any of the same cultural signifiers as the places it started out; Illmatic probably wouldn't have been the same album if the struggle was about going £30 million over budget on your new artificial archipelago instead of the ravages of urban poverty.

But the young Emirati elite throwing wads of cash at studio time and music videos to forge their way into a rap career don't care about that, and why should they? Genres don't have to stay rooted; dubstep was spawned in a borough of south London known for its train stations and knife crime, and has ended up somewhere between a Tucson frat house and a guy who used to have a snakebite piercing.

The problem is – weirdly – those wads of cash aren't exactly conducive to an authentic, organic scene. No one's going to unleash a conscious backpack album about the government oppression of its critics when there's far more to be made out of following Flo Rida's artistic process and just droning the word "club" over a house beat. Meaning we're left with a load of stuff that sounds like the kind of thing Phillip Schofield could feasibly have a good time dancing to at the BBC Christmas party.

That said, there are some Emirati acts trying to reclaim a bit of prestige. Like Desert Heat, two brothers in kanduras from Dubai who you might recognise from their 2008 hit, "Keep It Desert". One of the brothers, Illmiyah, has been quoted as saying that it pains him that Emiratis "are stereotyped as [being] born rich and privileged", and wants to correct that assumption. In fact, he even released a solo album called Stereotyped to prove it. Unfortunately, Desert Heat were banned in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after releasing their first album, and haven't had much success in their native UAE, either.

American hip hop is popular in the Emirates – Rick Ross has his first show there this month – but the radios won't play homegrown MCs and nobody really seems to bother tracking any local artists down online. It's kind of like UK hip hop, I suppose, only even less popular.

DJ Bliss in his studio.

I wanted to get a better idea of some of the other people who make up the UAE's hip hop scene, so I went to speak to a few of them. The first was DJ Bliss, a producer, radio host, TV presenter and the face of Beats By Dre in the Emirates – and pretty much the only Emirati in the country's music business who everyone can name. After DJing at parties as a teenager, Bliss – real name Marwan Parham Al Awadhi – ended up momentarily bowing down to family pressure and pursuing a career with a multinational tobacco company.

But that blip only lasted a year, before he was out again, leaving his brothers to start a successful shawarma chain and landing a spot on one of Dubai's biggest radio stations. He's clearly been raised with the comforts of basically any Emirati his age, but Bliss struck me as a hard worker, not someone who's let his parents' money ferry him to where he is now.

He has the bolshiness of any other young, successful DJ, but, managing a rapper who's been on his books for two years because "the time isn't right", he understands the problems facing the Emirati hip hop scene – that nobody will play it and nobody will promote it, so nobody will listen to it. He also doesn't shy away from the fact that some of the Emirati rappers born into infinity pools and Maybachs are arguably just tourists in a culture that they've summoned into existence with handouts and a bulk order of Yankees caps.

"It's true – rap comes from hardship," he told me. "And from the Emirati view, there really isn't that much struggle; even if you're a high school drop out or whatever, you just join the army and make a crazy amount of money."

At around midnight, Bliss' driver took me to People by Crystal – an elite Dubai club – to wait while Bliss sped home in his Bentley to change before playing a set. Waiting for him, I milled around with my camera round my neck, which attracted a bunch of people who presumably thought I was the club's official photographer, asked me to take a photo of them arranged in formation and got angry when I told them I probably wasn't going to email them the photo. I realised then why I don't like elite clubs: They're full of people who want to go to elite clubs. I left halfway through Bliss' set.

Bliss DJing in People by Crystal.

Bliss' output is tailored to clubs full of expats, and although he produces his own stuff – which is actually pretty good, in that bashy, shouty Jaz-Z way – he gets a much better response when he's dropping Kanye and Macklemore. Something a little more home-focused, though this time run by expats, is FreekTV, a YouTube channel both mocking general Abu Dhabi culture and championing local hip hop talent.

I met up with Mustafa Ismail, a Somali who founded and runs FreekTV, and Muhammed Rachdi, a Tunisian and frequent collaborator who MCs under the name Alonzo. They don't have much time for the Abu Dhabi and Dubai rich kids, talking more about the underground scene in the poorer (but still comparatively wealthy) areas of the country – mainly the emirate of Sharjah – that's slightly darker in terms of beats and lyrical content; more Raekwon than R Kelly.

But the music is hard to find, they say – a couple of shitty YouTube videos is the best you'll get, because these guys don't know how to promote their tunes and don't necessarily have the money of their contemporaries in the wealthier emirates to make professional music videos that nobody's going to watch. There are no shows organised for up-and-comers and nobody has any kind of web presence, so mostly they'll make a song and just send it out on BBM or email it to friends.

When Sharjah was brought up, I asked Mustafa and Muhammed about Dangour, a rapper from the area who was arrested in 2011 for "inciting gangsterism" and sentenced to three months in jail. His crime? Spreading a music video on BBM where he rapped about torturing anyone who disrespected him, smoking hash and hating white people over footage of torture (that the police later claimed was fake). That was notable because A) I can't even imagine Necro putting torture footage in a music video, and B) the court eventually ruled that Dangour had created the video to "make people scared of him".

His is the only case I could find of an Emirati rapper trying to present himself as a thug, even if it was a whole new type of thug – one who's racist while waterboarding people instead of selling drugs and drinking 40s. But, shockingly, it was all an affectation; according to a policeman who knew him at school, "He wasn't tough then – he used to cry all the time."

Talking to Emirati media after the arrest, another local rapper, Mohammed Al Amry, said, "He wanted people to talk about him like he's a criminal and he was looking to be arrested. But don't blame rap music. It's not about the music, it's about him."

Mustafa from Freek TV.

Muhammed didn't share Al Amry's opinion; "He's got something special about him," he told me. Unfortunately, I couldn't find out what that special thing is – every attempt to contact Dangour was fruitless, save for one muddled email from an associate telling me he was in Malaysia and "trying to claim his rights from outside".

As you'd probably expect, the output from Emirati rappers who aren't being jailed is considerably more tame than Dangour's love letters to flagellation. For example, Dubai-based MC Bunny J's videos don't feature anyone having their face kicked in, just people wearing sunglasses at night and pouting a lot in deserts.

With those videos in mind, I expected a spoilt kid pepped up on delusion when I was on my way to meet Bunny – weirdly, a Dubai police officer by day – and his manager in a Starbucks in Dubai Mall. But instead I met two slightly timid men with a genuine passion for what they're doing.

Bunny J is never going to deliver anything too profound – DOOM and Immortal Technique needn't worry too much about an Emirati invasion occupying their niche. But, to him, that doesn't matter. "I just rap about life, partying, what I see," he told me, "I just do it for fun." I asked how that poppin' bottles lifestyle fits in with his religion – whether he's ever encountered any opposition from particularly conservative family members. But he just told me that Islam is important to him and left it that. The UAE is moderate in comparison to many of its neighbouring countries – and the vast majority of its citizens are expats – so everyone I spoke to told me that the culture is accommodating of hip hop, even if it was a new phenomenon when Emiratis started rapping themselves.

Bunny J.

Bunny was keen to show me the video for his new single "Fly Away", which – although not exactly inspired – wouldn't be out of place on a Tiger Tiger playlist, all auto-tuned chorus and lyrics about "touching the sky". Sadly for Bunny, he's inevitably going to have a hard time getting his song played in whatever Dubai's Tiger Tiger equivalent might be, telling me that the radio ignores people like him and that there's not really anywhere else for his music to be played.

I tried to track down anything resembling an amateur hip hop battle, just to see if there's anyone in the UAE nurturing the scene, but the closest thing I could find was a local poetry slam night called Rooftop Rhythms. Unfortunately, the night I went along to can probably best be summarised by the guy who spent the majority of his time reciting lyrics about how his "rhymes are sick" from his phone. Maybe it was just an off night, but it didn't give me much hope for Bunny and his peers, given there appear to be absolutely no opportunities to perform anywhere and nobody capitalising on the burgeoning interest in the genre.

The scene seems to be stuck in the same place that UK hip hop has been festering in for years. The artists are passionate and dedicated, but nobody else really seems to care. The silver spoon lifestyle might seem at odds with other hip hop movements around the world, and it does translate to some pretty awful music the majority of the time, but that doesn't mean the scene should be ignored; a lot of people like awful music.

Before I'd left him at People by Crystal, Bliss had stressed that the "UAE is only young". And he's right – the country itself is only 42 years old, the same mean age as The Wu-Tang Clan. Emirati hip hop is even younger, which is easy to forget given all the older money propping it up to the same level as scenes that having been evolving for decades elsewhere. That said, age shouldn't be an issue; radio play might be rare and managers few and far between, but the internet also exists, and all the scene needs to now is someone good enough to get the world to listen.

Follow James on Twitter: @duckytennent

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