Nafada: industrial, hip-hop, and the diasporic condition

In September 2019, industrial band Konqistador released Nafada, a nine-track album that is in collaboration with female Arab-Muslim hip-hop artists originating from various regions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The purpose of Nafada was to shine a light on women artists existing within regimes characterised by censorship, obscurantism, and gendered discrimination, and to produce an artistic statement of defiance to these paradigms of control. The ethos of industrial music is rooted in critiques of control (Kromhout, Popular Music and Society 34(1), p. 31, 2011; Oksanen, Secessio 2(1), 2013; Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. Oxford University Press, 2013, x; Steirer 2015, 185). As Reed states, industrial has “expressly framed itself as an anti-establishment mouthpiece for decades … and so this is a natural approach to the genre” (Assimilate 137). Similarly, hip-hop has proven a productive genre that marginalised groups can assert presence in transgressive, resistant, and distinctly localised ways. The union of industrial and hip-hop genres creates a vehicle that is philosophically primed for mobilising voices against oppressive forces. Nafada generates and draws on these synergies to tell experiential life stories that render visible counter-hegemonic representations of MENA women. Further, we discuss the importance of the internet in the creation of Nafada, arguing that the ability to digitally traverse national borders has “cultural and cross-genre implications”. This chapter contributes to broader fields of music production, industrial music, non-Western hip-hop studies and examines the intersections between music, politics, and representation.