May 1, 2013 | Quote

You Can Buy Jihadi Rap on iTunes, But is That a Good Thing?

I didn't think it would be hard to find “9 Disturbingly Good Jihadi Raps” online, but it was. There were, of course, the stylings of al-Shabab's rapper laureate, Omar Hammami, and the music video for “Dirty Kuffar,” which was designed to go viral on social media sites like YouTube and Dailymotion.

Vozick-Levinson agrees: “Artists test boundaries, like Ice-T's song 'Cop Killer.' But that song didn't lead to an epidemic of violence; that song is a work of art. Time has shown that censorship isn't the answer. The better choice is to discuss these things and why they're objectionable rather than try to censor them.”

And its worth noting that, like Ice-T, who went from rapping about shooting cops to playing a detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, M-Team took a decidedly more moderate tone in their sophomore album, “My Enemy's Enemy.” As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and jihadi rap critic, described it on Twitter, “M-Team's later deviations diminish their jihadi cred. Kind of like how Katy Perry's later music diminishes the credibility of her early work as a gospel singer.”

Read the full article here.