Palestinian rap group Battalion 5 poses at the refugee camp in Beirut. Photo / Reuters
"Battalion 5" might conjure up images of the next big computer game but in Lebanon it's a group of musicians who express the misery of life in Palestinian refugee camps through rap.
The five 20-something men scatter their lyrics with references to badly built houses, a lack of
electricity and bad schools - all part of daily life in a Palestinian camp.
"As young Palestinians, we reach a point where we stop school and there's nothing in front of you. No work. You reach a level where your mind is lost," said 22-year-old Amro, who goes by the moniker "C4" (a type of explosive).
The men wear Western clothes. They all use nicknames, like Yousri "Molotov" or Tarek Jazzar (Tarek the Butcher in Arabic) and Nader "Moscow".
"You can't really speak to your parents, your friends can't help you, so you feel like you have no choice but to express something in a moment. So I expressed it," Amro said amid the din of constant car horns and the stink of overflowing rubbish in the camp.
The Bourj al-Barajenah camp in southern Beirut is one of 12 scattered across Lebanon that house over half of 400,000 Palestinian refugees.
Battalion 5 said they got interested in rap because the music was angry and tackled problems of discrimination and unemployment.
"This art is performed by people who are fed-up, who are suffering."
They occasionally incorporate English choruses in their songs. "I'm sitting, watching, can't do nothing. My world is a f***ing competition," they rap in a song called This is Atheism. It makes for a surreal situation: a group of young men in Lebanon who know all the English swear words you need to make an authentic hip hop song.
The group were recently approached by a Lebanese production company to record their first album.
- Reuters
