No Ones Here: How Arab hip-hop collectives are taking the internet for a home 

In 2018, Haifa-based collective Pngwng Cru would launch their music career by announcing themselves as “children of the internet, the new Arabs”.  

Holders of both Israeli citizenship and Palestinian first names, the crew’s cards were already dealt scrambled, declared third-class citizens on what once was their soil. For those who exist on the fringes, the fringes of society, of nationhood, of the world itself, the internet becomes a home. 

In one of the very few now-ephemeras left of Pngwng Cru —consisting of Bassem Bahouth and Farouk Karawani—, they mention: “The track explores the idea that the internet is the only certain place for us to go back to at the end of the day.”

Although their musical endeavor is considered, sadly, short-lived, their vision was realized just as anticipated. Pngwng Cru’s music, a hazy blend of trap percussion, autotuned vocals, and internet-age melancholy, would live on as prophecies, inhabiting the internet forever partly via YouTube and streaming services (as the crew would constantly take down their work) but mostly via Google drives created collectively, shared, and reshared, uploaded and reuploaded by the listeners. Many times, the songs, during the process, became chopped, slowed, reverbed, bass boosted, or all four simultaneously, which is how I personally have always enjoyed their music, digitally manipulated and to the extreme. 

Since the fading of cult favorite, Pngwng Cru, the soundsphere of the MENA region witnessed a number of renditions of those same online-inhabiting musicians. In this landscape, collectives like M7DH0N in Beirut, written in Arabic chat alphabet (arabizi) and translating to no one’s here, and smoom Gang in Jericho, translating to venomous, emerge as digital refuges, crafting identities that exist somewhere between the underground and the upload. 

Traditionally, underground music refers to music that defies the mainstream, both melodically and lyrically, and uses guerrilla marketing and distribution tactics to gain a voice. In the Arab world, underground, especially for hip-hop, was a persistence on creating a national and distinct Arab identity and speak of the people, the Arab people, but today, this underground is transnational, yes, one certain of its Arabism, but also algorithmic, broadcasted through WeTransfer links and VPNs. And it’s not just sonic, it can be seen. 

This online living trap scene from the region comes to encompass a visual identity shy of polishing and the high-quality frames sponsored and produced by hulking record labels, but also their visuals, like their reality: distorted, uncertain, and ironic. Although Lebanon, where M7DH0N hails from, has its own currency – the Lebanese pound or lira– the country operates on US dollars, and Jericho, where smoom is based, hosted the PLO entrance to government following the sham of the Oslo Accords. This infrastructural instability seeps into art. In places where power cuts are routine and currency collapses weekly, even connection is a class privilege. Corrupted exports, low-resolution tools, pirated software, continuous lags, those imperfections turn into style over time, even identity. Their music videos and cover art often resemble screenshots, with buffering, mid-load, and barely holding together, reminiscent of the worlds they come from. 

MrF13 from Jericho’s smoom gang describes this visual language as: “A hybrid aesthetic pulling from lo-fi chill to hardcore metal and all that’s in between, with hints of minor scale everything. Even if the music was to be uplifting, the details within would drop the listener down to the meadows of sadness between the arms of their own uninterpreted feelings.” 

Emo affect, Y2K nostalgia, and digital ruin become a shared vocabulary of feeling. It’s a visual metaphor: “We are the static, the broken line, the glitch in the official narrative.” Their worlds feel like open tabs left running too long: low battery, too many emotions. M7DH0N and smoom Gang’s visuals carry the weight of a generation raised online, yet never fully inside it, globalized yet not fully a part of the globe. An existential crisis of the forgotten, spoken through Autotune. Perhaps the visuals are also an extension of the music, imitating the technology itself used to produce the sounds and pushing it one step further. A generation’s melancholy translated into pixels and 808 drum machine basslines. 

To be a “child of the internet” in the Arab world is to exist nowhere but everywhere all at once. Pngwng Cru declared it first, but M7DH0N, smoom gang, and many others on your screens carried the torch, turning scarcity, inconsistency, and lack of stability into a pixelated and glitchy world that will always welcome those lost in translations.