Matthew Collin - Pop Grenade

Hamada Ben Amor was still living at his parents house in the provincial Tunisian port city of Sfax when he finished a new hip-hop track he had been working on and uploaded it with a video clip to the internet.

The video opens with black-and-white archive images of Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali trying to comfort a terrified schoolboy in a classroom. His hair slicked back in vampiric style, the president looms over the cowering child and demands to know what is wrong: Go on, tell me. Dont be afraid! Do you want to tell me something?

It then cuts to the young rapper, wreathed in lugubrious shadow as he launches into a reply like a vengeful prosecutor reading an indictment for the most heinous of crimes: Mr. President, today I am speaking to you in my name and in the name of all the people who are sufferingToday I speak fearlessly on behalf of the people crushed by the weight of injustice

As the 21-year-old rides the rolling groove, he looses off a barrage of lyrical punches, landing slug after slug on the Tunisian dictator. Corruption, poverty, unemployment, police brutality, repression - line by line, verse by verse, he batters away at Ben Ali in what must be one of the most vigorous takedowns in hip-hop history.

Rais Le Bled (Head of State), the song that the young MC recorded in November 2010 under his alias El Gnral, would go on to have more impact than he could ever have imagined over the weeks that followed, and wider political resonance than most other rap songs ever recorded.

It was a direct message for the president, a message in the name of the people, for the people, he explained later. I wanted it to reach the president, I wanted him to know whats happening in the country.

The message got through. As tens of thousands of Tunisians took to the streets a month later, after a street trader set himself on fire in a symbolic act of self-sacrificial protest, Rais Le Bled went viral, becoming an anthem for their uprising, sharpening the rage and disgust of a people that had suffered too much and for too long.

El Gnral quickly struck again with another blast of insurrectionary lyricism, Tounes Bledna (Tunisia My Country), declaring that the protesters would never back down, never surrender: Tunisia is our country, the entire people hand in hand! This time his words so infuriated the authorities that police launched a dawn raid on his parents home in Sfax, dragging him off to the National Security Bureau in the capital where he was handcuffed to a chair and interrogated for three days.

They asked, how can you write such stuff? How dare you pass messages to the president, he has such an important position in our country, you cant criticise the chief directly! Why did you do it? What do you want? Whos behind you? Who are the people who told you to write such stuff? he recalled.

They asked a lot of questions, and I said: I belong to myself. I write about the things that I see from one day to the next. This is the voice of our everyday lives.

And it was already too late to stop him; the songs were out there and the days were counting down to president Ben Alis flight from power and into exile. After El Gnrals release, he joined the protests too: On the streets, I saw unity, I saw intelligent young people. I felt like I belonged.

The Tunisian uprising heralded the start of a remarkable few months in the Middle East and North Africa: what became known as the Arab Spring, a moment of revolutionary zeal which struck fear into the souls of dictators across the region and beyond. A time when rappers scrawled their lyrics behind the barricades, and when it seemed that the impossible had finally become achievablefor a brief moment, anyway, until some of those dreams turned into savage nightmares

In Tahrir Square in Cairo, protesters thrilled to the sound of rapper Deeb declaiming a summons to action called Egyptian, Stand Up! over steely funk interlaced with sinewy Arabic motifs: The revolution is not over yet, it has just begun, he urged. In the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon and Jordan, even in Syria, hip-hop had become a new medium of dissent for a younger generation of Arab youths.

Songs were lashed together from street slogans, quickly recorded, uploaded, file-shared, replayed back onto the streets on which they originated, creating a feedback loop that fed itself as it nurtured the resistance. Today in the Arab world, when you want to pass on a message, rap is the best way, El Gnral declared. Chuck D of Public Enemy once described rap as the black CNN; now it was as if Arab MCs were running their own rolling news channel, the hip-hop nations Al Jazeera.

Music is the weapon of the future; music is the weapon of the progressives; music is the weapon of the givers of life.

Fela Kuti

People have been using music to damn the iniquities of the powerful and narrate the emotions of changing times since the earliest days of recording, and for centuries before that. The story of how an obscure young rapper from a provincial Tunisian city became a revolutionary hero was just another example of how pop, in its widest definition, can still help to inspire and sustain movements for change, and in turn transform the lives of those who channel the energies of social turmoil into sound.

The six pieces of reportage that make up this book are about extraordinary moments like this - fleeting periods in recent history when music became a soundtrack to social transformations, quickening the heartbeat and feeding the soul of cultural movements or alternative communities seeking, with the audacity of youth, to confront injustice, alter the consciousness of a generation, or at least create safe havens where they could freak freely until the police moved in.

The first and final chapters tell the stories of encounters with two unique groups of pop-cultural activists, Public Enemy and Pussy Riot, who came from very different times and places but both started out with the direct intent to set fires and smash icons. Despite being wounded by the energies that they unleashed but ultimately could not control, both succeeded in shining a light into the darkness at the heart of their own worlds.