April 28, 2009 (Bloomberg) -- Bilal Yaici carried a plastic bag of cassettes and a boom box into an Algiers music store and tried to peddle his rap performances to the clerk.

When verses in one song rhymed the word police - in French slang, flic - with Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the clerk said he already had plenty of that on his shelves and told Yaici to get a job.

“The old man doesn’t want to hear about what we think,” said the 19-year-old, heading down Belouizdad Street looking for another store.

In the Middle East and North Africa, where reporters and bloggers have been persecuted, Web sites blocked, and books and movies censored, rap has become the sound of youthful discontent, saying what few grown-ups say aloud.

Algiers, a chalky white city overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, is teeming with would-be rappers, said Hassina Amroune, culture editor for La Nouvelle Republique, an Algerian French- language newspaper.

“Hardly a week goes by when someone doesn’t come in to me trying to get publicity for his rap,” she said. “It is the voice of the majority, in a way. Rappers pop up everywhere.”

She estimates there are hundreds, including wannabe amateurs, in Algeria, a country where half the population is under the age of 27 and official unemployment is 15 percent.

Algerian rap is heir to an American hip-hop culture that began with social and political protest. In the U.S., rap morphed into glorification of ghetto gangsters, aggressive sex, jumbo cars and jewelry. Algeria’s percussive rhymes remain intensely centered on public ills.

Rap here oscillates between the ironic and downbeat, delivered in a fierce stew of Arabic, French, English and Berber, a language of people across the Sahara Desert. Government repression, corruption and hopelessness are the main ingredients.

“Today it’s a crackdown, ain’t no football match,” raps Lotfi, one of the country’s best known artists. “Up there people are fleeing, the land’s become black,” or charred.

Vixit, a group from the city of Oran, sings, “We have the mafia, what is left? Engineers, doctors and diplomats think about selling cigarettes.”

Protest rap has also spread across the Middle East. The Arab-Israeli rap group DAM rails against the hemming-in of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israeli troops.

“We fight for freedom, so you’ve made it a crime. And you the terrorist call me terrorist,” says one of DAM’s verses.

In the religiously pious United Arab Emirates, a pair of rappers who call themselves Desert Heat preaches clean living, education and respect for women. In Morocco, where rap dates from the 1980s, the Casablanca group Casa Crew focuses on corruption and unemployment with titles like “I’m Angry” and “Lies in the News.”

“Arab and North African rappers are not into being gangsters and bad boys,” Amroune said. “This area has big problems, and rap is an exit for the young, an outlet for anger.”

Rap’s arrival in Algeria coincided with 1988 youth and worker riots that undermined the political domination of the National Liberation Front, which had ruled Algeria since independence from France in 1962. Reforms led to 1992 multiparty parliamentary elections. While the NLF tried to gerrymander in its favor, a party known as the Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win two-thirds of the seats at stake when the army canceled the vote.

More than a decade of civil war followed, sending rap into hiding. Thousands of young people took off for Europe in search of work. The jobless who remained became known as hittistes, a reference to Algerians who hang around street corners leaning against walls.

After about 200,000 deaths, the civil war wound down. Bouteflika, 72, is credited with pacifying the country through an amnesty that persuaded thousands of rebels to lay down their arms, even though recalcitrant terrorists still bedevil security forces. On April 9 he won a third five-year term, receiving 90 percent of the vote.

With the civil war in abeyance, rap revived - its lyrics reflecting the feeling that corruption, inequality and injustice lived on.

Mohammed Issam Abdellah, 29, a rapper who goes by the name Mister AB, said he raps on bribery and nepotism as the root of Algeria’s problems while trying to discourage teenagers from using drugs and migrating illegally to Europe in rickety boats.

“In my last song, I called the migrants kamikazes; they’re going to die at sea,” he said in an interview.

He plays at dance halls, music festivals and living rooms and says he raps more frankly at live shows than he does on disc. “When I’m with an audience, I can name names,” he said, declining to name whom he might name. And he steers clear of the government-Islamic rebel conflict.

“I don’t understand it and it’s dangerous,” he said.

Yaici and his four-man crew of drummers and DJs - they call themselves K Ammo - have all the typical hittiste characteristics: They hang out at a corner of Bab El Oued, a working-class district, wear jeans and T-shirts, smoke cigarettes and talk about going to France. They are short on bling.

“No money; can’t do anything with no money, especially you can’t get married,” Yaici said. “If we can get a disc contract, we can make it big,” he added, to the nods of his pals.