This chapter examines the popularity of Kinyarwanda-language rap and hip hop in urban Rwanda. It considers how it can be understood as a genre both of anger and sorrow, revealing Kigali as a site not of progress and modernity but rather of poverty and deception. The genre’s use and invention of Kinyarwanda slang is considered, as well as its politics. The chapter argues that a simple resistance–domination binary is unhelpful for truly understanding hip hop’s local complexities. Instead, it takes into account the carefully guarded silences that hip hop artists maintained, and the ways in which the performance of swaga was less available to young women than to young men.