1. Another very fine radio show from the estimable Toukadime. Broadcast #18. Vintage North African tunes. (But no playlist yet: come on, pals!). And to show how eclectic their tastes are, they conclude the show with Herbie Mann's "Caravan"! Don't miss this show.
Added Oct. 20, 2014: Here's the playlist:
Tazi Boukhari & Aouicha: Comment Faire? Guerouabi: El Barah Mohamed Chemoum: JSK Mohamed Jerrari: Ya Mariam Mohamed Jerrari: El Karrita Mohamed Bergam: Farah El Islam Bouchaib Bidaoui: Khoutna Yal Islam Albert Suissa: Dar El Baida Haja Mina el Gharbaouia & Haja Khadouj Bent Barek, Marechal Kibou: Jini Wlanjik Albert Suissa: Ya Rabi Tsmeh Fli Daj Mustapha Nainia - Khouya Bouya
2. The latest Middle Eastern and North African playlist from The Guardian's music blog, by John Doran. Souad Abdallah (Iraq), Maurice Louca (Egypt), Fayçal Azizi (Morocco) -- all interesting, well worth a listen and pursuing further. But what really struck me was the live track from E.E.K. feat. Islam Chipsy -- in concert in London on October 12. This is mad mad mahraganat music, and I've http://www.weather.com/weather/today/Fayetteville+AR+72701:4:USblogged about Islam Chipsy in the past. (Here, for instance, though one of the vids has vanished.) Check out what Doran has to say about them, the 'preternaturally talented keyboard player Islam Chipsy, flanked by
drummers Khaled Mando and Islam Tata,' who have been driving crowds in Bristol, London and
Newcastle wild. "In Cairo, the three-piece are usually hired to play large outdoor
wedding celebrations and their sound has developed in tandem with a need
to kickstart parties while often contending with battered old PA
systems. Now, through playing indoors through really powerful rigs,
their sound has morphed into something that is bordering on
overwhelming. The tightly syncopated rhythmical assault is in a lot of
ways analogous to carnival or marching musical forms such as soca, New
Orleans second-line drumming, dancehall and calypso. However, these
beats are played at hyperspeed by two drummers who can switch styles and
tempos without dropping a beat, adept at providing a rigid framework
for a virtuoso keyboard player whose individual technique includes
firing out bewilderingly fast blasts of tone clusters deployed by
punching, slapping and karate-chopping his keyboard at such a
frightening speed that his hands become a blur of movement. A truly
unique experience."
And now: check out the vid, and see whether Doran's enthusiasm isn't warranted.
3. John Doran also has a piece in Vice about the Cairo Liberation Front, a Dutch trio who make up a dance party unit that plays mahraganat. The article title describes what they do as "Wedding Dance Rave," which is certainly as good a synonym for mahraganat as the other synonyms in use, techno shaabi and electro shaabi. There's a mixtape of new (at least I guess new) mahraganat here as well, so download, listen, enjoy, start your own dance party unit if you dare.
This set from David Degner. And focusing this time on the Tamanya Fil Meya ("Eight Percent") crew from Matariya. (And again, no mention at all of the January 25, 2014 massacre in Matariya. Sheesh.)
In any case, great photos. I particularly love the one above, featuring Oka and Ortega at some kind of (staged?) pink wedding.
Mosa'ab Elshamy is one of the best, maybe the best, photographers in Egypt to emerge into global fame since the events at Tahrir in January-February 2011. Rolling Stone magazine has just published a set of his photos on Egypt's mahragan (AKA electro-shaabi) scene, and they are stunning. (There is text as well, unattributed.)
Mahragan in Rolling Stone? Yep, the genre is getting a level of international reputation and cred that is remarkable. It's a testimony both to the creativity and quality of the music as well as the interest that the so-called Arab Spring and its culture spawned in the West.
I'm not sure I like this description of the phenom: "the country's underground electro-rap uprising." Why "uprising"? Was rap, which Rolling Stone compares it to, an "uprising"? What did it overthrow? This issue, moreover, begs the question, not addressed in the text that accompanies the photos -- what is the relation between mahragan and politics in Egypt today, ever since Rabaa massacre of August 2013, the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the military coup, and the emergence of the Sisi phenomenon? What about the fact that, on the third anniversary of the launch of the January 25 (political) uprising, 21 people protestors were killed in al-Matariya, one of the strongholds of mahragan, the popular quarter of the Eight Percent crew (Wizza, Ortega and Oka)? Really, you'd think that at least some readers of the mag would want to know... One more quibble: I keep insisting that the genre should be called mahragan (sing.) not mahraganat (plural). Someone please tell me why I'm wrong. In any case, the photos are great, take a look. And you can see more of Mosa'ab Elshamy's photos on flickr, and follow him on twitter via @mosaaberizing.
Reading about the events of January 25, 2014, the three year anniversary of the launch of the Egyptian uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak, I came across casualty figures. The first stats I saw were these (in Arabic, from Shorouk News, January 26), which give a total of 53. I noticed that a lot of the casualties seemed to be from al-Matariya, a popular quarter in the north of Cairo. I counted, and the total was 21. A more recent accounting from WikiThawra gives a total of 89 dead, 28 of them from al-Matariya.
I posted the early figure of 21 on Facebook, and my FB friend Alex posted as a comment this video of the events at al-Matariya, which is titled the "al-Matariya Massacre."
It shows a very large crowd of demonstrators, at Maidan al-Matariya, and lots of Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) banners. (I've since learned that Matariya was one of two sites of MB demonstrations in Cairo on January 25, the other being Alf Maskan in Ain Shams. In Alf Maskan, according to WikiThawra, 32 died in confrontations with the security forces.) The young men who seem to be leading chants at the demo, shown early in the video, don't look like your typical Ikhwan members, but rather, like prototypical fans of mahragan (electro shaabi) music. Then you see confrontations between demonstrators and the security (who are not visible, you just hear shots being fired). And then, quite gruesome footage of casualties being carried from the lines of confrontation to (rudimentary) medical care. Quite gripping and shocking footage.
On twitter, I came across this photo of damage done to a wall of the shop by the firing of the security forces. You wonder what sort of ammunition they were using...
I've hunted around and been somewhat surprised that there has been very little coverage in English (or other European languages, as far as I can tell) of these events. One guesses because they happened in a popular quarter, which is far from the places that the Western media ever hangs out in, unlike Tahrir Square, which is very accessible. Al-Matariya is off the beaten path, like all of Cairo's popular quarters. One guesses as well that the absence of the usual subjects of Western coverage (young liberals/revolutionaries with Western education) is responsible for the lack of coverage. Finally, it was a Muslim Brotherhood organized demo, which is just not as sexy as a secular demo.
And yet al-Matariya is not, in fact, entirely unknown to the Western media. It's the 'hood of the celebrated mahragan (electro shaabi) posse, Eight Percent (Tamaniya fil-Miyya), composed of vocalists Wizza, Ortega and Oka. They're responsible for many great mahragan songs, including "Ana Aslan Gamid" (I'm Really Hard). This video, as of this writing, had been viewed by over 1,315,000 people.
These Matariya homies have received a great deal of publicity in both Egypt and abroad since 2011, including from yours truly, writing in Middle East Report, more recently for the Norient Musicfilm Festival 2014, and several times on this blog. They're among the mahragan stars featured in Hind Meddeb's fine documentary, Electro Chaabi, which screened at the Norient festival.
Al-Matariya is also an important pilgrimage site for Eastern Christians. The Holy Family is said to have stopped at al-Matariya village -- whose name is said to come from the latin Mater, for the Virgin Mary. (It was part of the area of the ancient city of Heliopolis, destroyed at the time of the Persian invasion in 525 BC.) Jesus is said to have used a staff that he took from Joseph, broken it into pieces, planted them, and then dug a well which made the pieces of wood take root and grow into a balsam tree. Mary (in the story about these events in the Qur'an -- not sure what verse) is said to have used the sweet-smelling water of the well (because of the balsam tree) to wash the clothes of Jesus, and so the well is known as the Tree of the Holy Virgin. A sycamore tree was planted on the site of the balsam in 1672, and a shoot of this tree still remains til today.
Because Mary and Jesus are venerated in the Muslim tradition, and particularly in its popular versions (although Muslims do not believe in the virgin birth), both Muslims and Christians make pilgrimage til today to the shrine of Mary's tree. There are also a Jesuit Holy Family Church and a Coptic Virgin Mary Church at the site.
I was asked to write the program notes on electro sha'abi (better known in Egypt as mahragan) for the 2014 Norient Musikfilm Festival, and they were just published today. You can read them here in English, and for the first time, something I wrote has also been translated into German, which you can read here.
The Festival program is very exciting, and I really wish I could attend. (But there is that cash flow problem...).
On the mahragan/electro sha'abi front, the festival features a very fine documentary on the mahragan scene, Hind Meddeb's Electro Chaabi. Here's a trailer:
Plus there is a Cairo Electro Sha'abi Club Night, featuring (live!) the mahragan stars MC Sadat and MC 'Alaa 50 Cent with DJ Ramy from Cairo, plus the Dutch electro sha'abi dj's Cairo Liberation Front. Very exciting.
MC Sadat
The festival will also screen the terrific film about Algerian shaabi (very very different from Egypt's electro shaabi!) and the recent reunion and tour of Jewish and Muslim shaabi musicians, El Gusto.
Plus films about Pussy Riot and the cultural scene around Mexico's narcotraficantes.
Sadat and Amr 7a7a made a "surprise" appearance at the Home Works 6 forum on May 15 in Beirut. "Unassailably cool," writes Jim Quilty in The Daily Star.
I missed it, she covered mahragan (which she calls electro shaabi), as well as rocker Ramy Essam and graffiti artist Ganzeer, on September 4, 2012. She mentions Alaa Fifty, Amr Haha (7a7a) and Ahmed Vigo [the NPR transcript says: "Achmed (unintelligible)"]. It's a very short report, it doesn't tell us much we don't already know (other than the fact that mahragan vocalists are called "mike men" -- I need to check this), but it's basically on target.
And folks, there is more mainstream media coverage of mahragan in the offing. I can feel it.
Great short vid of mahragan (AKA 'techno shaabi' or 'electro shaabi') artist DJ Islam Chipsy working his keyboard magic, in a popular quarter in Cairo.
These are great clips, with subtitles in French, featuring DJ Omar Haha, Sadate and Vigo. "Lots of people criticize this music, but it's spreading like a virus."
Jadaliyya recently published this terrific article on the underground but now bubbling to the surface music scene which outsiders (like myself) have called techno shaabi but which is known locally as "mahragan" (or sometimes, mahraganat, the plural form), which translates as "festival" music.
Morayef tells us that it's the music of the popular quarters, of the microbuses and the ta'amiya stands. It is rooted in Egypt's "shaabi" music, the beats are pure sha'abi, but the sound is provided by DJ's jamming lots of electronica. The singing is shaabi as well but often heavily auto-tuned. The lyrics are full of humor and slang and are often very direct. Exceptionally and unprecedentedly direct, in fact, in their use of curses and vulgar language. Particularly in the case of the amazing Amr Haha (also spelled 7a7a).
Morayef describes Haha's new song, “Aha el shibshib daa’!” or “Fuck, I’ve lost my slippers!” Part of the impact generated by the song is that swearing is something that has long been taboo in Egyptian music. I remember discussions with Egyptian friends when I lived in Cairo ('92-'96) who were interested in rap music and were amazed by all the bad language. It seems that "mahragan" artists like Haha, and in fact perhaps particularly Haha, based on the evidence (all his music available on youtube) is responsible for breaking through that taboo. The song also gets its traction among audiences by its focus on the mundane, the loss of a slipper.
Morayef states that mahragan music often, or at least sometimes, has an oppositional edge. Haha and his posse (including Sadat and DJ Figo) mix the popular slogan “yasqut yasqut hokm al-‘askar,” or “down, down with military rule,” in their songs.
Elliott Colla, in his article "The People Want" in the latest Middle East Report (just out), shows how 7a7a, while supportive of the revolution, is also able to poke fun at it slogans. And I quote:
in one particular song, entitled, “The People Want Five Pounds’ Phone Credit,” 7a7a pokes fun at the slogan “the people want” even as he champions it:
The people want something new [to think about] The people want five pounds’ phone credit The people want to topple the regime But the people are so damn tired It’s hard living hand to mouth The people have said their word And Tahrir is their place
While 7a7a uses the same musical pattern of the slogan, he also adds rhyme where none existed before. Moreover, unlike the slogan, this song can only be pronounced in the vernacular. And like the sounds of the words, the lyrics also refer to a very local urban experience of poverty. This song also draws into question the tiredness of the slogan and the term -- “the people.” More precisely, 7a7a points out that “the people” is a rhetorical figure. In other words, 7a7a’s riff on revolutionary rhetoric suggests something very important, namely that the most powerful metaphor employed during the uprising was that of “the people” itself.
For a great account of Amr Haha playing at a wedding in a popular quarter, check out this account by Sarah Carr.
Morayef also discusses the group Tamanya Fil Meya or "Eight Percent," which includes DJ Ortega, Wezza and Oka, from Cairo's popular quarter Matariya. In their song "Ana Aslan Gamed" (I'm Really Hard), she says, they:
sing about their neighborhood, about faith and superstition, envy and the evil eye, and black magic. The lyrics flow like a conversation about an average day in their life as Oka, Ortega, and Wezza take turns in singing verses, while the others echo or call out to their neighborhood. In fact, the structure of their songs and the flow of their singing are very similar to rap music: street culture, roots, pride, ego, and prayer combined with a heavy rhythm and a raw energy.
What is also notable about this video is that it shows Eight Percent performing "Ana Aslan Gamed" not in Cairo but in the southern city of Aswan, and so, the crowd is full of young Nubians. We learn, then, that the group has a sizable fan base outside of Cairo, and as well, that mahragan groups are performing in concerts, not just at neighborhood weddings and parties (which was where they got their start playing).
I am really bowled over by "Ana Aslan Gamed." I find it quite beautiful, and at this moment, it's my favorite of all the mahragan music I've heard. The footage is quite remarkable as well, and it's from a forthcoming (2013) film about mahragan, called “Underground/On the Surface/Raise Your Hand if You Love God,” by director Salma El Tarzi. Please check out the film's blog for more information about the film (and even if you can't read Arabic, it's worth checking out the youtube vids, which feature clips from the film.)
Morayef tells us that mahragan music gaining a growing middle class audience. I was amazed to read her description of Haha and company performing at the Greek Club, one of my favorite establishments in downtown Cairo, but very much a place favored by middle class intellectuals and artists. The fact that shaabi, and in particular, electronic shaabi, is being performed in such a space, is testimony to how far mahragan is moving out of its origins in Egypt's popular quarters.
The more attention I pay to mahragan the more I hope that it blows up internationally, like kudoro or baile funk. It certainly is worthy of the attention. And it is about time for the world to recognize the incredible creativity, humor, tenacity and art of Egypt's lower and working class youth.
Mahragan is also good tonic, for moments when one get depressed about Egypt's ongoing revolution. It will cheer you up, and make you optimistic about the energy of Egypt's youth and its masses.
(I became aware of mahragan -- without knowing what it was called locally -- last fall, and have been struggling to make sense of it. I posted about it here, here, and here. So glad to read Morayef's account.)
More sha'abi techno from DJ Haha and DJ Figo, with rappers Alaa 50 Cent and Sadat, in concert. The sound levels make it almost unlistenable, but it gives you an idea of how good these dj's and rappers are, and of how cool the shaabi techno scene is. Thanks to Elliott for this.
"Haha" in Egyptian colloquial, by the way, means either "funny" or "disgust."
Banning Eyre of NPR and Afropop worldwide was in Cairo this past summer, and did a nice piece for NPR (October 4) on music coming from Egypt's streets. Listen to it, or read it, here.
He calls attention to a couple of great dj's from Cairo's popular quarters. First, check out this guy, DJ Islam Chipsy. (In Egyptian colloquial, "chipsy" is slang for chips, i.e., potato chips.) This is amazing stuff, and as Chipsy tells Eyre, this is DJ'ing with a real Egyptian rhythm. One of the many remarkable things about this live clip is that this is recorded at some party or event in what is clearly one of Egypt's popular quarters. Next time I'm in Egypt, I want to go to that party.
This clip of Chipsy shows him playing at El Azhar Park. The recording is not as good as that of the first, but Chipsy really gets the crowd going. Notice the woman (who appears to be somewhat elderly) in higaab who is dancing! Here Chipsy's keyboard playing at times reminds me of the sound of a calliope. And I'm more impressed by the two drummers accompanying him (Khaled Mando and Islam To'to'), probably in part because you can see them better here than in the first video.
Here's another vid from the same concert. And there are lots more, that you can find if you search using the Arabic, اسلام شيبسى.
Eyre also mentions another artist, DJ Amr Haha, from Ain Shams, who I had heard previously. I think his stuff is really incredible, very loud, intense, autotuned, hypnotically repetitive sha'abi Egyptronica.
There is a lot of his stuff on youtube. Check out this track, identified simply as عمروحاحا 2010. Note how many hits it has. As of this viewing, 186,600. Some people are paying attention.
Here's another Ha Ha track, from August 2010, identified just as عمرو حاحا الجديد.
664,737 hits for this one. There are lots of Haha vids out there, just search for عمرو حاحا.
Here's a link to an article by Ola El-Saket, "The Shaabi music breakthrough," from Al-Masry Al-Youm (October 22), which discusses the emergence of this brand of Egyptian sha'abi music (she calls it "shaabi techno") in the early 2000s. These artists emerged, El-Seket says, as cheaper alternatives to hiring singers and dancing to perform at weddings in popular quarters. Eventually the artists started to hold street festivals as well, aimed primarily at young men in the popular quarters. There is a dispute between Amr Haha and Sallam City's DJ Figo (who I posted about last month, identifying him as DJ Vigo) over which of them invented the "shaabi techno" genre.
El-Saket also writes that "Shaabi music is very similar to rap and hip hop in terms of its inception, and the songs are not free from populist views on social issues. Haha for instance tackles how security forces intimidate people in one of his songs, titled “Your ID, Punk!”...
Figo also played his famous track about the revolution, which mixes Omar Suleiman’s famous 11 February speech with a techno beat."
(Hopefully I can find these tracks in future.)
Other names mentioned as part of this sha'abi techno trend are Alaa Fifty, Al-Sadat Rap, Wezza and Benzina. Hopefully I can find some youtube vids of these artists in future. In the meantime: you look!
I have no idea if that name is really appropriate. And I don't quite know what to make of these vids, and the music, that I've been running across, coming out of Egypt.
Check out this one.
The author of this piece is known as DJ Vigo. The title also indicates that this is a video from a wedding celebration. It certainly looks like farah, a wedding party, in a popular quarter of Cairo or some other Egyptian urban center. And it is the kind of dancing that you might see at a wedding party in a popular quarter (mantiqa sha'biya), with young women dancing together. What is a bit disconcerting is that the camera is fetishizing the body and movement of a young woman belly dancing, in a way that is perfectly appropriate in all-women company, but rather provocative when it is filmed and taken out of that context. As for the way the young woman is dressed, in higab (head-covering), t-shirt and rather tight jeans -- I've seen such outfits over a period of twenty years in Egypt. Even the t-shirt, which says "Let's Bring It On," is not completely surprising. I don't have time or the chops, really, to work through the lyrics right now, but there are references to smoking and hashish...The music (vocals and beats and instrumentation) are rather rudimentary, but they allow the singer to declaim whatever he wants. (Just as the much more famous Sha'bola does.) You will find a number of videos in this vein from DJ Vigo فىجو, some with as many as 20,000+ views.
Then there is this:
Advertised as a song from the Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir School for Girls, it features girls singing, lots of autotune, the occasional interjection of a mail voice, hot beats, and a video that consists entirely of teenaged girls (who seem to be both Egyptian and non-Egyptian). As of this writing, the song has over 270,000 hits, which is quite substantial. The comments, as far as I can tell, are entirely in Arabic. The music is much more interesting than the first, but more or less in the same vein. Other youtube subscribers have taken the same song (provenance: unknown to me as of now) and put other images of young girls to the music. This one has over 666,000 views to day; this one (with bawdier photos), over 182,000 hits.
Clearly this is a mass phenomenon, very sha'abi, in the sense that it no doubt is the object of scorn from the part of the educated and the mandarins, and very popular, with young people, especially in the popular quarters, the homes of the working classes, the lower middle classes, and the workers and entrepreneurs in the informal sector. This is, of course, just an educated guess. I hope this serves as a provocation to someone to find out more and tell us.
Professor of Anthropology, University of Arkansas. Author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Co-editor of Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture and of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity.
