Egypt's youth find new voice with rebellious "mahraganat" music
New form of rapid-fire electronic music emerges using street slang to tell stories of everyday life
A new musical sound has emerged from the underground in Egypt since the country's 2011 revolution, a rapid-fire electronic beat, mixed with hypnotic rhythms drawn from religious festivals and fired up with auto-tuned vocals. Besides getting club crowds dancing, nit has given a rebellious voice to long marginalised youth, telling stories of everyday life in beaten-down neighbourhoods of Cairo.
Singers of music, from an Arabic word for festivals, push the limits with their lyrics, riffing on the world of an impoverished young man: sex, girls, drugs, empty pockets, and few options - all in an Egyptian Arabic street slang that leaves many adults in the country's conservative Muslim society befuddled and disapproving.
"We have our own language that no one understands except for us," says Sadat.
Sadat and his friends Fifty and Haha are among the biggest stars of - their DJ names, of course, which they prefer to go by. The three, in their early 20s, are childhood friends, neighbours in Madinet el-Salam, one of the sprawling slums of Cairo. They started creating music at home on an old computer with free programs found online.
evolved from an earlier generation of youth music, known as , roughly translated as "popular", from the 1970s, when working-class musicians started producing their own sound. Shaabi singers were in part inspired by , or Islamic festivals that feature rhythmic music and mystical poetry, which they turned into raspy-voiced songs about the common people infused with Egyptian humour.
, sometimes called "electro-shaabi", has amped that sound up to addictive levels, with complex, fast-and-furious rhythms, rhymes and word-play, repeated hypnotically over and over.
It has tapped into a youth that feels partially liberated - but not liberated enough - by the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The sound became popular in underground clubs, with clips passed among fans on the internet. With its atmosphere of drugs and sex it is still considered fringe. But it has made moves into the mainstream: it can be heard blaring from party boats on the Nile River and some mahraganat singers now perform at weddings.
Many singers oppose President Mohammed Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hardline conservatives see music as sinful, and even the less conservative are scandalised by mahraganat's lyrics. Still, only a few songs are explicitly political.
"They closed the doors, they raised the walls … while the people are broken and the destruction goes on and on," the three sing in , about the new constitution pushed through by Islamists.
"I love writing about politics and social issues, it's what moves me. But this is not what most people like," Sadat said. "Most want to have fun, so our most popular songs are humorous."
