Front Burner - Bonus | Nothing is Foreign: The music Egypt doesn't want you to hear

Episode Date: April 30, 2022

Starting in the mid-2000s, a pulsing fusion of EDM, rap and Egyptian folk – known as Mahraganat – has risen from the streets of Cairo and become a worldwide phenomenon. But Egypt's authorities are now cracking down on the music and the artists creating it, saying it's immoral and corrupting young people. We take you inside the culture and class wars of Egypt and explore what the banning of popular music says about the African country's image and its future. Featuring: Mahmoud Refat, music producer and executive of 100Copies Music. Fady Adel, Egyptian culture journalist.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. If you've been watching the new Marvel TV show Moon Knight on Disney+, you might recognize this song. It's called El Malouk, and it plays at the end of the second episode. In this genre of music, you can hear it all over Egypt. It's known as Mahraganat.

Since Moon Night, the song has blown up. It debuted at number 15 on Billboard's World Digital Song Sales Chart. And people around the world are discovering Mahargana. And for fans of the genre, this is a big deal. Not just because this distinctly Egyptian style of music is getting its Hollywood moment, but also because within Egypt, technically, it's banned. And at the center of a generational culture war, a group known as the Syndicate has been actively stopping Mahogany artists

from performing anywhere in the country. And just this week, Human Rights Watch criticized an Egyptian court ruling that sentenced two singers to a year in prison for violating Egyptian family values. This week, we're taking you to Egypt to tell you the story of music born out of a class struggle, what the bands say about this political moment in Egypt, and why Maharganat is transcending borders. I'm Tamarausing it. Can you hear me? Yes.

It's very nice to see your face. Mahmoud Rafat is the head of 100 Copies. It's an indie record label in Cairo that has a roster of maharganat artists. We're listening to one of his favorite songs together over Zoom, and he's beaming. I'm watching you, what, listening. It's just like, this is what happens. This is exactly the main intention of our music. Mahmoud's been described as a godfather of maharganat.

Back in 2006, he had a record label that was making experimental electronic music. One day, he was driving down the street and heard a song blasting out of a car that had stopped beside him. It was a track, a beat, and some guys saying names over it, like names and names and names. I said, like, what is this? And then I started to look for these guys in these neighborhoods, and I started to invite them to my studio. Mahmoud had never heard anything like it,

but these were the foundations of a new genre of music already being formed in Dar al-Salam, one of Cairo's poorest and most densely populated neighborhoods. Mahraganot music is the result of the Egyptian youth's understanding of modern music, very much linked to the past. Mahraganat is very popular music in the streets, in the street culture for people like uneducated maybe. Mahraganat's musical precursor is shabbi, another working class genre that came out of Cairo in the 1970s. And like Mahraganat, shabby lyrics touch on the day-to-day struggles of the average person. Subjects like sadness and friendship and like social situation and so on.

So Mahraganot came from younger people at this time of technology and accessibility to music software together with this Shabi heritage music. I know people talk about it as if it came out of the revolution, but it was around before that, in the late 2000s, right? Where did it come from? The very, very beginning was for something to do with the economy. Normally, people like to celebrate things here, like weddings, engagement parties.

things here like weddings, engagement parties. Any kind of event has to be celebrated physically with light and speakers and chairs and food and drinks. Wedding parties used to be like really out in the streets with big stages, big sound systems, lots of different bands and singers. This became very expensive. So people had to find other solutions. So they started to ask the guys bringing the speakers if they can also put some music in the speakers. At the same time, there were like some kids

watching some YouTube videos about free software how to make hip-hop beats and kind of cut edit your sample so this was happening at the time what the economy was very important for people to have low budget parties so these guys on the computer started to say to the people, you can actually come and I can make you your wedding party song. And I could also say your name in the song. So this business started to boom in these areas. I wonder if you could talk about what Cairo was like at the time. What was the vibe of the city? Cairo is a very big city. It's very urban, very fast, very harsh, very strong, very old, very chaotic.

Chaos is translated into Cairo, if you want to understand chaos. You come to Cairo and this is the actual translation of the word. Everybody is very ambitious. People are wanting to be something and belonging to this urban life, if you understand what I'm saying. Yeah, I think I get what you're saying. There is a culture of hustle and trying to make it. Exactly. You want to make it. You want to belong.

You want to be somebody. The competition is really high on everything. At that time, chances were very limited. Economy was not exactly in the best moment. So you had no other chance other than make it yourself. So all these guys in the neighborhoods that with less opportunities, less access to work opportunities, educational opportunities. So do you hear that influence in the music early on?

Of course, it was about the pressure and all the struggle. Generally, Mahara Ghanat music is always rebellion, discussing the tough life of these kids, which made it very, very successful because it's reflecting the reality of young people, a reality of so many people. For example, this is a song from 2013. Its title translates to The People Want Five Pounds Credit.

It's a sarcastic take on the revolutionary protest chant, The People Want the Fall of the Regime. It's about people wanting a five pound cell phone credit, about money problems and the stress of having to fight for every pound. So while a lot of popular Mahogany songs are about love and heartache, the music also touches on subjects that make some people, mostly older, more conservative people in Egypt, uncomfortable. Things like poverty, a disdain for institutions, sex, drugs and alcohol.

And the artists who pioneered the genre aren't the activists and intellectuals who led the Tahrir Square uprising in 2011. The military police is actually moving into Tahrir Square with force and they are trying to clear the square. That then led to the Arab Spring and brought down President Hosni Mubarak. They tend to be people from underprivileged communities just trying to make ends meet. But even though maharganat artists aren't really children of the revolution, the revolution did bring new eyes to the vibrant cultural scene in Egypt. The music is called maharaganat, and it stands for an attitude. And maharaganat exploded internationally.

But as the genre grew abroad, at home in Egypt, the artists started to see pushback. After the revolution, we were just releasing music at that time. Then we started to have this discussion about class. This music is not appropriate because it's coming from this class. And these kids are not musicians, are not educated. They don't look nice all the time. Some group of people decide a standard that suits them. So it was not up to their standard, the society.

The group Mahmoud is talking about is called the Egyptian Musician Syndicate. This is the union in Egypt that sets the official standards for music and hands out permits for artists to perform on stage. This past November, they banned 19 artists from singing and performing in Egypt. And in February, they banned another artist named Omar Kamal. Kamal is one of the people who was sentenced to a year in jail last month, along with Hamo Bika, on charges of violating family values in Egyptian society. This all stemmed from a complaint about a 2020 video of them singing and dancing with a belly dancer. This has been going on for like, what, five years now? Actually, the maharagana is officially banned from the national radio and national TV for over eight years or something like this. Wow.

Being banned by the syndicate also means you can't perform in clubs, weddings, or even have your own shows. Last year, the syndicate even tried to get YouTube and SoundCloud to take maharaganat songs off their platforms. The syndicate has said the band artists were, quote, creating a chaotic movement in the country. The head of the syndicate, Hani Shekhar, has also been open about how much he dislikes Maharganat. He said that just because the music is popular on YouTube, that doesn't make it good. Worth noting, though, that Hani Shekhar is himself a famous singer in Egypt. The syndicate accuses the artists of promoting what they see as immoral

behavior, of being vulgar and corrupting young people, and of misrepresenting Egypt on the world stage. But Mahmoud says the reasons behind the hard line that they've taken are about more than just morals. The syndicate don't understand the actual situation. They don't understand how it works or what is happening on the international market or what is happening on the digital platforms and music distribution and not to mention the freedom of expression and the freedom of accessibility to information. I could so many things we could discuss with or without the maharaganaat, younger people have different perspective of freedom and expression and information.

Plus, there is a whole major economy happening around this music that is not exactly going together with the syndicate. There is an economy and a structure happening far away from them, far away from the usual major structures or entities. It's not happening with this, it's happening elsewhere. It sounds like it's a combination of them being a little bit out of touch, ideological differences, and then on top of that, there is a huge economy around this genre that they're not a part of and they're not getting a piece of that pie. Exactly. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

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for Egypt. And the statements that I've seen from the syndicate all kind of say things along similar lines, that this music is corrupting the youth, that it's promoting vile ideas. Why do you think they feel that way? They are not in touch. If you think I'm saying something bad, people are also listening to it.

If you think this is bad, so everybody else is bad. So it sounds like they don't understand that this music is a reflection of Egyptian society. And that the musicians aren't introducing anything new to the public. This is stuff the public already knows. For them, it's the lyrics. The lyrics are promoting violence and inappropriate behavior. Yet millions upon millions are supporting this music. So clearly a language barrier has been destroyed somewhere that you're not aware of. Try to understand it. Try to see what's going on. And then you see how to work with it. Or just leave it.

What kind of impact has the ban had since it first came into effect? How strictly has it been enforced? Very strict, very strict. They are actually doing it. And the thing is that every artist has a crew of people working. And suddenly this has to be erupted like we had to stop it people have to stop working it was not good for them but in the end it's not stopping the the music production the studios and the distribution with like the major platforms and all. Other people who've been watching the backlash against Maharganat say it's part of a wider crackdown on certain kinds of art in Egypt.

Last year, there was a controversy around the movie Feathers. It got international acclaim, but it was criticized in Egypt for the way that it depicted the country's poverty. An MP asked Parliament to hold the producers accountable for scenes that he felt didn't reflect reality. And earlier this year, an Egyptian MP lodged a formal complaint against Netflix's first Arabic-language film, a remake of the Italian movie Perfect Strangers.

In the film, and this is a bit of a spoiler, one of the characters is revealed to be in a same-sex relationship, while another is exposed for having an affair. Their friends are okay with this, and the MP complained that the film didn't conform to the moral code of Egypt. I think people are missing the bigger picture here. These crackdowns are just an indicator of a much bigger series of events that are happening with films, with all sorts of words, really. Fadi Adel is a freelance culture reporter in Egypt.

So this movement is kind of, it's everywhere. And like, since 2013, really, people have been all about like the image of Egypt, and how do we make it better? And how do we represent it accurately? And how do we not focus on the negatives but try and like you know show all the good things that are happening everyone's under scrutiny even those people who are like vocalizing their you know their disagreement with with counterculture at the same time they're kind of like trying to pick a side so they're safe and good and not stepping on any toes. Some of them, they work on insane propaganda pieces.

During Ramadan, we have this series called Al-Ikhtiyar. And it documents the heroic actions of our military and police since 2011 today. And it completely changes the narrative of the revolution in 2011, 2013. And, you know, it's trying to not like reverse demonize the image that we have of our police and of our military, which has sort of like taken up the country. What's up with this obsession around protecting Egypt's image? I think it's been a rough decade since 2011, right? And a lot of people have been doing great or not doing great.

Tourism is really, it's nowhere near what it used to be. The economy is struggling. I think everyone is obsessed with this idea of stability and we need to get things back on track, right? We can't go back to the days of 2011. We can't go obsessed with this idea of stability and we need to get things back on track, right? We can't go back to the days of 2011. We can't go back to the days of 2013. It was so unstable. And now with COVID and everything, we'd rather have someone rule us with a fist of steel than have people voice their opinions or express or tarnish the image of Egypt. Like we're on a track now.

That's how they think. Like we're on a track to somewhere and we're not going to let anything get in the way of that. And be it something as silly as a lyric in a muhrabon. So it's like a long simmering backlash to what happened during the revolution. Okay, we let the kids up. Zahir Square in 2011, they had their part. They had their moment. The kids are now going to have to take a sidestep

because we can't let kids run the show anymore. That's really, that's more or less the sentiment that anyone over 40 will tell you right now. None of this backlash has really slowed down Mahmoud or his roster of artists. We're heading to the West big time. We're always on the international map for like 10 years now. And in the States, they compare us with the hip hop. In Europe, they compare us with the grime music. I'm sure in Asia, there will be something.

South America, they compare us with the reggaeton. All of that. So the last deal we made with Sony Music is like a big deal that we produce a lot of Mahraganot music and very successful. and very successful. As part of this multi-year deal that Mahmoud is talking about, Sony is representing 100 copies catalog worldwide. As we speak, we're discussing an even bigger deal with an American company, like big stuff.

Shows that we're on the right track. That's awesome. I hope that works out. Now, I think everybody understands that this is the sound of the country. Everybody's starting to understand that this music is important. There is nothing bad happening about this. It's except the syndicate. Where do you see Maharganat music

going from here? Sometimes we think we're done. Sometimes we think we're out of ideas. I don't know why people are still coming back and wanting more and more. This is nice, but it's big. And I think the important is that are we still going to be the voice of the youth? Are we still going to be giving them the hope, giving them solutions, telling them that we understand them? To be a big genre or small genre. This is something we leave it for the time. I think that us as a studio and

all the most of the musicians are really concerned about being the real voice of the people. All right, that's all for this week. You've been listening to Nothing is Foreign. Our producer is Joyta Sengupta. Our sound designer is Graham McDonald. Thank you. is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Joseph Chavison. If you like this episode and you want to help new listeners find the show, please take a second to rate and review us wherever you're listening. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at CBC Podcasts.

I'm Tamara Kandaker. Thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you back here next week. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.