EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 19 - Mahraganat
Genre of the Day - Mahraganat
Album of the Day - Kahraba by EEK (2015)
Today’s genre is an exercise in extremities, compared to yesterday’s yayue. Just as music can imitate the refined nature of those sitting at society’s zenith, it can capture the joy and discontent of those at the opposite end. Music is too fluid, as natural an act of creation from artist to artist, to easily suppress: today, we follow the Egyptian government’s futile attempts at cutting down musical liberty.
Mahraganat translates to festival in Egyptian Arabic, and the word is a bit of an understatement. It’s a hyper swirl of traditional sounds with modern EDM and hip-hop sensibilities, flowing through the air of Cairo’s festivities like neon smoke. Just like yesterday’s genre, traditional Arabic pop (a smash hit by my Substack standards) is associated with pronounced grandeur and elegance. New sounds began to take hold as Cairo became increasingly dense and home to a massive working class. This sound was known as shaabi as it emerged out of lower-class Egyptian neighborhoods in the ‘70s, and like earlier Algerian raï, singers minced few words in expressing the daily difficulties of life through irreverent, sardonic humor and danceable release.
As hip-hop and electrified palettes took cities by storm worldwide, they’ve helped democratize urban musical expression from mambo urbano to jungle. In the late 2000s, mahraganat carried the shaabi torch with those templates in mind for the ashwaiyyat, the precariously developed quarters of Cairo. Weddings are a massive affair in Egyptian culture, and music is an integral centerpiece. In a wedding in an ashwaiyyat, celebrating families often lack the money to hire the bands that typically drive the extravaganza: DJs to the rescue. Through synthesizers, samplers, and the global godsend FL Studio, DJs reproduced a digitized fusion of traditional uproarious tunes with global hip-hop beats and rapped shaabi narratives over them. It’s a potent act of self-sufficiency in areas often considered overlooked by an Egyptian government racing to build gaudy developments. However, the vulgar and rebellious nature of the songs, intensified after the Arab Spring, has drawn the ire of censors who declared a ban in public venues in 2022. Music’s considerable liquidity is too hard to pin down and stamp out, though, so tuk-tuks, street celebrations, and social media persist as informal but culturally saturated channels for the genre to thrive. In Cairo’s informal housing areas, the financial success showered upon the scene’s stars is a vital rags-to-riches story for a discontented population.
As I return to a city that feels viscerally uncomfortable to situate myself in for the moment, something that spoke the frenzy of an urban environment was welcome. Though Islam Chipsy has distanced himself from the term mahraganat as he’s not an emcee, today’s artist still epitomizes its instrumental intensity in a brisk four songs. The frenetic video-game esque synths and digitized flutes against a traditional drum beat on “Trinity” creates a beguiling soundscape totally his own, an outburst of energy as massive as a supernova. He honed his sound playing keyboard at weddings alongside drummers, fully improvising each dynamic performance with his classical training and uninhibited approach to Egyptian music. He’s like the pied piper of dancing mania, leading listeners into a frenzy that could shake his massive city’s very foundation—indicating a passion too great for any political entity to contain.