Mahraganat is a DIY music genre born from the streets of Al-Salem City, an informal neighborhood in Cairo, Egypt. It is also a movement that has been informed by decades of contentious history. This article will explore the socio-cultural dynamics, economic structures, and political tensions that have shaped this vibrant and controversial musical movement. Dalia Ibraheem, an anthropology PhD candidate at Rutgers University presented her talk “Seismic Transformations: The Cultural Ecologies and Periurban Poetics in Mahraganat Music in Egypt” at the Orfalea Center on February 28th, 2024. She linked the socio-economic conditions of Al-Salem to the emergence of Mahraganat music, highlighting how the historical relocations and socio-economic hardships of Al Salem’s residents played a crucial role in shaping this genre. This article summarizes Dalia Ibraheem’s key points, providing a comprehensive understanding of Mahraganat music and its significance within Egyptian society.
Socio-Cultural Context of Al Salem City
Al-Salem is an informal neighborhood in the far east of Cairo; part of an urban topology called “Ashwayat,” which translates to haphazard or informal. These Ashwayat are the Egyptian equivalent of slums, shantytowns, or favelas. Al Salem is also the product of forced resettlement due to “urban disasters.” Established as a social housing project in the 1970s under President Sadat, Al Salem remained largely uninhabited until the early 1980s. During this period the government relocated thousands of impoverished residents from Old Cairo to Al Salem whose homes were deemed “unsafe.” The 1990s saw Al Salem become, as Dalia put it, a “quasi-official human landfill” housing those displaced by “urban disasters” following events like the 1992 earthquake. Those born at this time and displaced to Al Salem would go on to become the inventors of this novel genre of music that is called “Mahraganat.”
Mahraganat is a DIY electronic dance music genre whose singers are predominantly urban poor young men. The short handle for the music is “electro chaabi” because it relies heavily on synthesizers, and chaabi denotes its association with the urban poor. The genre started in the street weddings of Al Salem where DJs and voices that wouldn't usually qualify as singing voices started to experiment with music. Dalia posed her main question, “How have those artists turned their music experimentation into a real music genre? And how has Mahraganat music, despite heavy state censorship, managed to reach not only national popularity but also pan-Arab and at times, even international popularity”?
The Gift Economy and the Evolution of a Genre
The early 2000s saw a surge in Mahraganat’s popularity. Internet cafes, known as cyber cafes, became hubs of musical experimentation, attracting young populations who had no computers or internet connection at home. These youths taught themselves and each other how to use digital audio workstation software. This grassroots approach to music production underscored the genre’s organic evolution within the community, allowing it to flourish despite limited resources. "Internet cafes turned into music laboratories,” Dalia noted, “where kids taught themselves and each other how to use programs like Acid Pro, Mixcraft, Fruity Loops, and other audio digital workstation software programs." The production of Mahraganat music relies heavily on community resources and informal economies. Dalia emphasized, "A huge part of the production of Mahraganat songs is a modality of the gift economy. Producing, mediating, circulating, and consuming Mahraganat is an all-encompassing neighborhood economy that involves many of the neighborhood's young men, even those not directly involved in singing." This inclusion can involve people offering rooms to use as studios or everyday neighbors becoming cameramen, directors, stylists, etc. What is truly fascinating about these productions according to Dalia is that there are no written contracts in these production relations, and in some instances, no money is exchanged. There is, however, a strong element of reciprocity, though what is exchanged is hard to quantify.
Impact of State and Society
Informal labor underlines the production and circulation of Mahraganat. The Egyptian state attempts to control cultural production, including prohibiting the broadcasting of Mahraganat on state-owned radio and television channels. Despite this, Mahraganat artists have mobilized the street as infrastructure for transportation technology, and as a means of circulation to overcome the opposition they face from the state. They have employed innovative distribution methods, such as using USB drives and tuk-tuks, to circulate their music. These methods bypass traditional state-controlled media channels, allowing Mahraganat to reach a broad audience.
However, the unprecedented success of Mahraganat has helped it reach a wide national and even international audience, suggesting that this gift economy is intertwined with another mode of ultra-capitalist production: the gig economy of music-sharing platforms. These platforms not only enabled Mahraganat to gain national and international popularity but also allowed artists to monetize their success, challenging the traditional cultural gatekeepers and the state's control over artistic expression. "Transnational platforms like YouTube, Spotify, and SoundCloud have significantly changed the power dynamics between the state and its underclass by allowing artists to monetize their success and fame. These platforms disarmed traditional cultural gatekeepers and enabled artists to partially bypass state control,” Dalia stated.
These platforms transform music-making in Egypt in three main ways, according to Dalia. The first reason is that transnational online platforms allow for out-of-border reach. The second is that virality, trends, and viewerships became the new markers of success, allowing these platforms to significantly disarm traditional cultural gatekeepers like TV and radio presenters, and music critics who would decide what music “is in.” The third and most important shift sees these artists monetize their success, fame, and popularity through such platforms. These transformations, Dalia said, have prompted many questions about conceptualizing and theorizing this compounded economy that interlaces elements of the informal economy with the transnational gig economy. Taking Levi-Strauss’s definition of a “collage” and adding to it, she gave us the term “local transnational collage.” While this arrangement has allowed artists to bypass the state in many ways, the question remains whether it is truly possible to bypass the state, especially in a country like Egypt, where the state restricts the lives of Mahraganat artists, primarily through the state-affiliated Musicians' Syndicate. Since 2015, the Musicians' Syndicate has waged a relentless cultural war against Mahraganat, fining artists, banning them from performing, demanding they change their names, and refusing to recognize them as singers. Instead, they are labeled as vocal performers, as Mahraganat is deemed a disgrace to Egypt's renowned art. Beyond the Musicians' Syndicate, the state exacerbates the plight of these artists by rendering their informal neighborhoods uninhabitable through mass incarcerations for petty crimes, thereby turning these areas into oppressive environments.
Mahraganat or Sha’abi?
This attack on these neighborhoods disrupts their urban fabric, and its impact is evident in the lyrics of Mahraganat songs. Something important Dalia noted here is the difference between Sha’abi music and Mahraganat: “the most important difference between them is related to the narrative,” particularly the narrative they construct about the artists themselves. Unlike the victimhood narratives of earlier Sha’abi musicians in the 1980s and 1990s, Mahraganat artists take pride in their masculinity. “Their music creates a conflicted subjectivity that is hyper-masculine yet aggrieved,” said Dalia. Mahraganat music is polyphonic, noise-based, and often reflects the chaotic environment of the neighborhoods from which it originates. Dalia noted that the music serves as both an expression of resistance and a form of social commentary. The artists themselves embrace the noise, using it as an aesthetic element, and their sample-based music is associated with dances related to street fighting and prison.
Within Cairo, two main groups of Mahraganat artists exist: the Eastern group and the Southwest Giza group. The Eastern group exhibits hip-hop aesthetics with oversized clothes, bling jewelry, and distinctive hairstyles. In contrast, the Southwest Giza group adheres to a more classic Sha’abi aesthetic with quiff hairstyles and tight clothes. “Despite imprisonment being a common aspect of their lives, the Eastern group seldom references prison in their music, focusing instead on providing alternative futures for young people in their neighborhoods. Conversely, the Giza group's music often features a subgenre dedicated to prison, referred to as ‘the impasse’ to convey both physical and psychological constriction,” said Dalia. The differing attitudes toward prison among these groups highlight their unique approaches to their art and their environments.
A Political Economy of Abandonment
Circling back to Al-Salam, Dalia stated that it defies simple categorization as either a city or a camp, embodying an unresolved state of existence. The displacement of the urban poor from Cairo's inner city has become a routine function of urban governance. This displacement presents a significant challenge for Mahraganat artists, as they grapple with their connections to their neighborhoods of origin, which are often deemed uninhabitable, yet remain deeply intertwined with the artists' identities. Despite achieving fame and wealth, many artists find themselves unwelcome in affluent neighborhoods, complicating their sense of belonging.
“Mahraganat music reflects a political economy of abandonment. More importantly, it embodies endurance, perseverance, and ambivalence. It is crucial not to reduce Mahraganat to mere resistance, as this would oversimplify and misrepresent the complexity of the music,” Dalia stressed. Instead, these artists use Mahraganat as a response to the state's efforts to impose a bare existence upon them. Through their music, they articulate a sophisticated political response, exploring what it means to inhabit an uninhabitable place, to escape an inescapable state, and to succeed without formal artistic recognition.
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