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Neoliberal Expansion and Aesthetic Innovation: The Egyptian Independent Music Scene Ten Years After

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2020

Darci Sprengel
Darci Sprengel*
Affiliation:
Junior Research Fellow in Music, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: darci.sprengel@music.ox.ac.uk
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Type
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 545 - 551
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Although there are disagreements about terminology, many of its musicians view independent music as situated in the spaces between state patronage and the multinational music industry represented by Rotana. As this essay demonstrates, that distinction is starting to change (see also Asfour essay in this issue). Independent music (al-mazika al-mustaqilla or al-mazika al-badila) draws from a variety of eclectic aesthetic influences, including Arab art music (al-musiqa al-ʿArabīyya), Western and especially African diasporic popular musics, Nubian music, Moroccan Gnawa, rai, and increasingly Egyptian shʿabi and mahragānāt.

2 For an alternative depiction of music in the revolution see Michael Frishkopf, "Songs of the New Arab Revolutions," YouTube video, 6 May 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u4v7R9yF0o.

3 Prior to 2011, independent music had only a small, mostly middle-class audience and few performance venues.

4 “Yes, We're Still Here, but Why?” Naira Antounis, Stephanie Baily, Mariam Elnozahy, Ania Szremski, and William Wells, conversation at the Mosaic Rooms, London, 7 July 2018.

5 Music scholars have recently been at the forefront of demonstrating that, if 1990s scholarship had a romance with resistance, the 2000s to the present mark a period of fetishizing it, especially in the study of Middle Eastern music and cultures, popular music, and urban youth cultures. Ethnomusicologist David McDonald argues, for instance, that the Western media's emphasis on Arab hip-hop as a framing device for narrating and interpreting the Arab Spring is not only misinformed and superficial but imposes a “neo-Orientalist discourse of American hegemony over forces of reform and democratization in the Arab Middle East”; “Framing the ‘Arab Spring’: Hip Hop, Social Media, and the American News Media,” Journal of Folklore Research 56, no. 1 (2019): 105. Performance studies scholar Rayya el-Zein uses the term neoliberal orientalism to describe this tendency, concluding that it ultimately fills the lacuna left by the abatement of debate in the West about political alternatives at a time of neoliberal political power; Performing el Rap el ‘Araby 2005–2015: Feeling Politics and Neoliberal Incursions in Ramallah, ‘Amman, and Beirut (PhD diss., New York University, 2016), 66. See also Nooshin, Laudan, “Underground, Overground: Rock Music and Youth Discourse in Iran,” Iranian Studies 38, no. 3 (2005): 463–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Swedenburg, Ted, “Egypt's Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha,” Middle East Report 265 (2012): 39–43Google Scholar; and Almeida, Cristina Moreno, Rap Beyond Resistance: Staging Power in Contemporary Morocco (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the romance with resistance, see Abu-Lughod, Lila, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 41–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mahmood, Saba, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Abu-Lughod, Lila, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Laudan Nooshin, “Underground, Overground”; el-Zein, Performing el Rap el ‘Araby.

7 I began researching independent music and mahragānāt in Alexandria in 2010, when I was enrolled in a year-long Arabic language program at the University of Alexandria and working as an intern at an Alexandrian arts organization. I have continued this research until the present during yearly stays in Cairo and Alexandria.

8 Personal communication with the author, 10 January 2019.

9 I use the word patronage loosely. Sometimes the state thinly veils its interference as a form of support that musicians cannot refuse without some type of state-led retaliation.

10 Mahragānāt (literally “festivals”) is a genre of electronic music that emerged from working-class neighborhoods and wedding culture in the early 2000s. It is sometimes referred to in Europe as electro-chaabi (shʿabi).

11 This professionalism included high-quality recording equipment, a director and team in charge of production and storyboarding, makeup artists and wardrobe designers, paid actors and models that appeared in the video, and set design.

12 Appel, Hannah, “Toward an Ethnography of the National Economy,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 2 (2017): 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Ibid., 311–12.

14 This free labor facilitated the partnership between Universal and Aloft Hotels, with the hotel chain providing major funding for Universal's activities in the region.

15 Alijla, Abdalhadi, “Gazzawi as Bare Life? An Autoethnography of Borders, Siege, and Statelessness,” Contemporary Levant 4, no. 2 (2019): 177–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007); Farah Najjar, “Why is Egypt's New NGO Law Controversial?” Al Jazeera, 31 May 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/05/egypt-ngo-law-controversial-170530142008179.html.

17 Entertainment tax (ḍarbīyat al-malāhī) is in addition to income tax and taxes collected by the Musicians’ Syndicate for each performer. Many independent and mahragānāt musicians are not (and are not allowed to be) members of the Syndicate; they must pay bribes to the syndicate to perform.

18 Public concerts continue to happen in the poor peripheries, however, where the state does not maintain much power or presence; Bayat, Asef, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 The band has not stated this directly, likely for safety reasons. However, it is widely accepted that this was not a track made of their own volition. Some of the band members’ private Facebook posts about the track's release affirm this suspicion.

20 As anthropologist Paul Amar argues, this new wave of post-2011 “shock doctrine” sees militarized state institutions and security agencies increasingly moving into areas that neoliberal capitalist logics had formerly relegated to the private and civilian public sectors in Egypt. This sphere is dominated by the logics of security rather than free choice, consumerism, or individual rights, the typical hallmarks of neoliberal ideology; “Military Capitalism,” NACLA Report on the Americas 50, no.1 (2018): 82–89.

21 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

22 See Anonymous and Asfour essays in this issue.

23 See also Tucker McGee, “Dina el Wedidi's ‘Slumber’ Traverses Seven Hallucinatory Train Stations Inside a Dream,” Scene Noise, 11 October 2018, https://scenenoise.com/Reviews/dina-el-wedidis-slumber-traverses-seven-hallucinatory-train-stations-inside-a-dream.

24 The album is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAbok9NF018.

25 Performance studies scholar Rayya el-Zein describes a similar phenomenon when describing “political feelings,” politics in process that do not depend on speech, emancipation, or subject-based agency. Unlike the artists in el-Zein's work, many of the Egyptian artists mentioned here strongly reject any notion of politics in relation to their music; “Resisting ‘Resistance’: On Political Feeling in Arabic Rap Concerts,” in Arab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice, ed. Tarik Sabry and Layal Ftouni (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 87–112.

26 Musicians frequently used the word “fusion” (in English) to describe their mixing of different musical genres such as rock or jazz with Arab or Sufi music aesthetics. For a critique of the concept, see Rami Abadir, “Faqr Musiqa al-Mazaj wa Kayf Yehduth al-Tajdid al-Haqiqi,” Ma3azef, 22 November 2015, https://ma3azef.com/فقر-موسيقى -المزج،-وكيف -يحدث -التجديد-ال /.

27 Vice Asia, “Marwan Pablo: Egypt's Godfather of Trap,” YouTube, 3 October 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYKEREfQ3S0.

28 Whether this recognition of working-class culture and creativity indicates the increased inclusion of the working classes in other areas of life remains to be seen. For the new recognition of al-shʿab by artists, see Sprengel, Darci, “‘Loud’ and ‘Quiet’ Politics: Questioning the Role of ‘the Artist’ in Street Arts Projects after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 2 (2020): 208–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.