Portfolio Category - LCEA 2013

Through the warren of Cairo’s unplanned slums, mahraganat (festival) music blasts from tuk-tuks, cigarette stalls and cranked up cellphone speakers; auto-tuned voices mixing with heavy electronic rap beats. The sound quality is low and the lyrics are unmistakably vulgar. Egyptians can’t get enough. Sha’abi music (literally translating to the music of the ‘poor’) is the new anthem of a new Egypt, recorded in bedrooms, mixed on shoddy laptops and capitalizing on the anger at the country’s economic and political situation. The young singers discuss pride, community, sex, and religion, seething about their frustrated expectations of a better life through irreverent, comical and sarcastic lyrics like “The people want phone credit! Just phone credit,” a play on the popular 18-day Tahrir Square uprising chant: “The people want the fall of the regime!” Walking down the street, Oka, Ortega and Shehta blend easily into the crowds of the Egyptian youth that have spontaneously amassed for the last two years at city intersections—throwing stones at police, demanding a better life, chanting for freedom, against Hosni Mubarak, against president Mohammed Morsi. But their band “Tamanya Fil Meya” [the eight percent] has become the new voice of Egypt. Tamanya Fil Meya knows the masses: They perform on rickety wooden stages in alleys and at impoverished weddings in their neighborhood of Matareya. Their latest recordings are passed from phone to phone by bluetooth. Their YouTube videos have over 1 million listens, their Facebook page has hundreds of thousands of likes. They are proud of their poverty and proud of Egypt, but they also know they are being stripped of their opportunity by the state. “We have four social segments in Egypt: poorer than poor, poor, middle class, and upper class. We are happy to be part of the poorer than poor, but we do and sing as we want,”