"Our musical kitchen is full of cockroaches"
Egyptian pop cults: Umm Kulthum, Mahraganat and solidarity's horizon
Halfway down Sonnenallee, the German signage starts to intersperse with glitching neon Arabic. I’m in a taxi when I first spot a gilded shop front that reads ‘Bäckerei Umm Kulthum.’ Transported by this name back to three memories at once, I remember being a visitor in the city I’m now living in, record shopping with Ellie, my first intro to Umm Kulthum. We took an afternoon to browse at the end of the last ever Good Throb tour. She emerged from a back room uncharacteristically animated with a grip of dusty albums and started to patiently explain the significance of this diasporic gold, as the counter guy eyes whose widened gently.
Known variously as ‘The Nightingale of the Nile, ‘Egypt’s fourth pyramid,’ or just ‘El Sett’ which means simply ‘The Lady,’ Umm Kulthum was an Egyptian crooner behemoth born in 1898. She inspires a level of dedication across the Middle East that is hard to really fathom, but to say its like naming your bakery ‘Princess Di Bakery’ doesn’t really start to come close. A kohl-encrusted contralto whose songs frequently stretch to two hours in length, Kulthum—nb. I’m using this spelling but you just as likely might see Oom Kalso/uom or another variation owing to the joyful vagaries of transliteration—bent her incredible voice across the three Ls of love, longing, loss like no other before her. Said to inspire a ‘collective ecstasy’ when her marathon bangers would finally reach their crescendo, at its peak the phenomenon of El Sett was used to both mobilise the troops and subdue a crowd (who would rush home to put the radio on!) The Cairene literary critic Raja’a al-Naqqash once wrote that until his teens, he thought that ‘listening to music’ meant ‘listening to Umm Kulthum.’ To say people lived through her music is to underplay its the power of its ubiquity and what she meant, and means, as a sign.
As a child she was routinely dressed as a boy so she could perform in public, later defying gender norms through both her lower than typical vocal tonality and her use of switched-up language forms that mess with the lover object/subject. She never had children and finally married a man who was actually just her doctor pretty late in life. Her signature sunglasses, independence in a massive modernist villa and unapologetic star power already scream gay icon, so it’s perhaps no surprise there is an also enduring theory that Umm Kulthum was a lesbian. A photo of her apparently kissing a woman went viral on Arab-language social media a few years ago, its veracity naturally disputed. I searched but could not find it, and an article titled ‘Was El Sett a lesbian?’ once went up on a Lebanese website but was removed within a day.
After the 1952 Nasserite revolution, a tune of hers was adopted for a time as the Egyptian national anthem, clearly offering just the right amount of campy defiance with the name ‘It’s Been a Long Time, O Weapon of Mine.’ El Sett also sang against the 15-year Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula with considerable …vim (‘slaughter, slaughter, slaughter them’) and became a stand-in sovereign symbol for the embattled republic. A cool four million people came out to mourn on ‘The Black Day of Egypt’ when she died in 1975. On Millennium Eve Jean-Michel Jarre projected her face onto the Pyramids at Giza, and today YouTube comments under every single one of the vids is a beautiful mash up of unalloyed joy mixed with intense play outs of intra-Arab beefing for the odd chancer who bowls in to stir the pot by suggesting she has better songs than this one. Start with Enta Omri ‘إنت عمري’—‘You Are My Life.’
A few months after, I was invited to travel to Cairo. Grasping our visas (which you buy at a counter in arrivals) the first thing we noticed was a wall of music about as far away from Sad old Umm as you could imagine. Mahraganat (literally ‘festivals’) is an intoxicating mix of auto-tuned sha’abi wedding music with hyperspeed zar rhythms, and its schizo cadences are totally woven in with my memory of this trip. Competing lurches of high tempo vocal mix in the air above you, everything has a similar bpm but feels kind of nauseating at first, recalling the weird flinch when you realise you’re playing music in two tabs at once. Every radio, bluetooth, cars, street vendors city’s 9.2 million inhabitants appeared to be pumping psycho sha’abi by dudes like the El Esaba Band or Oka & Ortega. After a few days adjusting to the layers of tinny euphoric sound fog and midi-string assaults pumping from bluetooth speakers rested on piles of bricks, rising out of every tuk-tuk, bus, taxi and felucca boat, I was impossibly hooked. The original tool of choice to make these tunes? Why, the only thing industrious youth have ever needed for democratising bangers of course: cracked copies of fruity loops. Scenes in Salma El Tarzi’s incredible 2013 documentary ‘Underground/On the Surface’ show the lengths Ortega and other members of Cairo’s 8% crew went to just to get a basic recording set up, as they become controversial household names. It’s a country that has visually, culturally and politically transformed in the decade since my last visit as a young teen, when global tourism thrived and Mubarak’s guys were still about, but also sonically. You can see how the El Sett Industrial Complex would feel like some bloated statist histrionics to the shirtless mahraganat lads, availing themselves instead of gun fingers for a Winamp wheel up and slapping each others’ butts.
I had gone there with my friend Julia at the invitation of some researchers, to spend a day with some Egyptian feminists working on a similar project to the one we had started in London: to name, map and challenge street harassment and public sexual violence. The idea was to compare and contrast our approaches, experiences, and campaign tactics, and understanding at how our cultural differences informed our strategic choices. I return to the feeling I was left with after day together every time I think I know what I’m talking about, whenever the tendency to universalise creeps in.
We meet the group in a bright white room overlooking Tahrir Square, and begin to gently explore each other, cautious at first but bonded by a shared mission. The group were deeply generous with their thoughts and time and this day remains one of the most important political experiences I have had. At one point one of them asked about my repeated phrasing of ‘women and LGBTQ+ people,’ which we used when we talked about who’s most targeted for gender-based violence. Slowly and very quietly they began to explain the issues they would face in mentioning the struggle for queer and women’s rights in Egypt in the same sentence. What they said was something to the effect of “to align our public work on the rights of women with those of gay people, or to name these in the media as part of the same struggle, would be very personally dangerous and not a risk we can take.” The problem, they said, is that if we start to talk about gay rights, the doors we have only just begun to wedge open will be slammed shut again. When it came to public life and civil liberties “they will not,” they said “accept gay people until they can accept women.” I explored their exasperation even as I bristled at that—because of course, er, por que no los dos?—even while I couldn’t sit in it fully. My political compass felt defective in that moment, the static western identity politics I was mired in revealing a cartoonish analytical flimsiness when applied elsewhere. I had not lived through a revolution. Reflecting on the line between compromise vs. capitulation, strategic comms vs. betrayal, I considered my own relative cowardice, too. We had been vilified in the press once or twice, too, a few years before, but no credible death threats and certainly no late night police visits to my home. At that time in the UK many of my peers in the women’s sector were not yet alive to the true scale of institutional transphobia at its top, let alone equipped, organised or motivated to the need to resist it, even rhetorically. I return to this interaction often, remembering that, while I have lost work and been targeted for speaking out in support of trans rights, I’ve not yet been arrested or tortured for it. Solidarity, wielded effectively, is both powerful and dangerous, but as someone said recently, for the Western Left it is too often a stand in for the Rights’ ‘thoughts and prayers.’ Earlier that morning I read about the latest wave of raids on Cairo’s saunas. El-Sisi’s militarised police routinely harassed gay and bi men under ‘debauchery’ laws, pulled out naked into the streets, photographed, arrested and worse. Wither the queers is never a question of existence, just knowability, of course, but then as now, every activist I could look up was now in exile or prison for crimes like flag-waving. Electrodes and despair. Even the bigger civil liberties orgs toed a fine line. When representation means a target on your back, would you take another by association? How high do the stakes need to be? As labneh flowed with the looser talk over a huge dinner feast, it became clear that the necessity of denial meant investing in the possibilities for a rich hidden queer life not predicated on outness or a horizon of visibility alone. I thought about the boy-on-boy vogue/mosh homosocial mashup dancing style known in mahraganat, and Umm’s apocryphal girlfriends, about the useful lies we tell ourselves about our idols and our desires.
Mahraganat would get its first martyr when first wave pioneer DJ Zo’la would be shot in the back of the head on the fourth anniversary of the revolution. His bandmates maintain the ammunition which killed him was from a police weapon. Egypt’s Musicians Syndicate is ostensibly a union, but has an increasingly censorious function as surveillance body controlling the industry in the country. In February 2020, after a scandal over lyrics in a song called ‘Girl Next Door’ by Hassan Shakoush at a Valentine’s Day gig, the syndicate announced ‘Egypt’s musical kitchen is now full of cockroaches,’ immediately banning all public mahraganat performances. Syndicate head, the singer Hany Shaker went on: “This type of music is based on promiscuous and immoral lyrics, which is completely prohibited, and as such, the door is closed on it. We want real art.” Fines for playing it from boats, taxis and cafes came into effect the following day, with noticed posted in the streets that playing the music will result further legal action. The offending lyrics were: “If you leave me, I will hate my life, I will be lost and I will use alcohol and hashish.” Shakoush and his contemporaries are independent of the Syndicate with all the lack of kick-back that implies. The month the band was imposed, ‘Girl Next Door’ was the second most streamed song on the whole of Soundcloud globally.
The ban was repealed on March 5th 2020, and replaced with an annual paid licensing system for all artists who must legally sign to adhere to a strict moral code governing public licensing that also requires performing their material to the Syndicate to be approved. One month later, just before Covid hit, the Egyptian government staged a concert where Umm Kulthum ‘performed’ as a hologram, Tupac style. In a statement, the Culture Ministry said the aim of the concert was to “confront vulgarity and redirect attention to our arts heritage.”
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35mm Photos from my 2016 Trip to Cairo
Film stills from ‘Underground/On The Surface’ by Salma El Tarzi (2013)