Serene Assir talks music and business with some of Cairo's top DJs Nowhere else in our post-modern world do music and money come into any closer interaction than they do in the location par excellence of our era: the discotheque, or to be a little more PC to youth lingo, the club. And Cairo's night life, though it may seem at the outset somewhat limited, is no exception. Highly exclusive private events aside, only in a top-end club will you find A-list actors interacting with start-up businessmen, pop- stars showing off their dancing skills and chatting up female starlets and inhibitions being replaced by intense socialising, sleaze and laughter. And while the driving force behind a club is dance, the ultimate responsibility of success or failure and of finding music so good that it drowns out the din in the only way you would want it to, rests on the shoulders of the DJ. The definition of a DJ's work in Egypt differs greatly to that of his or her Western counterpart. For one, "you simply won't find a DJ, however hard you look, who will play a totally new session and improvise wholly new tracks at a club here in Egypt," DJ Assem, who plays house, hip hop and RnB at top- end club Ritmo, told Al-Ahram Weekly. "And if you meet anyone who claims the contrary, don't believe him. International artists like Paul Van Dyck and DJ Tiesto have all the time, all the money and all the equipment they need to work long hours at home at mixing rare sample material and then playing out their sessions at clubs, making music as though they were instrumentalists." Apparently also suffering from the burdens of a still floundering Egyptian economy and from overwork due to high levels of unemployment, Assem works every night, from 8pm to 5am. "It's hard for me, as an artist, to keep such long hours, and then at the same time be expected to produce new material," he said. The upside, however, is that "only in Egypt will you find such good mixing," Assem continued. The main reason why mixing skills are so developed is the high demand among audiences for "songs they already know and are keen to dance to. But this in turn is the root of a problem that we have to continually deal with, and which club managers only seek to feed: the fact that it is very, very difficult to introduce brand new tracks to club-goers. So rather than play music and find channel for our artistic skills, we end up reproducing the music everyone already listens to on TV, the radio and the Internet. Our passage to improvisation and spontaneity is thus killed." DJ Mohamed El-Sheikh, who used to feature regularly at top-end, high attendance clubs and now chooses instead to play at downtown Cairo's answer to underground locales After Eight, complains of a similar fate. "More often than not," El-Sheikh told the Weekly, perhaps owing to the relatively small number of fully equipped clubs, "people are not all that musically open-minded." The trick, however, lies in "bringing the people to the music rather than the other way around". In other words, if El-Sheikh finds himself playing to an unresponsive audience, he plays tunes that he knows will draw them to the dance floor, enabling them to shed their inhibition and dance. "At that point," he explains, "they are in my control. I transform the night, get creative and play the sets that I want to play. And it works. The novelty sets them off and they keep dancing all night long." But how does a DJ sense what an audience may or may not be into musically? "You've hit the nail on the head," El-Sheikh went on. "Being a DJ is all about sense. Before I start mixing, I look around, mingle with the crowds. You can judge people's musical taste and sense of adventure by their clothes, whether or not they move around the club, and their age." In other words, social exposure is key to the success of a DJ. "Further, the locale itself plays a crucial role in defining the kind of music it requires. Low lighting, for one, creates focus on music and a desire to let go, and décor also needs to be in tune with the kind of audience the club caters to," he explained. There is a fine balance, agree DJs Assem and El-Sheikh, between giving audiences what they want to hear and providing them with enough novelty to keep the levels of adrenaline running. "A mistake DJs in Cairo often make," Assem said, "is that they play songs which we've been hearing constantly for four or five years." And although songs which made it big and stay put in the musically uneducated person's mind provides an easy high and give managers the false impression that the club is doing well, ultimately club-goers will end up complaining. After all, adds Assem, "the traditional role of a DJ is to introduce people to new, previously inaccessible music." A craze that has become one of Cairo's most prominent in recent years has been the Latin trend. So popular has it become that you'll regularly find club-goers mouthing the words of Celia Cruz classics without having the slightest idea of how to speak Spanish. "The reason why Latin music is so popular here," El-Sheikh told the Weekly, "is because its sounds are close enough to Arabic music to feel familiar, and yet new enough to inspire excitement. In addition, Latin music and dance are inherently powerful and very expressive. And while Egyptians are full of soul power and energy, they often feel they cannot freely express it. Latin music provides that outlet." And although clubs such as Latex and Hard Rock do sound out house music and hip hop, the clear favourite among Egyptian audiences remains, to this day, Arabic music. This is perhaps particularly true for weddings where "on average, 80 per cent of the tracks played will be local," El-Sheikh explained. "Weddings are perhaps the hardest venues to play, partly because of the fact that as a DJ, your role is confused with that of being an entertainer and partly because it is false to assume that guests even intend to dance." Still, if a DJ manages to scoop a wedding at a top-end hotel, the returns are highly lucrative. "A DJ mixing at a five-star hotel will make at least LE4,000 that night," Assem said. "At a top-end club, he usually gets paid LE2,500 to LE3,000 per month." As for an early learner mixing at a street wedding, "He'd usually get paid between LE100 and LE200 for the night, and believe me, most will be quite happy with that." Entry into clubs in Cairo usually functions according to the widespread system of paying a minimum charge. Depending on the popularity and exclusivity of the night and venue, clubs will charge between LE20 and LE200 per person. Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays are usually the best nights if you're looking to boogie. Enjoy.
