In concert

Hani Shenouda:
In concert
The day the music died? He doesn't remember, because only the future counts
Profile by Pascale Ghazaleh
The song goes something like this: "Girls, please don't believe that marriage is a breeze, and girls, if we speak frankly, don't be upset, please, because marriage was never, never was a breeze." It sounds like a nursery rhyme gone slightly berserk, sung soulfully in gangster-gruff tones to the jolly electronic accompaniment of a beep- beep-driven synthesiser tune, and it features a female rejoinder reminding the listener chirpily that marriage is inevitable and that love will triumph in the end. It's a riot, in other words, and it's one of the songs that made Al-Masriyyin famous, starting in 1977. The band was based on the simple yet apparently revolutionary concept that it was possible both to sing in Arabic, thereby snaring wide popular appeal, and to do so to Western music, thus ensuring the devotion of several generations who were simply tired of what their parents listened to, but among whom, for various reasons, European or American pop had not caught on.
But try to convince Hani Shenouda ("Hani Shenouda? Isn't he the guy from Al-Masriyyin?") that his music was also subversive and full of mischief, and he will shake his head innocently. "We never made fun of anything. Maybe the Jets did -- '200 hellos and no answer,' 'He ordered coffee and didn't drink it' -- but we were very serious." Even the name of the group, which could be interpreted as poking fun at stiff official patriotism, was apparently chosen in perfect good faith: the entire world, says Hani Shenouda firmly, is indebted to Egyptian civilisation.
That song, 'Girls, please don't believe...' is originally a folk tune from Tanta, sung as the bride's trousseau is being carried to her husband's home. It covers 15 weeks, and ends in divorce: 'in the third week, girls, you'll be running to your mother-in-law...' and so on, including 'you'll be trekking to court...' Egyptian folklore, Shenouda declares, is very rational, very objective: "in the midst of all the happiness at the wedding, they're reminding the bride that this is the scenario, this is what's going to happen. They're showing her the other side of the moon -- 'don't think it's all like this, because it's like this too.' When Al-Masriyyin covered it, I changed the tune, and Salah Jahin (a genius wherever you put him) changed the words -- we kept the first line, but as we sang it, it was very optimistic, all about how marriage is really a wonderful thing. It was extremely successful because these are real meanings, wearing simple words that are just the right size for them. It could be understood anywhere in the world, not like 'I love that girl, she spoke to me; when my hands were tied, she spoke to me' -- so what? The beauty of something like that is in the pun, the sonority of the words in Arabic, that's all. It has no human meaning to it."
Shenouda was born in Tanta, in a setting both rural and urban, suspended between city and countryside. That is why he likes trees and greenery and twittering birds, of which there is little evidence in the small apartment/recording studio off Pyramids Street where we ring the doorbell until he wakes up. He eventually opens the door (still in pyjamas) and attempts to convince us (the struggle is brief and good-natured) that we are in fact an hour late, and that the time is now 12.00, not, as our watches would stubbornly have it, 11.03.
Tanta, at any rate, is also a town of mulids: no sooner has one finished than another is underway: Sidi Ahmed El-Badawi, Sitt Sabah, big mulids and small, celebrating figures both local and revered throughout the Muslim world. At the time when Shenouda was growing up, it thrived on religious tourism -- even if the expression was unknown in the middle of last century -- "and the peasants would sell the cotton and hold a mulid, sell the wheat and hold a mulid... It was very clever: they would get paid for the crops, come to Tanta, buy cloth or whatever and attend a mulid, for the baraka. I went to all these mulids, and I heard things there that affected me my whole life."
Shenouda wasn't keen on music though, back then: he liked drawing. His mother played the 'oud, listened to Umm Kulthoum, and so, having someone at home who was so talented, he turned his back on music in the conviction that he would never be half as good as her. Then in his last year of school he went into the piano room and struck a key. He discovered that a single gesture produced more than one sound, contrary to what he had been told. For a time, his parents were unable to convince him to leave the room at all. That is how it started, between Hani Shenouda and music.
His father was a pharmacist, and an open-minded man: "Get good grades in your final exams, and then you can study music if you want to, but you'll get nowhere if you don't work hard." Hani obeyed, then enrolled in Helwan University's department of music education, taught for five years, and entered the Conservatoire. He had already been in a band or two: the Quattro Amici, then the Petits Chats. The boy bands of the 1970s, they sang in English, French, Italian and sometimes Spanish. Shenouda is an unabashed apologist of "international" music, and implies it is in fact superior to its Oriental counterpart. "We all loved harmony, and the music of Abdel-Halim and Umm Kulthoum was monophonic. The singer sings a melody, the orchestra plays the same melody, they play the same note, qanun, tabla... I studied harmony and counterpoint at the Conservatoire. How could I not use that knowledge, how could I just do something monophonic when I started working in Arabic? I do the songs I like. I would get words and put them to music, and what I loved and had learned was polyphony. That is how Al- Masriyyin started."
Except that it almost didn't. The first production company Shenouda went to was not convinced, nor was the second. Songs in Arabic set to international music? No. "Well, then they called back, and we cut the album, and it was such a success... No one was as successful after that, until Amr Diab."
In retrospect, he feels that the group's success was just one of the many, many strokes of luck he, personally, has had. He is a lucky guy, extraordinarily lucky in fact. Once, when he was touring with the Petits Chats, the group had just arrived in Syria. There was not much available in the way of entertainment, and so Shenouda had decided to grow a mustache. It was splendidly luxuriant, and so huge that you could see it from behind. At the time, he wanted to buy a special keyboard -- he has always loved new instruments, and would peruse catalogues and album covers to find out what was available, and he would discover a new brand of electric keyboard, and send off to get it. So here was Hani, looking for a keyboard of a certain type, and he had heard you could find them in Lebanon. He was told to ask this Armenian, a singer at a nightclub, about it. He went to meet him, and no sooner had he walked in the door than he was swept off his feet and carried to the stage. There were many people there, and they were all applauding. It turned out they were holding a competition for the most beautiful moustache, and Hani had just won first prize -- which, as it happened, was a silver brush and comb especially for mustache grooming, but, perhaps more importantly given the mustache's ultimate fate, a return bus ticket to Beirut, and a cash award, by coincidence exactly half the price of the keyboard. Well, he had been planning to bargain the price down, because he didn't have the money, but he hopped on the bus to Lebanon, put his money on the table, and said "I'll take that, let's go."
Hani Shenouda smiles when he tells these stories, and his bright blue eyes are as devoid of sadness or nostalgia as any two eyes could be. He could be Bilbo Baggins, if Bilbo had favoured check shirts and corduroy trousers, or the Demys Roussos-inspired floaty caftans that Shenouda and the other Masriyyin wear on the cover of their Greatest Hits album. They are standing in a field, at sunset, the men sporting full beards, and all decked out in the white robes. Even then, back in the days when not everything was ironic, there must have been some element of tongue in cheek, no?
"We were always very serious, even if the words sometimes -- take 'Freedom, freedom, the world is freedom. You like summer shirts; I won't tell you they're too flimsy. I like country homes; don't tell me they're ridiculous. If you love me, untie me.' We were talking about women's issues a long time ago. This is something I want for my daughter, my wife -- I would have wanted it for my mother, if that had been possible. Listen: 'One day I had to start, to live my life, create myself. You were light, I was your shadow. I had to find out for myself -- the sea is blue, the birds are where they used to be... How else could I believe that happiness is just one word? I'll search, and read between the lines.' That's about being a full person. You can't tell me 'love me' if I'm your shadow. That's not love, it's just your shadow. You have to give me the right to be my own person so I can love you. That's from the album called 'Start Over' -- it came out maybe the day after Sadat was killed. That album is the very soul of Hani Shenouda."
One woman who was in high school when Al-Masriyyin were big remembers discovering a sense of self-worth thanks to their songs, of which so many were about self-respect and pride, even in the midst of romantic disappointment. And if another remembers mainly dancing in the living room to the video clip to "Girls, Don't Believe..." ("There were no video clips at the time!"), which featured Iman Younes as the caricaturally harassed wife and Hani Shenouda and Mamdouh Qassem in a Laurel-and-Hardy-style duo of insensitive and slovenly husband figures, that should not undermine the strength of the songs' political messages.
Hani Shenouda doesn't think that this is the point, though. Love is. "I did songs about love, and I don't think that before Al- Masriyyin love songs existed in Egypt. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. It was always about desertion: 'You're asleep, I'm awake; sleep, leave my lover's eyes...' That's masochism, not love. 'Two years waiting at the port...' Two years? I don't think I would spend two years standing there waiting for anyone, not even the most beautiful lady. I did do a song about betrayal, though -- 'And let me tell you, hell has a cheerful face...' I loved that song."
So that was the message: love is important, and equality is essential in love. Hence the refusal to countenance any clichés about suffering and loss. "As long as it's impossible for you to go back in time and fix the past, you shouldn't be thinking about it. It's useless. One concept that is present in every one of our songs is that you are making the future now. The present does not exist -- it's an illusion, except maybe grammatically. What you are doing, right now, is the future. That's all we do. Those who don't think in that way -- well, they're a little warped."
So for Al-Masriyyin, what made the future, at the end? What happened? Of course, Salah Jahin died. Tahsin Yalmaz, the bass guitar player, died. Mamdouh Qassem died. "One of two things happens to bands: music frustration, or death. You can't bring in new people -- the old members won't accept it, although I did replace Iman Younes with Mona Aziz, because Iman Younes came in one day and said 'if you want me to sing something, I'll sing it now, because my fiancé is waiting outside in the car and today is my last day as a singer.' She was making the future -- am I wrong? She had studied voice for seven years at the Conservatoire, but she gave that up -- she gave up a promising career in the brightest band in the history of Egyptian music, a band that changed the whole course of that history."
Surely this is something of an exaggeration? True, the group paved the way for many of today's shabab and 30-something pop superstars, made thinkable a seemingly impossible fusion -- but changed the course of music history? "You can't say 'lucky slipper, would that I were you,' and just move on effortlessly to 'Love you? No. Need you? Yes. With my heart, no. With my brain, yes. Often, yes, I miss you, true. But that doesn't mean I'll think of loving you one day, because you live in apathy.' That is a radical change," he insists. "Before us, it was all about unrequited love. Look at Qays and Laila -- they loved each other, they were going to get married, everything was fine. But it wasn't a love story -- he had a psychological problem. It's like Romeo and Juliet: the frame is hatred, and it chokes love. We sang about love, and the reasons for love, not about blame -- doomsday is now, I can't sleep, you're snoring... the end of all those songs should be 'go to hell,' because, pre- Masriyyin, that's what it was all about."
Still, one would think there was a limit to the number of songs about happiness, equality and fulfilment it is possible to hear without choking on self-satisfaction, and they did address other issues -- "social issues," as Hani Shenouda puts it.
There's "Why Isn't He Here?," for instance, which is about the twin plagues of traffic and people's nosiness. It's about this girl, who's waiting for her boyfriend ("or her husband, because what do I care? whose business is it?") and there are two cars circling around like birds of prey, and people looking at her: she's disgusted, why don't they leave her alone? But at the end, you hear a car pulling to a stop, and she gets in, because love is stronger, and must endure. There's another song: "Why are you crying? Regrets? What can I do? You're the one who chose him, and preferred him to me. Now you've lived with him, you can't stand him; you say I'm richer than him, because I have more love ..." -- that, explains Shenouda, is not about a married woman having an affair, it's a warning: things are not simple, you can't just marry for money and think you'll be able to put up with it. "Well, one day someone phoned me and said he had to come and visit me. He was a humble man, wearing a galabiya; he brought me a box of biscuits that his wife had made, because she had vowed that if they got married she would make me something with her hands. Her parents had wanted to marry her off to a rich man, and she was about to accept when 'Why Are You Crying?' came out. He sent her the tape, with the song underlined in red, and she listened to it all night. The next morning she refused her wealthy suitor and said she would only marry the man she loved."
Salah Jahin wrote the lyrics to several of their songs, which accounts for the political overtones of much of the Masriyyin's music (whether or not they were aware of these overtones is also open to debate). There were others: heavyweights, and many young unknowns, whom they brought in thanks to the weight of Salah Jahin's name. He was the spirit of Al-Masriyyin. He would come in to the studio every day, and they convinced him to sing on "Streets Are Stories."
Still, despite a brilliant formula, they did not have an easy time at first, if only because the group's name aroused some resentment in the Arab world. Egypt, it was felt, had departed from the pan-Arab consensus, and here were these shabab singing to Western music and emphasising their national identity. Hani Shenouda is contemptuous of such criticism, and just as impatient with attacks on the group's successors. The most popular young singers who appeared after Al-Masriyyin were described as pests. People lament the days of Umm Kulthoum: but that, he exclaims, was another generation. "Today, you have singers like Hakim who sell records throughout the Arab world, in Europe... But we want to kill them, we criticise their lyrics, instead of nurturing them. OK, forget they're people -- let's pretend they're trees, or goats!"
Anyway, the group's extraordinary popularity swept away any criticism the music establishment leveled at them. It seems all the stranger, then, that nothing similar has taken the gap that yawned open when Al-Masriyyin disappeared. The closest equivalent, today, would be Sha'ban Abdel-Rehim -- although, as a friend observes, that kind of music has also filled the gap that Sheikh Imam left. But youth music of the sort Al-Masriyyin made (by young people, for young people, about issues that concerned them) seems to have died in 1981, or shortly thereafter. The genre, like the era, is all but extinct -- quite literally, because it is almost impossible to find copies of the tapes now, and only one master of each album was ever cut. These masters, somehow, were destroyed or disappeared. Hani Shenouda remains very philosophical. "I am an observer of nature. I know what it means to plant a seed, reap the wheat, and burn the rest. Everyone will die. You have affected your society positively or negatively. And in Egypt collective work is difficult. We're bad at football; we're not brought up to teamwork. The great value of Al-Masriyyin was this: we were five people, working together."
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