Man on the street

Neither simple nor innocent, sha'bi music has been called everything from vulgar to revolutionary. Mohamed El-Assyouti traces the sha'bi tradition from grassroots popularity into modern commercial success
Sitting in a café in the working class district of Boulaq; walking down a side street in Bab Al-Sha'riya; taking a microbus down the hill from the Muqattam shanty towns to Sayeda Aisha or weaving through a raucous street wedding: you can't miss it. Listening to what the delivery man, the plumber or your car mechanic is humming -- it's not the so-called gil (generation) music, with easy lyrics about love and heartache and billboard-size posters of heart-throb singers; nor is it the timeless tunes of Umm Kulthoum or Abdel-Wahab, cherished, but inimitable.
It is the scandalous sha'bi (literally, folk) song. The protagonists: the homeless, the orphaned, the sickly, the unemployed. The themes, grounded in society's ills, are equally raw: friendship and betrayal, a fall from grace, a test of a parent's unconditional love. The upper echelons of society snub the sha'bi singer as tasteless or vulgar, and the media is happy to brand him a fool. Aside from the occasional rags-to-riches story, the sha'bi star has traditionally been left as the property of the masses, but all this may be changing.
Treated as a serious form, sha'bi music represents something truly Egyptian in character and stands apart from the highly commercialised entertainment business, which sanitises and packages songs and stars. Western influences bastardised the gil/shababi (youth-oriented) music over the last two decades, while in the past, Turkish and other foreign influences contributed to the foundation that the music of Umm Kulthoum and Abdel-Wahab was built on. The majority of sha'bi songs, however, are purely native.
The mawwal, melancholy in style, can readily be compared to the blues. An almost spoken ballad with spare accompaniment, the mawwal, like the blues, is characterised by a communion with the oppressed -- a working man's lament of humanity's shortcomings -- and both are loaded with politically and sexually subversive connotations. Perhaps most importantly, both favour live performance, during which singing can become highly improvisational, leading to numerous recordings of the same song in circulation.
THE STRANGE CASE OF SHAABAN: Currently the hottest sha'bi singer, Shaaban Abdel-Rehim has confounded critics and popular culture by soaring to national fame, largely because of advances in mass media and timely, provocative lyrics. The infamous former makwagi (a man who irons clothes) who unabashedly sings that he hates Israel has surpassed even the pillars of his genre in fame -- Shukuku, Adawiya, Hassan El-Asmar, to name a few. But who is Shaaban and what does his unexpected rise signify?
A microbus passenger claimed that people listen to Shaaban simply because he is "a lunatic straight out of an asylum who managed to find a producer." On a more analytical note, Ambassador Maher El-Kashef remarked that the quality of Shaaban's music is "probably the lowest, but his lyrics have noble meanings. Other singers just sing of how desperately in love they are." Mohamed Rakha, an entertainment agent who has been in the business of arranging weddings and private parties for 40 years, believes that Shaaban is paid his LE3,000-LE6,000 fee per party "for people to laugh at him."
But Shaaban cannot be dismissed as a simple commodity spoon-fed to an indiscriminate class of largely illiterate microbus drivers, street peddlers and café crowds. The Shaaban song, steeped in cultural and political references, is prohibitive and preachy, and yet reckless and hedonistic. Shaaban, perhaps, is to Egyptian pop culture what a John Waters film has so self-consciously become to Western culture: "an exercise in bad taste." As such, his sudden leap to fame reveals the hypocrisy and tastelessness prevalent in mainstream culture.
THE HIDDEN FORCE: One of the most potent and interesting components of the sha'bi song is its lyrics. As the "new wave" of sha'bi music has revealed, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of singers out there -- and there probably have been for decades. Yet one cannot really maintain that today's vocalists are by any means remarkable -- quite the opposite may be true. In fact, one could easily argue that -- aside from exceptions like Adawiya or Hassan El-Asmar -- vocals are perhaps the weakest element of sha'bi music.
And yet the musical accompaniment is not the most appealing aspect either. With the genuine mawwal in a current state of decline, and since most sha'bi tunes are heavily dependent on repetition (a characteristic that has invited comparisons to Western rap), the true appeal of a sha'bi song seems to be its lyrics. Whether one takes them seriously, makes a joke of them or dissects them on cultural or social operating tables is an individual prerogative that depends largely on personal upbringing and interest. The fact remains, however, that in this particular form of popular art, the lyricists, who enjoy precious little public attention, are the key producers of a tape's success. The singer is, after all, just a performer, a mere interpreter.
The words sung by Shaaban Abdel-Rehim have contributed the lion's share of his success, and Shaaban's stardom has earned him mention in most local and regional newspapers, who praise the straightforward character of his songs. But who wrote them? The man behind Shaaban is Islam Khalil, an Arabic teacher a primary school in Qanater. He began writing poetry when he was 12 and has written the lyrics for numerous songs in plays produced by the Ministry of Culture's General Organisation for Cultural Palaces, as well as others performed in state-owned theatres, including Bay Bay ya 'Arab (Bye Bye Arabs) and Al-Masyada (The Trap).
Though Shaaban's lyrics are written by Khalil, he maintains that the ideas behind his songs are his own. Whether Shaaban recognises the implications of the words he sings, however, remains an open question. Khalil's lyrics sometimes quote directly from main news headlines, and one of them even has Shaaban repeatedly mispronouncing almost nothing but the phrase "alawin al-akhbar" (news headlines).
Shaaban's popularity, in turn, reveals the flimsiness and superficiality of the mass media machine. The same song ends speaking of "the sweet girl Tata, who eats raw meat and has sweet potato for dessert." Seemingly disconnected and almost hallucinatory, the lyrics are open to interpretation -- unintentionally, perhaps, but powerful nonetheless. The slang expression "you eat my mind for dessert," which means: you are trying to fool me, comes to mind, possibly implying that the media is fooling the public.
SEND IN THE CLOWNS: Acclaimed director Dawoud Abdel-Sayed recently recruited Shaaban and Khalil to work on his new film Mukhbir, wa Muwatin wa Harami (A Police Agent, a Citizen and a Thief). The collaboration is yet another facet of the expanding Shaaban phenomenon, but Abdel-Sayed explains that he sought Khalil and Shaaban because he feels their work is imbued with an "innate street philosophy." Shaaban's songs are filled with biographical bits that have endeared him to the jobless and the destitute. He refers to having "slept on the sidewalk" and salutes police stations "especially that of Al-Sharabiya," where his family lived.
Cinema has made celebrities of many sha'bi singers, notably sha'bi icon Ahmed Adawiya. Once touched by fame, though, many singers have dismissed the role sha'bi music played in their rise to stardom. Hassan El-Asmar is often plagued by this claim, but Shaaban has tried to stave off criticism by using popular films as material for songs, all the while denouncing renegade sha'bi performers.
Evidently, there is no end to the love-hate relationship between the entertainment industry and the ever-marginalised sha'bi figure. The 1980s film Al-Keif (literally, a pleasurable habit) starred Abdel-Aziz as a hashish-smoking sha'bi singer who gets himself embroiled with a drug kingpin. Last year, Abdel-Aziz remixed the songs of Al-Keif for a commercially released album. In doing so, he became the very sha'bi character he had moralised against 15 years before.
TAUNTS AND WHISPERS: In the early 1990s, Shaaban's album Kadab ya Kheisha (Kheisha, You Liar!) became an instant hit. The title song defended Shaaban against his detractors, who had chastised him because his family trade was ironing clothes.
In the song, Shaaban argued that fann (literally art, but used to the mean the music scene) is full of craftsmen, claiming that Magdi Talaat was a barber, Adel El-Masri painted cars and Abdel-Basset Hammouda polished furniture. Hassan El-Asmar, the most famous of the lot, was "a wall painter." El-Asmar, who was later accused of commercialising sha'bi music by blending it with Westernized shababi music, complained to censor Hamdi Surour about the song. Surour imposed a ban on Shaaban's music and ordered the album pulled from the market. The song remained extremely popular, however, and survived through pirated copies.
For years, Shaaban went underground. In 1994, he earned a cameo with star Mahmoud Hemeida in Osama Fawzi's Afarit Al-Asphalt (Asphalt Devils), one of the two or three films considered by most critics as the best of the decade. Fawzi recalls that Shaaban's songs were such a taboo then that even the singer himself couldn't produce samples of his music since the market has been wiped clean by the censors. At a street wedding, where hashish is smoked openly, Shaaban plays the wedding singer who is joined by Hemeida, the protagonist, in the typical salutary call of all the guests, themselves widely comprised of microbus drivers -- Shaaban's number-one fans (also alluded to in the film's title). In a Nus Al-Dunya interview, Shaaban admitted that though one of his songs criticises bango (Egyptian marijuana), he sometimes smokes hashish when offered, and that all over Egypt, the ashqiaa (hooligans and outlaws) are his friends.
Eventually, after reconciling with his producer, Shaaban released an album titled Sadiq ya Kheisha (Kheisha, You're Truthful), a reconciliatory work in which Shaaban makes peace with the censor and his detractors.
THE TOWN CRIER: Liberated from his virtual imprisonment underground, Shaaban has enjoyed a second burst of popularity. He has released several albums over the past couple of years, each with at least one catchy hit and all true to the same musical composition that has become his trademark -- addressing current issues in a straight AA-BB-CC rhyme scheme.
He has admonished the widening gap between classes, told kids to stop wearing bracelets and necklaces and go find a job on the Toshka project and warned against the rise in incidents of wives killing their husbands, kids who worship the devil and the widespread smoking of bango, cigarettes and shisha. He also sings of the pollution of the Nile, the fated EgyptAir flight, the Al-Aqsa Intifada victims and declares that he loves the president, the foreign minister, and Arafat, while he hates Israel and Ehud Barak.
Not surprisingly, Shaaban's intuition and wit never fail to duplicate the misogyny and homophobia prevalent in many levels of the society. He dedicates many of his lines to shunning girls wearing tight pants and boys wearing bandannas, calling this cross-dressing and saying it "prevents recognising Sayed from Sally" -- a swift allusion to the transvestite Sayed, who became a media curiosity in the late 1980s.
THE MIRROR INSIDE THE MIRROR: Shaaban takes his cue from the man on the street, echoing the talk in cafés, in microbuses and picking up popular themes in the mass media, like campaigns against smoking. Shaaban's criticism, however, is knowingly empty -- a heightened image of the media's superficiality, highlighted by Shaaban's blatant disregard for the things he preaches (he smokes cigarettes and hashish and wears heavy gold chains). His songs are an exaggerated replica of the hollow morality in the media version of public opinion. The shallow and self-indulgent nature of sha'bi music is in fact an amplified echo of its mainstream counterpart.
The question, of course, remains: where is the sha'bi song going? Nothing surpasses the subversive potential of music and lyrics that spring from a culture deemed unrefined, backward or even shameful. The illiteracy and vulgarity of the singer are a licence to circumvent censorship and thus sexual and political double entendres make their way into society unchecked, sung by countless fans as they go about their business and further reproduced in films and on stage.
In the early 1970s, when Naguib Mahfouz's recently banned novel Awlad Haritna (The Children of Our Alley) was nowhere to be found, the public was being inundated with Adawiya's "Isah, Indah, Imbu" -- regarded by many as the epitome of bad taste. And almost a decade ago, when the censor gagged Shaaban and banned Kheisha, it never prevented anybody from singing the controversial song, even on national TV shows. Today, Shaaban is back, as bawdy and jocular as ever. He survived the pits -- for the majority of society he is the pits. While intellectual and artistic repression pervades, the sha'bi song, with its winking references to the sins of a people, will remain an outlet for pent-up frustration in a class-stratified society.
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