LAUGHTER IN THE DARK

An Egyptian journalist offers a brief, pungent dispatch from the vibrant youth music scene pushing against authoritarian dictates in her country.

A participant in the protest movement that convulsed Cairo during the Arab Spring of 2011, El Rashidi, the author of The Battle for Egypt and Chronicle of a Last Summer, has been a keen observer of the alarming crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt since Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi took power two years later. The author follows several popular young hip-hop artists who continue to push against governmental boundaries and express ongoing revolutionary dissent. In a country where 60% of the population (65 million) is under the age of 29, the Arabic genre of hip-hop known as “mahraganat,” borrowing from American artists like Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Eminem, and Jay-Z, has been thriving. Marwan Pablo, one mahraganat artist who emerged from the street scene in the strictly conservative Islamic city of Alexandria, peppers his work with swear words and references to alcohol and had to go underground for a spell. As the author notes, he raps deeply emotional lyrics about “rising above the circumstances that plagued young men like himself, to buy himself freedom.” Expressing a general angst of disenfranchised young men, Cairo rapper 3enba became so popular that the government issued him a “syndicate” to perform, thus holding him on a tight leash. El Rashidi traces the beginnings of this musical trend in cybercafes, and she clearly shows the gravity of official condemnation and suppression of the work as blasphemy. The author’s interest in writing about this subject matter stems from her disappointment in her millennial generation, which, in the face of oppression, wilted. “These singers,” she writes, “have commanded my attention, even envy at first, precisely for their lack of inhibition—for their fierce assertion of independent, nonconformist identities….They did not cave in, as my generational peers did. They do not swallow their words.”

A vivid journalistic report.