![]() ![]() The songs are also common at cabarets, after-hours haunts for bellydancing and drinking, patronized only by the most formidable party animals and debauched souls in this predominantly Muslim country. The songs play a central role in wedding celebrations, where friends and family will gather to fête a newlywed couple over an ecstatic night of feasting and dancing. In Cairo, you can hear a syncopated shaabi rhythm called the maqsoom thumping out of microbuses, taxi cabs, tuk-tuks, and Nile party boats. ![]() Shaabi songs are sung in colloquial Arabic - the everyday spoken language, not the classical Arabic mastered by Egypt’s great midcentury diva Oum Kalthoum. Shaabi comes from the Arabic word for “people,” and the term refers to the culture of the common man and the street. It’s an album of perpetual motion, always slightly off balance, seemingly ready to combust at any moment. On every track, the beat drives and the melodic parts cycle in and out, creating hypnotic atmospheres and eerie dissonances. The songs feature samples of Egyptian keyboardists and artists, playing the same style of music that I often heard booming out over the Nile, and the album captures the same dizzying effect I became familiar with in Cairo. Over four tracks, musicians Raed Yassin and Paed Conca merge elements of contemporary classical composition - in the style of composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich - with the pulsing keyboards and driving percussion of Egyptian shaabi (“popular”) music. I think of my time on the houseboat when I listen to Doomsday Survival Kit (Akuphone, 2018), the new album by Praed, a duo from Beirut. The kooky keyboard pitch-bends and synth-flute riffs of Mohamed Abdel Salam’s instrumental hit “Mizmar Abdel Salam” were always audible somewhere in the near distance. All day and night, interspersed between calls to prayer over mosque PAs, I could hear the driving rhythms and Autotuned hooks of local artists like Figo, Sadat, and Oka wi Ortega. Couples, teenagers, and tourists would hire the boats out by the hour, and captains would provide onboard entertainment by blasting music at top volume from scratchy speakers. The scrappy vessels were fitted with outboard motors, decorated in LED lights and Egyptian and Saudi flags (all the better to attract tourists from the Gulf). ![]() Resting on floaters, the structure often creaked and swayed to the currents, while the balcony offered a front-row view to passing party boats. My three-bedroom apartment was on the second floor of a wooden building berthed on the banks of the Nile. FOR MUCH OF 2017, I lived on a houseboat in Cairo, the capital of Egypt. ![]()
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