Sif Safaa: New Music From the Middle East
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Cairo remains the dominant city of the Middle East, so it’s not surprising that most of the music on the collection is Egyptian. The country’s pop music was significantly transformed in the 60s, as the nation faced industrialization and the Nasser era came to a conclusion. Nasser had stressed Pan-Arab unity, but the masses who flocked to the cities for work ended up being exploited and ghettoized. In response, the music called shaabi (“the people”) was born to celebrate the identity and experience of the workers. Building upon folk motifs, the movement introduced a new rhythmic sexuality and grew away from traditional Egyptian music while retaining its instruments, most notably the oud (the classic lutelike instrument with a piercing, melancholy sound), violins, and percussive instruments like the duff, cigat, and riq, all hand drums loosely resembling the shape of a tambourine.
Until the 1970s, Egypt’s greatest star was Umm Kalthum, whose sway over the citizenry matched that of heads of state. But the rarefied, ornate songs of Kalthum and her contemporaries often got their lyrics from classical love poetry, while shaabi music employed more daring rhythms and lyrics that emphasized the rigors of everyday life. An excellent 1990 compilation of Egyptian pop called Yalla–Hitlist Egypt (Mango) provides a superb, lucid delineation of this transformation. With Kalthum’s death in 1975, shaabi ascended as a true pop music form, with no single star towering above all others.
