Let’s meet music of the Egyptian “working class” with our dear friend Hakim.
In the 1970s, when recordable cassettes made popular music accessible to people all over the world who had little money, several genres of “cassette culture” music developed around the world–punk music in England, for example, rai in Algeria, Jamaican reggae and, in Egypt, shaabi (translated as “music of the common people.”) Today’s famous shaabi singers, like Abdel Hakim Abdel Samad Kamel — Hakim! — continue this tradition by using their lyrics to skewer politicians and confront social problems in an artistically direct way. Watch Hakim wow an audience — delightfully, with the aid of bubbles.
