A multimodal analysis of selected Cairokee songs of the Egyptian revolution and their representation of women

Abstract

This article is an investigation into the different semiotic resources used in three music videos (MVs) of the January 2011 Egyptian revolution by the youth band Cairokee. The three videos (“Voice of Freedom”; “Oh Square”; and “Stand your Ground”), recorded at different periods during the first year of the revolution, portray the shifting sentiments and emotional states of the protesters from euphoria at the beginning of the revolution to disappointment and nostalgia several months later, to a tension between dejection and resoluteness by the end of the first year. I argue here that a full appreciation of the layers of meaning of the three MVs and their visual design can best be established through a multimodal analysis as opposed to focusing only on the lyrical and the musical compositions. Such an analysis is significant as the MVs integrate a number of semiotic modes such as still and moving images, frame, camera angle, spatial organisation in the composition of images, and the gaze, facial expressions and gestures of individuals to create meaning. In my analysis, I use the theoretical framework proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen in their work on visual design and multimodality.