Cleaning up shaʿbi: Music and class-cultural divides in cairo

Abstract

Egyptian shaʿbi music is typically positioned as a somewhat vulgar style produced and consumed by the working-class masses. But in practice, numerous individuals have long been attempting to sanitise it to appeal to audiences deemed more elite. This article, based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork with musicians and producers in Cairo, investigates how this mainstream, mass-mediated, commercially successful version of shaʿbi, known as ‘clean shaʿbi’ ( shaʿbi nadif) is produced and distributed. I explore how three different cultural brokers try to clean up shaʿbi in distinctive ways. I argue that their success does not reveal a straightforward crossing of class-cultural divides, as it might at first appear; in each instance boundaries are in some ways crossed, and in other ways reinforced. Cleaning up shaʿbi does not necessarily benefit the musicians: the processes through which their music is sanitised and mediated are often exploitative, serving to entrench pre-existing social inequalities.