Cleaning up shaʿbi

Music and class-cultural divides in cairo

Bibliographic Data

ID2402874
AuthorsSophie Frankford (0000-0001-5194-0711, King’s College London, London, UK, corresponding author)
Year2024
Publication date2024-11-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1466-1381 • E-ISSN: 1741-2714
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14661381241302530
OpenAlexW4404717005
LanguageEN
References cited21

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

Aesthetics · Art · Class (philosophy · Ethnography · Media studies · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Computer Science · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Urban and Rural Development Challenges · Artificial Intelligence

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Open DOIOpen Access