Al Shaab Yurid Khamsa Guinea Raseed الشعب يريد خمسة جنيه رصيد (The People Want Five Pounds Phone Credit) Sadat & Alaa Fifty Cent

This is the first translation we’re publishing of a song in an emerging genre in Egypt known as mahraganat. Literally meaning “festivals,” mahraganat is a style of music that emerged out of music played at street weddings and other celebrations in Cairo’s lower-class neighborhoods. Featuring aggressive beats, shaabi-style keyboard licks, and raw lyrics chanted through auto-tune, it captured the frenetic bustle and in-your-face chaos of Cairo’s popular neighborhoods in a way that the slick Arab pop of Amr Diab and Tamer Hosny never could.

For a while in the early 2010s, mahraganat music was paradoxically everywhere and nowhere in Egypt. Blaring from what seemed like half the taxis, microbuses, motorcycles and tok toks in the country, it was fast becoming the soundtrack to Egypt’s pulsing urban life. At the same time, however, it was banned from the airwaves and denied official recognition due to its perceived vulgarity, and only circulated on USB drives and bootleg CDs. Although in recent years Egypt’s music and film industries have begun to co-opt and cash in on this musical trend, it still retains underground associations and is somewhat less than fully respectable.

Given the fact that mahraganat first came on the scene in the years right before Egypt’s Arab Spring revolution and represented a lower-class aesthetic and perspective that the governing elites preferred to sweep under the rug, there has been a lot of speculation about the political valences of this musical phenomenon. In reality, though, very few mahraganat songs comment on politics at all, and the genre’s major stars have mostly steered clear from political affiliations.

The song we’ve translated here is a partial exception. Adapting the slogan of Egypt’s 2011 Revolution (al-shaab yurid isqat al-nizam – “the people want to topple the regime”), the mahragan “Al Shaab Yurid Khamsa Guinea Raseed” expresses an altogether more quotidian demand: “the people want five Egyptian pounds of phone credit.” Although this titular line brings a certain irreverence to the theme, the song as a whole shares in the optimism of the post-revolution period and exhorts its audience to help build a better future for the country. At the same time, it expresses its aspirations only in general terms, and does not align itself with any specific political platform.