In mid-2012, just one year after Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's (r. 1981–2011) monumental ouster, seemingly everyone in Egypt was talking about politics. It was the year of Egypt's first presidential election, in which citizens were meant to elect their leader for the first time after over 50 years of military dictatorship.
Yet I was struck by the number of artists, especially, who were making it their mission to avoid the political. I found this avoidance to be more than an artistic rebelliousness or aversion to trendiness; rather, it stemmed from a painful realisation that the ordinary politics of discursive critique and public protest had already failed. These artists critiqued the flourishing, at the time, of artistic expression that espoused an overt political ideology. Songs that doubled as protest chants and that directly addressed the failings of political leaders, for instance, proliferated during and immediately after the 2011 revolution. In the words of one friend, a 33-year-old bass player and ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) rock/metal musician,
It's very important: if art cannot convey, imply a political message then no fucking way [laughing] we can deliver the message. With our music, what we want to say politically is: okay, we want a country that is this relaxed, and this organized, and this beautiful … if we couldn't do this with pure music, pure music, then okay people can talk forever. (emphasis added)
For him, politics in the form of discursive critique was just idle ‘talk.’ He favoured instead what he called ‘pure music’, music without political lyrics and often without lyrics at all.
As Egypt moved from revolution against military dictatorship back to military dictatorship in 2013, ‘pure’ music became not only a countercurrent but seen by some as the most viable option. Prominent revolutionary leader and independent musician Ramy Essam perhaps best summarised these sentiments when he told Tom Rollins of al-Monitor, ‘Of course I want people back out in the street chanting against the system, but our best option now is art’ (Rollins Reference Rollins2014).
These statements suggest the belief that ‘art’ can continue revolutionary action both in the face of overwhelming powerlessness and in ways that ordinary politics, which I take to mean public protest and discursive critique, cannot. One artist likewise critiqued the overt politicisation of art as necessarily involving a hierarchal relationship: those in a position of relative power use the arts under the guise of spreading ‘awareness’ or ‘enlightenment’ to try to convince others to act in certain ways. Speaking of his own street arts projects in contrast, he told me that, ‘we are doing art, not awareness, not enlightenment, not anything like those big words. We are doing art, and art has its own magic. This is what art is. You can pass anything you want through art.’ The privileging of ‘art’ over ‘politics’ as a ‘magical’ solution to political failure indicates a privileging of the ineffable as the most effective – and just – way to produce social change.
My goal is not to decide whether Egyptian DIY music is in fact a magical force that produces social change. As Simon Frith argues, ‘The significance of magic is that people believe in it’ (1981, p. 159). Instead, I analyze why the ineffable is believed to be a more utopian form of politics. In post-revolutionary Egypt, musicians experienced hearing independent music in the public street to be a type of healing ‘therapy’ that could form inexplicable senses of community. This is because musicians treated musical experience as largely subconscious – it was ‘magical’ precisely because it was an affective experience that supposedly pre-empted cultural or ideological interpretation. This community formed, however, through the marked exclusion of the working-class public culture already dominant in public space. Significantly, because musicians considered sonic experience to be an inexplicable, subconscious phenomenon beyond their control, they viewed the working-class street audience as the primary agents of their own exclusion. Mobilising discourses of ‘magic,’ then, is ultimately a means of absolving the speaker from perpetuating social and ideological divisions, which, in the Egyptian case, some attribute to the revolution's ultimate failure. I argue, then, that mobilising magic is a particularly positioned solution to political failure that obscures the relations of power it perpetuates.
Scholars and activists in a variety of fields/contexts have looked to the ineffable as an alternative way of acting politically, because they believe that it bypasses relations of power by engaging the senses directly. Egyptian independent musicians’ approach resembles what feminist theorist Lauren Berlant calls ‘post-public sphere politics’, for instance. Looking at the waning of the American dream in the USA, she describes what she calls the ‘desire for the political’ in which artist-activists bypass the normal public sphere of discursive critique and protest while still seeking, nonetheless, to maintain its political potential (Berlant Reference Berlant2011, p. 230). These artistic practices eschew classic discursive communication in favour of the ‘visceral immediacy’ that such communication rationalises, inducing ‘new sensual routes for political potentiality’ (Berlant Reference Berlant2011, p. 229). This thus mobilises what Berlant calls ‘political affect’, in which ‘practices of politics might be invented that do not yet exist’ (Berlant Reference Berlant2011, p. 229). Similarly, some young Egyptian artists consider the arts ‘the best option’. They believe that the arts involve an intersubjective process that act as a sort of ‘therapy’ have fractured can cultivate public community without fuelling the social hierarchies and ideologies that fractured post-revolution Egyptian society. This sensorial, pre-cognitive approach to politics holds such wide international currency in part because it emerges from a view of the ineffable as a seemingly universal autonomous object, a largely biological, pre-cultural phenomenon that pre-empts conscious interpretation or cultural specificity (see Massumi Reference Massumi2002).
There is a long and complex discussion among scholars pertaining to the nature of affect as pre-subjective ‘raw material’ or as necessarily already situated within a web of socio-cultural meaning. Space does not permit me to reproduce a thorough account of this debate here.Footnote 1 With most scholarly approaches viewing affect as either a pre-cultural or a culturally-situated phenomenon, there has recently been calls to consider how these two aspects are instead intertwined (Becker Reference Becker2004; Hofman Reference Hofman2015; Gill Reference Gill2017). For the purposes of this article, I define ‘affective magic’ as the political utilisation of the ambiguous space between the pre-cultural and cultural aspects of sonic experience. Considering both of these aspects together ethnographically demonstrates why this ‘politics in emergence’ falls short of its utopian aims.
Before examining these practices, it must be stated at the outset that discussing notions of magic in an Egyptian context must be done with caution. Orientalist longings and fascinations have long viewed Arabs and Muslims through a Western gaze that associates ‘the Orient’ with enchantment, exotic beings and remarkable experiences. As Edward Said has famously argued, the concept of the ‘Orient’ was a European invention manifesting what they considered ‘exotic’ or in opposition to themselves (Said Reference Said1978, pp. 1–2). In many ways, Egypt, with its ancient architecture, language and monuments, has been a central site in this imaginary (Muhlestein Reference Muhlestein2004). Rather than only a bygone colonial fantasy, however, associating ‘the East’ with the unfamiliar and magical is powerfully operative today. In their contemporary writings, Arab artists and intellectuals have often carried the burden of continually pushing back against the persistence of orientalist narratives (as only a few recent examples see Racy Reference Racy2016; El Zein Reference El Zein2016; Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2013; Zaru Reference Zaru2017).
As ethnomusicologist and preeminent scholar of Arab music A.J. Racy notes, however, music's ability to ‘charm’ is familiar in the West. It appears, for instance, in Greek mythology when Orpheus uses the lute to charm the gods of the underworld (Racy Reference Racy2016, p. 200; see also Goodwin Reference Goodwin1986). Musicologists Wilson, Buelow and Hoyt have likewise demonstrated that affect was a concern of Western music theorists as early as the late 15th century (Wilson et al. Reference Wilson, Buelow and Hoyt2011). And, as Frith's study of 1970s rock music similarly shows, the view of music as ‘magical’ still operates in more contemporary Western genres (Frith Reference Frith1981). ‘The East's’ particular association with magic in the Western imagination, then, has more to do with the West's strategic self-positioning vis-à-vis its others. It has allowed the Occident to position itself in contrasting terms of progress and reason, for instance, relegating the East to a supposedly premodern, bygone way of life (Racy Reference Racy2016, p. 202; Said Reference Said1978).
Given this troubling history, approaching conceptions of magic in this context must be done with care. I spend time explicating Arab aesthetic ideologies on the ineffable nature of listening not to further ‘other’ musicians in Egypt but instead to show exactly what these musicians are discursively positioning themselves in contrast to. Further unsettling notions of Arab/Muslim essential ‘difference’, DIY musicians’ eclectic aesthetic and ideological influences likewise manifest in the international nature of the music they perform. DIY music is made by urban Egyptian youth who, marginalised from mainstream media and production outlets, use low-budget home studios and Internet software to produce and disseminate innovative music forms. Since it is delineated by production process rather than musical genre, it encompasses a variety of styles. This essay focuses on two loosely conceived approaches to DIY music that are deeply intertwined with class relations in Egypt.Footnote 2 The first is referred to locally as ‘independent music’, al-mazīka al-mustaqilla, or simply by the English word ‘independent’. It is primarily associated with middle-class youth who may draw from Arab art music aesthetics and diverse genres including rock, hip-hop, jazz, electronic and Nubian to name only a few.Footnote 3 It is mostly performed in private or in cultural institutions (NGOs and foreign state institutions) not affiliated with the Egyptian state (see Rizk Reference Rizk, Rizk and Shaver2010). The second is known as mahraganat, a style newly emerging in the early 2000s that is strongly associated with working-class male youth. It draws heavily from electronic music, hip-hop and urban Egyptian popular music (sha'bi) and is a style that is already ubiquitous in urban spaces.Footnote 4
Rather than perpetuating orientalist notions of Arab/Muslim fundamental ‘difference’, the DIY musicians examined here can be viewed as drawing from rock, jazz, hip-hop and avant-garde influences as much as ones typically read as specifically ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim’. In other words, musicians entwine various ideologies on the ineffable nature of listening, expressing a universalism more in line with the aesthetics and values of their social positions and generation. This essay, then, demonstrates the malleability of the concept of ‘magic’ to entwine seemingly disparate currents and the ways it can empower while obscuring the very relationships of power it enacts. It thus seeks to avoid a romanticisation of the ineffable by teasing out the tension – or perhaps, more importantly, the compatibility – between the cultural and pre-cultural currents of sonic affective experience as they are mobilised in actual practice.
The ineffable qualities of listening and performing
The way independent musicians understand their affective practice as ‘pre-cultural’ and ‘universal’ often lies in contrast to the ways the ineffable has typically been treated in the region as deeply rooted in cultural and geographical specificity. In other words, the inexplicable has long been strongly associated with performing music and listening in the Arab world (Dols Reference Dols and Savage-Smith2004, p. 88). In contrast to a Western privileging of vision, for instance, listening in dominant strands of Islamic thought has held a privileged position over other faculties. In this view, ideas both secular and sacred are acquired through hearing. Hearing, or sama’, implies an interiorisation (acquisition) of knowledge (During et al. Reference During, Baumann, Bröcker and Fujie2010, pp. 552–3). In more mystical currents of Islamic practice, especially, sama’ is believed to elevate one to a higher state of consciousness, bringing the listener in union with God (During et al. Reference During, Baumann, Bröcker and Fujie2010, p. 554; Shannon Reference Shannon2004; Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006; Shiloah Reference Shiloah1995, p. 40; Kapchan Reference Kapchan2009). Anthropologist Charles Hirschkind's study of the Islamic resurgence in Egypt demonstrates the continued primacy of sama’ among some urban Egyptian Muslims. Listening to Islamic sermons on cassette tape, for instance, serves as a sort of ‘ethical therapy’ in contemporary daily life because hearing is believed to bypass cognitive functioning, going straight to the senses to cultivate ethical dispositions. In this view, Islamic preachers have not traditionally been authoritative figures, but mere channellers of divine messages – it is up to the agency of the listener to hear, and thus embody, divine truths (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006). In this tradition, the ineffable is not understood as pre-cultural but divine. Discursively distancing themselves from this lineage, the majority of DIY musicians in the realms of both independent and mahraganat musics are markedly secular in political outlook and actively alarmed by the Islamic resurgence as a political force, which they believe to be stifling of free and creative expression.Footnote 5
Many DIY musicians likewise distance themselves from the language of affective transformation used in the secular realm of Arab traditional music. Tarab, commonly translated in English as ‘musical ecstasy’, refers both to a genre of urban art music (al-musiqa al-‘arabiyya) and to the enchanting effect music has on performers and listeners (Racy Reference Racy2003, pp. 5–6). Manifesting through a feedback loop, the performer's transformed emotional state that results from exploring pitch, rhythm and timbre is conferred upon the audience, whose expressive feedback during the performance further heightens the performer's own altered state (Racy Reference Racy, Nettl and Russell1998). A related concept, saltanah, is ‘the “magic” that momentarily lifts the artist to a higher ecstatic plateau and empowers him or her to engender tarab most effectively’ (Racy Reference Racy2003, p. 120).
In these accounts, music (or its vibrations) is sometimes attributed with having its own agency. Certain melodic modes are believed to ‘impose’ themselves at certain times of day in ways described as ‘mystifying and compelling’ (Racy Reference Racy1991, p. 13). Saltanah, for instance, is attributed to forces, such as the cosmos, outside the artist's control. Performers sometimes report being compelled toward certain melodic modes (maqamat) based on the position of the stars (Racy Reference Racy2003, p. 139). Such accounts suggest a sort of universality in the sense that they treat music as a pre-cultural, autonomous object with an ability to act ‘on its own’; at the same time, however, the privileged position of the affective is widely considered a defining characteristic of Arab musical aesthetics.
With regards to the ineffable nature of music and listening, it is clear that the sacred and secular domains just mentioned are not distinct spheres but deeply intertwined (see also Gill Reference Gill2017, p. 68).Footnote 6 More significantly for my purposes here, Arab/Islamic philosophies of listening are likewise not entirely distinct from interpretations of musical experience elsewhere. To provide only a few examples, musical astrology is not unique to Arab-Islamic belief but exists in a number of belief systems, including classical philosophy in which the ancient Greeks similarly viewed music as a type of cosmic therapy (Racy Reference Racy2003, p. 4).Footnote 7 As a more contemporary example, some prominent Black avant-garde musicians performing in New York in the 1960s and 1970s used a language of ‘energy’ and ‘vibration’ as part of their radical music practice (Baraka Reference Baraka1968 [2010]; Heller Reference Heller2016). In more ‘mainstream’ American currents, 1990s public anxiety regarding the relationship between heavy metal music and anger, depression, violence and/or suicide likewise demonstrates the latent belief that music can have profound emotional and psychological effects on individuals, and especially on vulnerable populations such as children. Exploring a variety of cultural contexts around the world, prominent ethnomusicologist Judith Becker has argued that musical practices leading to altered states of consciousness are ‘universal’, with all societies having some kind of ceremonial or ritualised practice (Becker Reference Becker2004, p. 1). What these distinct yet related phenomena suggest are varying degrees of desirability for interpreting sonic experience as affective depending on particular histories, contexts and relations of power. Whereas there is a long history of interpreting a variety of Arab musical/sonic styles through affective experience, it is only somewhat recently that scholars writing in English have begun to take seriously the affective nature of listening and performing in Western contexts (see for example Frith Reference Frith1981; Gray Reference Gray2013; McCann Reference McCann2013; Siddall and Waterman Reference Siddal and Waterman2016). Such recent scholarship demonstrates the fallacy of a hard East/West dichotomy with regards to the affective nature of musical experience.
Yet this dichotomy with regard to the nature of listening is often upheld in accounts of Arab music, with Western influence being strongly associated with music's affective decline. In comparing contemporary Arab music with that of the early 20th century, for instance, it is a common assumption that its ecstatic nature has waned as a result of modernisation efforts, the influence of Western popular music and neoliberal reforms. As the story goes, with the changing of popular tastes, recording technologies and political/economic influences, so too did the small ensembles deemed most suitable for ṭarab fall out of style in favour of larger, more orchestral ones that offered less improvisation to a supposedly more passive audience (see Racy Reference Racy1977; el-Shawan Reference El-Shawan1980, Reference El-Shawan1982, Reference El-Shawan1984). Social and political changes also transformed the nature of performance from an event that happened regularly in open street cafes and markets to the more private realm of venues and official institutions (van Nieuwkerk Reference van Nieuwkerk1995). Likewise, new recording technologies also put mediated distance between performers and audiences, limiting the opportunity for an improvised feedback loop and for extended improvisation (Racy Reference Racy1977; el-Shawan Reference El-Shawan1982).
These gradual transformations stemmed from state-led efforts to ‘modernise’ and ‘rationalise’ society that began in the 19th century and intensified in the 20th as the urgency to compete with Western dominance increased. Trends toward more superficial listening practices are especially considered to have intensified following Egypt's neoliberal restructuring, known locally as al-infitah, ‘opening’, in the 1970s. The early 1980s marked the emergence of Arab pop music produced by multinational music companies such as Rotana that would come to dominate the Egyptian market. These songs rely heavily on electronic sounds neatly packaged into three- to five-minute tracks that afford little room for melodic exploration or improvisation.
It is in part this ‘loss’ of the ineffable that has allowed it to seem so revolutionary – so utopian – in the present moment. As Hirschkind reminds us, modernisation is an impartial and incomplete process. Although it has transformed in some ways the terrain upon which listening takes place, it has also opened new spaces for alternative practices (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006, p. 32). The example of Egyptian DIY musical activism demonstrates that some young musicians today use new technologies, Western musical influences and electronic sounds in order to affect listeners and in particular ways. As the next sections will demonstrate, it may not be that contemporary Arab music is entirely less affective but that the language and ideologies used to give meaning to musical experience have transformed from the more ‘localised' to that which is read today as ‘universal', not only to meet the needs of contemporary realities but also to stake certain claims to power.
Affective magic as healing in conditions of powerlessness
Thirty-one-year-old Sammy Sayed, the lead singer and creator of the band Procession Towards the Unknown based in Cairo, considers his music to be a form of ‘art therapy’. The band's performances are held in the small, intimate spaces typical of independent music, and feature live art (usually painting) and uninterrupted group improvisation. The band only performs at most once a month – the night of the full moon – because on this night Sayed believes the ‘energy’ is ‘right’. For each performance, the band comprises completely new members (beside Sayed and the keyboardist). They do not rehearse beforehand, using the course of the performance to ‘find themselves’. Sayed's vocal lines are less melodic than they are rhythmic and timbral. He often performs vocables, clicks and drones, and sings in what he calls ‘ancient languages’. Attending a handful of their performances between 2015 and 2016, Sayed often closed the performance by asking his audience, ‘how did that make you feel?’
Talking with me about his approach to music as a form of ‘therapy’, Sayed told me that he often goes into a deep state of trance during performances and cannot remember what he did. Describing this experience, he went on to say,
We can use our mind and our body as a tool to channel stuff, not like spirits and stuff to start talking in tongues, which I have no idea if that is real or not. I believe in the subconscious mind so much as the link to ideas and inspirations … I believe that I am channeling, not just me, all of us as musicians, we are channeling not from a spirit [said in a mocking tone] … we are channeling the thought forms and the energies that are left hanging around us.
In his performance practice and discourse, Sayed engages multiple epistemologies of listening. He views his performances as a form of ‘art therapy’ in which the musician is a mere ‘channeler’ of ‘energies’ and ‘thought forms’ already in circulation. In his view, listening is a practice that links the human with the cosmos. Yet he uses a markedly different vocabulary from that of the Arab/Islamic traditions described above. Mobilising English words such as ‘energy’ and subtly mocking belief in ‘spirits’, he positioned himself positively within a seemingly more modernist discourse, attributing his experience not to emotion or the occult but to pre-cultural, subconscious ‘thought’.
‘Spirits’ or jinn are fundamental to Islamic cosmology. Unlike in pagan and Christian ideologies that have attributed misfortune to the work of evil suprahuman agents such as demons, jinn in contrast are not entirely evil or inhuman but a third category of being. They are often whimsical and are even attributed with inspiring musicians and poets (Farmer Reference Farmer1929 [1973], p. 7; see also Dols Reference Dols and Savage-Smith2004, p. 89; El-Zein Reference El-Zein2009, p. xv). In cases when jinn do negatively affect the human world, zar is a musical practice that can heal the afflicted through inducing trance. In this transnational practice that extends from the Persian Gulf to North and sub-Saharan Africa, jinn are not ‘exorcised’ but reconciled with their human host via drummed and sung music and dance that leads to a state of trance (El Hadidi Reference El Hadidi2016). Often coinciding with the anxieties of major life-cycle events (puberty, marriage, birthing, menopause), scholars attribute trance-inducing rituals such as zar to experiences of powerlessness (Boddy Reference Boddy1989; Morsy Reference Morsy1993; El Hadidi Reference El Hadidi2016). Not only limited to an Islamic context, the turn to the ineffable coincides with what scholars have found in instances of powerless and precarity in a variety of cultural contexts, including in the West (see for example Taylor Reference Taylor2001; Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann2004).Footnote 8
Although belief in jinn today remains an important way that some Egyptians make sense of the contemporary world, for others it has come to have negative associations. State modernisation efforts and Islamic fundamentalists have worked together in attempts to do away with what it views as a ‘premodern’ and ‘unorthodox’ practice, rendering those who continue to engage zar to be associated with lack of ‘proper’ education, be it Islamic or secular-modernist. By using the terminology of ‘energies’ and ‘thought forms’, Sayed distanced himself from the practices surrounding jinn and thus enacted a sensibility more in line with a cosmopolitan and educated middle class. At the same time, however, his musical practice primarily centred around transformations in feeling and cognition that he understood to be a form of healing. This healing was achieved through the subconscious. Through singing in clicks, tongues and ‘ancient languages’, he accessed a pre-linguistic, pre-cultural realm. He told me that connecting with others through the subconscious helped him and others ‘feel better’ in a society that he largely experienced as ‘depressed’.
Feelings of depression and powerlessness in Egypt intensified after the 2011 revolution when the Egyptian state went back to a military regime only two years later in 2013. The ‘new’ regime of military-general-turned-president Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi is largely regarded as more repressive than that of its ousted predecessor Hosni Mubarak. His regime recriminalised public protest and has enacted stricter censorship of public discourse. Some human rights organisations estimate that 60,000 people have been imprisoned since al-Sisi took power (Al Jazeera 2017). In this context, the hallmark political actions of discursive critique and protest that are supposed to have led to democratic transition have not produced their promised outcomes. Politics have failed. As one young Egyptian writer, describing life and public feeling under the ‘new’ military regime, put it, ‘It's like you died, and God said, “I will show you heaven,” and then as soon as you put one foot in, he grabs you by the scruff of your neck and takes you to hell. We really saw heaven during the 18 days [of initial protest], and then we went to a terrible reality, worse than where we were before’ (Antoun Reference Antoun2017). If the experience of military dictatorship before the revolution was ‘death,’ the feelings following revolutionary failure were ‘hell’. It is the emergence of a new, crueler experience of powerlessness than what Egyptians had grappled with for over 30 years under Mubarak's rule.
Such public feelings of overwhelming powerlessness and despair have had real physical consequences, making ‘art therapy’ increasingly meaningful. Ahmed, for instance, is a well-known violinist with whom I have worked closely since 2010. During one of my recent residencies in Egypt, he told me that he started suffering from panic attacks in 2013. They are triggered, he says, by witnessing or imagining violence in the street. During 2013, there were many demonstrations calling for the removal of then-president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood from power, and clashes between those pro- and anti-Morsi would often erupt (see also Matthies-Boon Reference Matthies-Boon2017, pp. 11–13). This public violence had a profound effect on Ahmed, ‘These were civilians against each other – not the police – this was a wholly different kind of violence for me’. Ahmed's psychiatrist prescribed him anti-depressants, but he says they made him feel numb. After two years, he stopped taking the medication, and the panic attacks returned.
At home one winter's day in 2016, as he felt the onset of an attack, Ahmed picked up his violin and dug the bow into the strings, ‘I was not making music’, he tells me, ‘I was surviving’. Instead of thinking about music, he focused on exploring ‘the energy of the strings’ and the ‘energy’ that lies within the patterns of vibrations, ‘I tried to hold on to one sound, my own sound, in the middle of this hell of outside sounds. When I am alone and close to death, I would rather play on one string and just keep resonating this one string. It is a way of getting into trance.’ Disregarding what he called ‘the rules of music’, he sought to get inside the violin's sound ‘to reach its energy’, entering a state of trance to mitigate his panic attack without the aid of medication. Shortly after this episode, Ahmed composed and recorded the violin piece ‘Reversing Mental Confusion as Means of Curing Depression’ (2016) as a recreation of his experience during this attack.Footnote 9 To record the piece, he put his laptop on his bedroom dresser, and recorded using its low-quality built-in microphone. He decided to upload it to YouTube ‘to express through sound the state I was feeling for myself, but I also had the crazy idea that it might hit some other human being's psychological state, so that they too can feel what I'm feeling’.
Ahmed's experience demonstrates the extent to which directly engaging the ineffable and subconscious aspects of sonic experience has become a means of surviving for some. On a most personal level, it mitigated a panic attack caused by social fragmentation. By uploading the track online, however, he made appeals beyond only himself to engage a larger public. Expressing a feeling through sound (or what he called ‘vibrations’), Ahmed felt that he could potentially connect with others. A sense of ‘connection’ was significant in a social context that he experienced as alienating and fragmented.
Using a language of ‘vibration’ and ‘energy’, Ahmed's appeal to the ineffable as a form of healing engaged the transformative power of listening beyond only Islamic belief and Arab musical aesthetics. Listening to sound to embody what he called its ‘vibration’ was a means to mitigate the physical effects of social and political problems that he experienced as outside his control. Although Ahmed has dabbled in Sufism, he did not appeal to Sufi practices nor directly to God in his moment of crisis. Likewise, Sayed's active dispelling of any musical connection with ‘spirits’ separated his approach to music as ‘therapy’ from zar and other occult practices associated with Islamic belief. Most DIY musicians, alarmed by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the political power of what has become known as the ‘Islamic resurgence’, distance themselves from overtly religious discourse. Neither did these musicians use the language of ṭarab, which for many urban youth today represents the aesthetics and nostalgia of an older generation as well as a deep-rootedness in Arab culture and aesthetics toward which some urban youth today are averse.
Instead of adopting language that would culturally situate their conception of magic, they use words such as ‘energy’ ‘vibration,’ and ‘thought forms’ to suggest a more subconscious – and thus pre-cultural – understanding of the ineffable. These terms are also not neutral. They suggest a closer orientation towards Enlightenment rationality and could be traced to the state's modernisation efforts. (see also Winegar Reference Winegar2006; Armbrust Reference Armbrust1996) Yet they belie the wholesale adoption of modernist ideologies by nonetheless privileging the inexplicable and intersubjective. ‘Magic’, then, is a logic that blends these various ideologies in a way that expresses the particular sensibilities of the urban middle class. It reveals their particular valuing of the ineffable as that which they deem to be pre-cultural, subconscious and universal.
‘Not politics’: magic as community
The political upheaval that began in 2011 inspired some independent musicians to use the ineffable, subconscious nature of sonic experience to heal not only themselves but what they experienced as a fragmented, depressed and anxious society. In the immediate aftermath of the 2011 revolution, dozens of artistic projects made the public street their primary stage.Footnote 10 Many of these projects began as public celebrations of the revolution's victory but slowly evolved into practices that were believed to continue the revolution itself. The burgeoning of independent music in public in the revolution's wake can best be understood as a reaction to processes of modernisation and state repression that removed certain types of arts, namely those that would become associated with the middle class, from public space. Although post-revolutionary street music projects emerged from diverse ideologies and practices, many were oriented toward social ‘uplift’ and fostering a sense of community.
Far from a novel practice, using art as a socially transformative tool was once an important facet of Egyptian state policy. Through state institutions founded in the 1950s, the state sought ‘to reconstruct a system of cultural values based on a progressive humanism from a synthesis of national and universal cultures’ (el-Shawan Reference El-Shawan1980, p. 118; for television see Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2005, pp. 10–11). Although espousing a sort of ‘universalism’, it upheld the secular-educated, upwardly mobile middle-class citizen as a national ideal. The arts, then, were a primary means of cultural ‘uplift’ for what it considered an uncultured and uneducated masses (Winegar Reference Winegar2006, 137–74).
These processes of modernisation, which had initially begun much earlier in the 18th century, likewise contributed to the removal of certain types of creative practice from the street and daily life. With the gradual institutionalisation of the arts in state entities, and with the Mubarak regime's criminalisation of public gathering, those who performed music in the street were largely associated with the lower classes, premodern practices and/or criminality (van Nieuwkerk Reference van Nieuwkerk1995). Whereas middle-class independent musicians did not have access to the street as a site of performance owing both to modernist values and to state policing, mahraganat musicians, in contrast, primarily performed at street weddings in low-income neighbourhoods. These areas of the city have largely remained outside state control and reform (Grippo Reference Grippo, Ritter and Daughtry2007, Reference Grippo and Frishkopf2010; Bayat Reference Bayat2010 [2013]; Swedenburg Reference Swedenburg2012).
With the state's adoption of neoliberal policies in the 1970s, it gradually abandoned its modernist-socialist project, shifting its focus from the citizen to the consumer (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2005). The charge of uplifting the masses through ‘culture’ thus fell squarely onto the shoulders of artists themselves, who, prior to 2011 at least, had unequal access to the street and the mass media as means of engaging a public (Rizk Reference Rizk, Rizk and Shaver2010). The project of using the arts as a pedagogical tool became all the more urgent following the successful ouster of Mubarak in 2011. With the election of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi as the first post-revolutionary president in 2012 followed by a swift return to military rule in 2013, many middle-class urban youth, especially, began to feel that the problem wasn't the government but ‘us’. In other words, what was needed was a transformation in what they called ‘culture’ as a prerequisite for long-lasting political change. As the independent musician mentioned at this essay's opening said, ‘Our aim is to get people out of their homes and involve them in culture. Uniting the people around culture is the most important.’ In many post-revolutionary street arts projects, ‘uniting’ people was primarily achieved through the ineffable nature of listening as an intersubjective and subconscious experience. This culture around which all people should unite, however, was one distinctly defined by particular values that privileged the middle-class subject.
Most musicians involved in street music projects believed that independent music in the street exposed the public to new ideas by transforming listeners’ affective states. One street concert organiser told me that he always begins his concerts by playing popular local favourites such as Umm Kulthum (b. 1898 d. 1975), considered one the most masterful ṭarab singers in modern Arab history (see Racy Reference Racy2003; Danielson Reference Danielson1998; Lohman Reference Lohman2010). He begins his concerts this way because, ‘You have to play something nostalgic, or something that [allows] people to relate to you … I am a good musician, but this man won't feel it if I play jazz. Emotionally transform (tetmazig gedan) people with your Umm Kulthum and after that play jazz as you want. Then they will accept your jazz, but only then. Before then, no.’ Musicians thus utilised listeners’ collective nostalgia and in some cases transformative states of ṭarab as a means of making them more receptive to unfamiliar types of music, such as jazz. Beyond only widening their musical palette, however, exposing pedestrians to new, independent musical genres was believed to transform listeners’ worldview, what some musicians called ‘mentality’ or ‘culture’, more generally, making certain bodies more receptive to new ideas and people. For instance, another musician told me,
Music in the street just wasn't a part of Egyptian culture. People were so stuck in their way of doing things, but the revolution opened new doors for people to imagine new possibilities. Music in the street has this power to change people's consciousness, to get people used to new things – new ideas, new people.
It was independent music's inexplicable ability – as a seemingly autonomous agent – to calm, transform and expand people's ‘consciousness’ that made it such a revolutionary force.
Street performances of independent music were experienced as highly transformative for many of those who participated in them. In one instance, a female performer told me that the emotional transformation inspired by her performance stopped her male audience from sexually harassing her (see Sprengel Reference Sprengel, Fischlin and Porterforthcoming). A female journalist who attended a different street concert supported this account, writing that the fact that there was no harassment of any kind at the performance made her believe more in the saying that ‘al-musiqa tahzib li al-nafs’, music disciplines the soul. Among the middle class, sexual harassment is widely attributed to working-class men, who are believed to embody a more aggressive masculinity (Amar Reference Amar2011). Another street musician recounted a time when a Salafi man, recognisable by his style of dress and facial hair, did not interrupt the music by walking through the performers or audience. Instead he walked around the event, treating the performance area as a sacred space. The artist was deeply moved by this display of respect from an Islamist, whom DIY musicians widely regard as opposed to their values. For these musicians, such instances signalled the cultivation of community, public unity in a society that was rife with social and political fragmentation.
These examples demonstrate that this community was one that included those deemed outside independent culture, namely the working-class ‘masses’ and Islamists. In the words of one street concert organiser, street concerts were especially needed after the revolution because of what he called,
Social–political–cultural diffusion. Because the Salafi guy can see people who voted ‘no’Footnote 11 on the constitution change and that they are playing good music and that they are good people. It is important because people meet each other. The time we spend together as a community is the time we spend in the street. So this time we need to be less tense, because everything is tense and chaotic but music calms it down. And we need it. To more accept each other. You know? … How could we ever see something like this otherwise? [At concerts] there is no harassment and there are no feelings of alienation (ghurba). The Salafi is standing next to the liberal is standing next to the girl with her hair visible next to the boy with long hair.
The boy with ‘long hair’ is a common aesthetic among independent artists. It is a style that sets musicians apart and often makes them subject to ridicule by those not involved in independent culture. Most broadly, a sense of community was significant because it meant feelings of belonging and security. As one independent musician told me, ‘This is why it is important. Because people feel they are safe’, specifically among those whom they consider different from themselves. This sense of community was experienced as quite profound given the class disparities and clashing ideologies that had been driving social turmoil in the years following the 2011 revolution, instability that some attribute to the return to authoritarian military rule and to the revolution's ultimate failure.
Significantly for the musicians involved, forming community by performing independent music in the street was understood to be non-political. In contrast to the ineffable, pre-cultural power of music, politics was ideological and counterproductive to their social aims. According to one organiser,
We are trying to keep this all about society and doing good and staying away from politics. Because if we bring politics into it, it is going to destroy the whole concept … As soon as they are going to say that we are getting people to go down and do the revolution all over again, it is going to go into a legal dilemma and we are never going to get out of it. We are trying to do something good, not complicated in this.
He viewed ‘doing good’ and ‘doing politics’ as mutually exclusive. Similarly, another street concert organiser in Alexandria considered politics to be counterproductive, telling me ‘We shouldn't politicize the cultural work in the street … everything in Egypt is politicized, and this is exhausting … We want this to end, and we can't get rid of this. Nothing is being accomplished, everything is going as it goes.’ The notion that politics only produces the status quo was pervasive among the artists I spoke with. To them, politics belonged to state bureaucrats and military officials who could produce, at best, ‘idle talk’. The inefficacy of politics was most poignantly demonstrated in the failed revolution – even rational discursive critique and a popular uprising that involved millions of Egyptians could not unseat military rule.
In contrast to this notion of politics, the public performance of independent music was understood to be an experiential model of social change not predicated on shared ideology, discourse or even words. It was the intersubjective experience of listening, what were thought to be music's ineffable qualities, that rendered social change possible. As the founder of one project told me, the goal was ‘to create social impact, not just social awareness’. Whereas social awareness was achieved through discursive critique, a pillar of public politics as conceptualised in much Western social theory, social impact in this case was to collectively experience the desired alternative in the present. As my bassist friend, whose comment opened this essay, said, he wanted to create a society that is ‘this relaxed, and this organized, and this beautiful’ through the collective experience of what he called ‘pure music’. These artists believed that similar to the way music could heal Ahmed's emotional and psychological state, it could likewise perform therapeutic work through ‘social–political–cultural diffusion’, intersubjective public listening that collectively reached the subconscious of disparate individuals. If listening subconsciously transferred ‘energies’, ‘vibrations’ and ‘thought forms’, this experience in public was given broader implications in the context of social strife. Public listening transformed public feeling and public consciousness, bringing a divided society into momentary communion. In other words, street concerts were a form of ‘art therapy’ for the masses.
‘Not mahraganat’: magic as power
Significantly, it was this interpretation of the arts as magic that differentiated it from politics. These independent musicians specifically chose songs that did not have political lyrics – their only mission being to ‘beautify’ the public soundscape. In so doing, they were believed to be unimposing of any particular message. Discourses of magic were thus a distancing mechanism from ideology. They located social transformation in the listener. If a listener should be moved to transform behaviour and/or thought, it was an act of the listener's own agency. This view resonates with some treatments of listening in Islamic philosophies, which view the listener as the primary agent who must realise divine truth (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006). Yet they employ vocabulary that suggests sonic experience is primarily pre-cultural through the seemingly innocuous and universal terms of ‘energy’ and ‘vibration’.
Although celebrating the non-political power of the ineffable to cultivate community, independent musicians founded public music projects on the premise that the street did not already have music and that it had not been a space of performance. In reality, however, the urban Egyptian street has had music in abundance. Sha'bi (urban folk or popular music, literally ‘of the people’) and mahraganat (festival music), for instance, are urban working-class DIY genres that emerged from street weddings in low-income neighbourhoods. Although ignored by most mainstream media outlets, their sound has become almost ubiquitous in public space by spreading through street weddings and via public transportation (Grippo Reference Grippo, Ritter and Daughtry2007, Reference Grippo and Frishkopf2010; Swedenburg Reference Swedenburg2012).
Independent musicians did not associate the music already circulating in public space with social change or cultural ‘uplift’. One organiser of street concerts told me, for instance, that he did not value all music equally for its ability to spread positive energy in public space:
There is music for the soul and it doesn't have to be one genre. It's just a matter of taste whether you like it or not, but it is music for your soul. When you listen to it you can just sense the energy of the person who is playing or writing it. You can feel it … And then there is music that is just there for people to move to. Which has nothing to do with the soul.
He admitted that some people who ‘dance their soul away’, referencing mahraganat’s association with celebratory wedding culture and boisterous dance, can be positively affected in the sense that the act of dancing makes them happy; however, he viewed this happiness as entirely different from the results of the independent music that he presents through his street music project. In contrast to independent music,
Sha'bi and mahraganat … [are] just about having fun in a different way. It is not about healing. It is not about feeding your soul. Because there is sophisticated music that when you listen to it, I feel it makes you smarter. Smarter as a human being, not just mentally as a GPA. It makes your soul smarter. I don't know how to explain it. But it's just a feeling you get.
The idea that hearing ‘makes your soul smarter’, overlaps in some ways with the privileging of listening in Islamic lines of thought in which knowledge is attained through the internalisation that hearing facilitates. Yet it goes beyond this ideology by relating this transformation not to God but to a more universalising ‘energy’. Significantly, ‘making the soul smarter’, pertained to only certain types of music at the same time that musical experience was treated as pre-cultural and subconscious.
When I asked another organiser if mahraganat could ever be performed in his street concert project, he seemed disgusted by the question and without a smile told me ‘mahraganat is not music’. Another critiqued some foreign journalists’ positive treatment of mahraganat as a ‘local’ music, telling me: ‘Yes, it may be local, but teachers physically abusing school children is also a “local custom,” that doesn't mean we should respect it’. Those outside mahraganat culture disliked the genre because of its supposed potential to perpetuate violence, sexual harassment and a problematic working-class masculinity. Mahraganat was widely considered, in the words of one Egyptian friend, ‘a form of violent expression’.
In her recent analysis of grassroots public beautification projects in the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, anthropologist Jessica Winegar similarly found that post-revolution projects primarily promoted modernist values and aesthetics that privileged the middle-class subject. The goals of the projects she examined included beautifying the street through citizen-led cleaning initiatives and regulating public behaviour in it to cultivate a ‘non-threatening public space’ (Winegar Reference Winegar2016, p. 611). These aims echo many of the sentiments expressed by some musicians, who used independent music to produce a public atmosphere that was ‘this relaxed, and this organized, and this beautiful’ and who associated the working-class culture currently dominant in the street with violence and aggression. Winegar concludes that the aesthetic ordering perpetuated by these projects reproduced the civilising, exclusionary tendencies of the state that idealises the middle-class citizen as exemplary. Her interlocutors presented ‘such judgements as true, pure, and universal’ even though they were founded upon a bourgeois emphasis on what she calls ‘sensory containment’, lack of bodily contact between individuals in public and between bodies and dirt, for instance (Winegar Reference Winegar2016, p. 611).
Considering the sonic nature of many post-revolution public projects indicates that this is not the complete adoption of bourgeoisie sensory containment predicated on rational liberal subjectivity, however. The public music projects championed by independent musicians targeted an ineffable, intersubjective experience as the primary driver of public healing and social change. Viewing independent arts as the vehicle to ‘uplift’ the masses and actively excluding genres such as mahraganat, however, indicates that this was a desire for intersubjectivity that privileged the position of the middle-class subject. Hearing was such a magical alternative to ordinary politics because it located agency in the listener. If the musician is a mere ‘channeler of energy’, social change lies firmly within the listener's seemingly voluntary actions. In other words, it was not the independent musician who acted, but the working-class listener who raised him/herself to the embodiment of supposedly middle-class sensibilities. Discourses of independent music as ‘magic’ thus allowed independent musicians to view listeners as the primary agents of working-class exclusion. Listeners’ social transformation, from once desiring mahraganat to now desiring jazz, was seen as an agentive act initiated via the subconscious and inexplicable. Discourses of magic worked to obscure these relations of power at the same time as they perpetuated them. My findings do not contrast with Winegar's but demonstrate how intersubjectivity was desired even among those who perpetuate modernist, rationalist ideals so long as it involved the agentive ‘uplift’ of other listeners to embody middle-class respectability.
That these changes were believed to come on the volition of the listener was clear in many of the musicians’ statements above: ‘When they hear this music you can see and feel a change in them’ (emphasis added). They are the ones who change. Drawing from the belief that the ineffable is subconscious and thus pre-cultural, listening is a way of inculcating in the working-class body new knowledge, ideals and ‘consciousness’. It supposedly made them more open to new ideals, people and cultures, such as jazz music and the ‘long-haired’ independent musicians who played it. It was through hearing independent music that the Salafi man was believed to respect difference and the working-class male youth to abandon (sexual) violence and agression, for instance.
Whereas Egyptian artists understood politics as necessarily perpetuating hierarchical relationships of power that fanned existing social tensions, they believed that music, in contrast, avoided these relations by directly engaging the subconscious and pre-cultural realm. They treated the listener, not the performer, as the primary actor, whose self-transformation facilitated affective bonds in public. These bonds cultivated a new sense of community centred specifically around independent culture and values. Discourses of independent music as ‘magic’ were thus an idealised response to the very real experience of political failure. Yet, this belies underlying assumptions that the working class are the problem, that they need certain kinds of art and culture because their own creative expression is ‘violent’ and thus counterproductive to revolutionary goals. It conceals the fact that the so-called masses must always be ‘uplifted’ to somewhere.
Conclusions
Not all street arts projects were the same. Some independent artists were keenly aware of the implications of working in less privileged communities. Artists working in these projects more often reported that it was the independent artists – not the audience – who were transformed in the process. As one such organiser told me, performing in the street teaches artists ‘humility’, ‘they learn that we are one, with the same problems’. Thus, Egyptian street arts projects were not a uniform practice; yet, many of those emerging in the wake of the 2011 revolution mobilised the ineffable to suggest a utopian alternative to politics in a way that located change, and the subsequent formation of community, in the voluntary transformation of a supposedly uncultured listener.
A key tension in theories of affect has been negotiating affect's supposedly pre-cultural, universalising nature but also its difference- and boundary-making potential (Hofman Reference Hofman2015). Scholars and activists who highlight the utopian nature of the ineffable often foreground its pre-cultural aspects by drawing from biological, textual and/or philosophical analysis. What an ethnographic approach highlights, in contrast, is how the pre-cultural and the cultural aspects of the ineffable cannot truly be separated. Ahmed's experience of mitigating a panic attack through sonic vibration indicates the lived efficacy of what are considered biological, subconscious aspects of sonic experience. As Judith Becker's work on trance has demonstrated, much of what sonic experience can do to the physical body lies outside of cultural codes and scientific analysis – it simply cannot be explained (Becker Reference Becker2004). Yet for the ineffable aspects of sonic experience to do the work of politics, they must also be rendered meaningful. It is exactly this ambiguity between the pre-cultural and cultural, object and experience, that makes ‘magic’ such a desirable form of politics. Appealing to affective magic allows one to locate change in the pre-cultural even while interpreting the consequences of this change through particular social and historical conditions that make such transformations politically meaningful.
The musicians at this article's opening were critical of music that espoused an overtly political ideology because such artistic expression bulldozed over this delicate ambiguity that made art so (socially) powerful in the first place. My bassist friend's conviction, that ‘If art cannot convey, imply a political message then no fucking way we can deliver the message’, suggests that individuals can be resistant to direct ideology, especially when some aspects of that ideology reproduce the historical privileging of some bodies over others (such as the Egyptian state's idealisation of the middle-class citizen). In the context of revolution and eventual revolutionary failure, it was ideology coupled with unequal access to institutionalised power that compelled citizens to commit acts of violence against each other. Using the ‘universal’ language of science (musical experience as vibration, energy) and/or that which is considered pre-cultural (channelling energy, singing in tongues and ancient languages) is a type of position taking. It is to stake certain claims to power, to which Egyptian citizens have historically had unequal access. Thus the subconscious and the conscious, the pre-cultural and the cultural, are not hard binaries but deeply intertwined. Even though many aspects of magic must necessarily remain inexplicable, it is important to remember that desires for the ineffable, and its utilisation as a political tool, are always culturally and historically situated.
My intention has not been to debunk the myth of music as magic. As the first half of this essay has demonstrated, listening to and performing certain types of music has inexplicable empowering social consequences and tangible physical effects. Instead it has been to show how the ineffable, when used as an alternative – and more ethical – model of politics, is not removed from power. It is thus not the utopian ideal that some have longed for. Or, if it is, it provides further evidence that utopias are always exclusionary (Winegar Reference Winegar2016, p. 620). It is instead the marginalisation of ineffable experience, whether through processes of modernisation in the West or in Egypt, and the failure of ordinary politics to make us feel better, that has allowed it to seem so revolutionary in the present.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks are due to my anonymous reviewers, as well as Timothy D. Taylor, A.J. Racy, Alex Rodriguez, Chris Nickell, the violinist, Pablo Infante Amate, Ana Hofman, Sammy Sayed, Barbara Lebrun and Nanette De Jong.
