In the wake of the Arab uprisings, many observers have noted the important role of Arab youth in sparking, mobilizing, and sustaining the social movements that challenged autocratic regimes across the region. Especially in the case of Egypt, often missing from accounts of the 25 January 2011 revolution and subsequent counterrevolution are deeper understandings of youth culture and especially music in the years leading up to the uprisings; discussions of the roles of rap, rock, or heavy metal in animating the revolutions miss an important dimension of the cultural forces at play when they ignore the development and contemporary importance of Egyptian pop music (al-mūsīqā al-shabābiyya). Daniel J. Gilman's Cairo Pop: Youth Music in Contemporary Egypt offers an essential guide to pop music in Cairo on the eve of radical transformation. Far from arguing that the music is a mere distraction from the everyday or an epiphenomenon of more basic struggles, as many scholars and local elites have argued, Gilman convincingly argues that there is a strong link between commercial pop music (including music videos) and political culture in Egypt today.

The book is organized into an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue that reflects on the situation in Cairo though summer 2013. The introduction presents the book's major question: how do anxieties about contemporary Egyptian pop culture reveal tensions concerning class and politics in the broader Egyptian nation? Gilman rehearses the oft-heard argument that popular music is morally dangerous, aesthetically suspect, and politically irrelevant or, worse, retrogressive. He situates al-mūsīqā al-shabābiyya in the context of the broader musical taxonomies—and their instabilities—in Egypt: from the prestigious neoclassical or heritage music of Egypt's Golden Age (mūsīqā al-ṭarab); to shaʿbī music of the urban popular classes, often criticized as vulgar; to al-mūsīqā al-shabābiyya and its role in urban youth culture today. Gilman astutely notes how each genre and the very taxonomic system they inhabit are laden with the class and gender anxieties of the modernizing Egyptian nation. Al-Mūsīqā al-shabābiyya occupies a middle ground, neither prestigious nor vulgar but accessible, often slickly packaged and presented via music video clips. Despite its outsized popularity in Egypt today, almost no scholarly attention has been paid to it; in fact, it has been the object of disdain and critical neglect, arising from what Gilman suspects to be a late-Orientalist nostalgia for a glorious past on the part of Egyptian elites as well as their scholarly apologists among Western ethnomusicologists and anthropologists (including the present reviewer). While not writing as a fan of the music per se, Gilman gives his Cairene interlocutors and the many consumers of al-mūsīqā al-shabābiyya among Cairo's middle-class youth the respect, dignity, and agency they merit as individuals and as members of an increasingly powerful class in the ongoing Egyptian struggle for self-determination.

Chapter 1 details the rise of the Egyptian cultural industry since independence in 1952, showing the close engagement of Egyptian popular culture with the ideological contours of the Egyptian nation in a time when pan-Arabism was ascendant. In this era the major icons of Egypt's musical modernity—Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahab, Umm Kulthum, and ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz—musically performed the modern nation. The lack of popularity of these great artists among Cairo's youth today can be explained not only by a generational divide but by an aesthetic and political divide in which today's youth are less willing to submit to statist ideologies.

Chapter 2 explores the rise of youth music genres since the 1990s, with a special focus on the linkages between sexuality and race in the aesthetic choices of Cairene youth. Gilman convincingly argues that popular music genres reveal the contradictions of race and gender in the Egyptian nation. Listening to and watching shabābiyya music through his interlocutors’ ears and eyes, Gilman analyzes how Cairene youth constitute their racialized and gendered “Egyptianness" (maṣriyya) through implicit comparisons both between contemporary shabābiyya artists and past mūsīqā al-ṭarab artists.

Chapter 3 examines how Cairene youth classify not only their musics but also themselves as participants in the overlapping and complex “taste cultures” of ṭarab, shaʿbī, and shabābiyya musics. Based on extensive interviews with a coterie of interlocutors, including the star singer Muhammad Munir, Gilman proposes that the classification of musical cultures and hierarchies of taste and authenticity in Cairo indexes not only a hierarchy of social class but also an important generational change—a “great aesthetic shift” corresponding to an ideological shift away from Arab nationalism to what we might call neoliberal authenticity: person-centered, sentimental, skeptical of the older generations, and pragmatic, much like the politics that would erupt in Tahrir in 2011.

Chapter 4 ruminates on pop music and listening practices during and soon after the 2011 revolution and counterrevolution and demonstrates how Cairene youth expressed political sentiment through their aesthetic choices. During the tense moments of Tahrir in early 2011, shabābiyya and related genres of pop music and videos became important agents in the construction of authentic responses to the ambiguities of power. The epilogue attempts to make sense of what has happened since 2011. By nature speculative, it nonetheless shows a thinker creatively engaging with the question of the political agency of pop music, and the aesthetic power of political mobilizations.

Overall the book is ethnographically rich and engagingly written, with frequent touches of scholarly humility and evocative humor; for example, at a recording session one musician “looked somewhat like Lenny Kravitz after a cheeseburger binge” (p. 63). The book would have benefitted from a more sustained theoretical engagement with the literatures on music, race, and gender. In addition, while rightly correcting an overemphasis in Western media and scholarship on underground and marginal musics to the exclusion of shabābiyya, the lack of attention to such emergent and important genres as mahragānāt music is striking since this genre has been shown to be a powerful mobilizer of youth and an active force in crafting sentiments and affective regimes today that are as much as part of the “great aesthetic shift” that Gilman analyzes through shabābiyya. Nonetheless, Cairo Pop not only fills in an important gap in our understanding of musical practice in the Arab world, it also offers critical insights into the constitution of modern Egyptian society and the political relevance of youth culture, insights whose relevance far transcends Egypt, the Arab world, and the Middle East to be of global relevance. For this reason it should be required reading not only for students and scholars of the region, but also for a general public interested in understanding the dynamics and contradictions of a major Arab nation undergoing significant transformation.