Electro Chaabi DJs CLF Are Bringing Egypt's Wedding Party Raves to New Audiences

There's few parties that go off like a Egyptian wedding party, let alone the wedding of one the country's biggest underground dance music stars. If you came across some of the mobile phone footage uploaded to YouTube you might well have mistaken it as a lost recording from the heydays of acid house. A crowd of hundreds, possibly thousands of fans, made their way out to Salam City on the outskirts of Cairo for the occasion. There are people dancing on top of speakers, displays of amateur pyrotechnics (made using aerosols and lighters), typical rave accoutrements (glow sticks, neon clothing) and everywhere people gyrating like mad with moves that are part breakdancing, part traditional Arabic dance.

The couple celebrating, barely visible in the melee of performers on the packed out stage, are Samer and Sadat, the latter is one of leading producers of some of most exciting music being made anywhere, electro chaabi. It's a sound that's difficult to describe, based around Eastern musical scales and influenced by Western hip hop productions, electro shaabi doesn't entirely belong to either of those precedents but has an irrepressible energy that is impossible not to be carried away by. Most of the scene's producers, like Sadat, are from the working class suburbs of Cairo and Alexandria where there is already a tradition of chaabi music, meaning 'of the people', which they've given their own modern take on. While Western pop is one inspiration on this new generation of chaabi, particularly artists like Shaggy, Tiesto, Snoop Dogg, the music they create is avant-garde – an absurd reinterpretation of mainstream pop – and yet at the same time populist in both its lyrics and audience.

Parallels have been rather hastily drawn between electro chaabi and the 2011 and 2013 Tahrir Square revolutions. There's some basis for this but only as far as the relaxing of internet censorship that catalysed the protest movement also gave producers and DJs access to music production software, YouTube tutorials for beat making and a means to distribute their work. However, what is certain is that electro chaabi is a sonic revolution. Some of it's earliest devotees, are Joost Heijthuijsen, Yannick Verhoeven and Joep Schmitz, who together formed the Dutch DJ collective Cairo Liberation Front to promote electro chaabi around the world. Together they create mixtapes and perform live with their own spin on the genre. Heijthuijsen also runs Incubate music festival in Tilburg and together with Verhoeven has played a crucial role in helping some of the scene's producers release and perform their music in the West. I spoke to the trio before they performed at Birthdays in London as part of their recent tour.

THUMP: Firstly, how would you explain electro chaabi in a sentence or so?
Joost Heijthuijsen: Electro chaabi offers an insight into Egyptian life, it offers some contrast to the perspective of Egyptian youth that we get from Western media.

Yannick Verhoeven: Electro chaabi is more than just a musical scene it's a rebellious youth culture, just like you had with punk in the UK and the beginnings of house music in the US.

How did you come to form a live act around electro chaabi?
Y: We thought that via the internet we can connect with the scene, it would normally not be possible to even hear of electro chaabi without the internet. So we started doing mixtapes as a way to connect with them. We've always been diggers for new music.

J: We didn't understand at all what they were saying but we understood the feeling, the raw energy. We're both fans of hip hop and punk gigs and the energy felt familiar. So we started playing it live, although not as a typical DJ set, it's really something else - closer to a party than anything else.

That's interesting that you mention punk and hip hop as comparisons, in energy if not sound. It's difficult to define but for me there's also parallels to hardcore dance music and grime.
Y: I think what we wanted to say is that chaabi doesn't exist in a bubble. In it's energy, and also sound, you could draw comparisons to hip hop production, it has very similar beats to trap or drill for example. But we also mix it with psychedelic music because it sounds really psychedelic and experimental in a way but at the same it's a street music.

J: This is music that is being played in underground dance music scenes and by bourgeois audiences but we didn't want it to have that suffocating fate. We wanted to mix it with Nicki Minaj – who's a great artist – instead because that's so much more vital and exciting. We want maximum energy and the total bliss of listening and partying.

Were you conscious to avoid electro chaabi being pigeonholed as world music?
J: A lot of non-Western musics are pigeonholed as world music - we hate this. It doesn't make sense to define music as "world music" just because it's from a different country or culture. We just like exciting music wherever it's from, whether it's made with guitars, electronics or like - chaabi - with cracked versions of FruityLoops - it doesn't matter. We didn't think chaabi should be confined to world music festivals, we wanted to hear it at dance music festivals, at rock festivals so that young people can enjoy it - not just beard-stroking 40-year-olds.

Y: I think partly too there is a lot of emphasis on authenticity in world music and that often results in the music being engaged with as museum pieces. We didn't want to sit in a DJ booth pushing buttons and just playing the music, we wanted total chaos.

J: And actually that's true to the experience of electro chaabi in Egypt. The DJs transgress genres, they don't give a fuck about what's credible or not. They'll take a beat from Eurohouse and mix with it Sean Paul and traditional Arabic music rhythms. We don't mix the exact same things but we have the same approach as they do: I'll mix Moderat, Nicki Minaj and Islam Chipsy, for example.

When did you first try getting in touch with the producers and DJs in the scene?
J: When we started making mixtapes, we took a political approach. We wanted to offer another perspective on the Arab world. They also like to party, they also do drugs, drink, dance. Eventually, we started getting emails from some of the guys in the scene. When we added them on Facebook they invited us to the wedding of Sadat, one of the biggest chaabi stars. That was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

What was the wedding party like?
J: The wedding party was the best rave I've ever been to. It was in Salem City, two hours from the city centre in a working class neighbourhood. When we arrived there was guys showing off their mopeds, clothing, listening to music, and just hanging on the street. The party was between two flats and the flats had no windows and they built an improvised stage between them. The whole place was packed and everyone was so welcoming, they all gave us high fives. It was a complete mad house, guys were crowd surfing and making their own flame torches with aerosols and lighters. The stage almost collapsed and the sound was really loud – it was incredible. All the stars of electro chaabi were on stage. Guys were on one side, girls on the other and they both were going totally wild.

Y: But I think it's important to recognise that electro chaabi is not just a music it's a culture, a rebellious street culture, much like hip hop.

So is it a reflection of working class culture in that sense?
J: Well the previous generation couldn't express themselves fully under the dictatorship. But when the internet restrictions were loosened around the time of the revolution a whole subculture with it's own music, fashion, etc flooded online. It allowed them to distribute music and to circumvent the censorship laws, with YouTube and Mediafire there's no one holding you back. For example, through YouTube dance moves could quickly spread between neighbourhoods. They took traditional Arab dance and mixed it with breakdancing to make the most crazy moves.

Y: It became a creative outlet. Similar to grime, chaabi MCs spit bars about their everyday life and everyday problems like money, relationships and just struggling to get by.

J: It's really a genre, not some musical niche. All genres have aspects of fashion, music and social attitudes combined and so does electro chaabi.

How do you see the relationship between politics and electro chaabi? It seems to me that there a lot of misconceptions regarding the scene's politics.
Y: In general, I think people try to over politicise it. If you look at hip hop, early hip hop didn't start as a direct protest against Regan or Bush, it came from a wider sense of disenchantment. Electro chaabi similarly seems to have emerged from that same feeling of being outsiders to mainstream Egyptian pop music and a lack of identification with its affluent popstars; it didn't reflect the reality of their everyday lives, so they decided to create their own music that does. So electro chaabi is a politics of the street even if it's not the politics of the state.

As with grime and hip hop, just because there isn't always an explicit political message doesn't mean it isn't political in of itself. 
J: Exactly, I think as well it's an oversimplification to politicise it as a part of the revolution, that's putting it too narrowly. But it's music that comes from the same social structures so of course it's political in a sense.

It's revolutionary in its sound and like most revolutions it starts at the fringes. And Salam city is in the fringes. The Western media only takes into account protest songs as political, they want a Bob Dylan, but shaabi offers another form that politics can take.

It's interesting to me that chaabi, like early grime, is made using relatively basic software like FruitLoops for example. Are those tools important to the genesis of DIY music scenes like electro chaabi do you think?
Y: I'm not sure the tools are that important, only in the sense that they've enabled people without any musical training to create music. They just watch tutorials on YouTube instead.

J: If you ask them, they aspire to the same studio quality as Shaggy or Tiesto but because of a combination of cheap software and poor PAs it doesn't sound that way. To begin with chaabi had to be played at weddings because all the producers started as wedding DJs who were tired of playing traditional Egyptian music and also Western music – so they created their own music. It has a very similar trajectory to dancehall and sound system culture. At weddings you had an announcer to introduce guests which naturally doubled-up as an MC.

I get the impression there's also a humorous side to electro chaabi that perhaps gets lost in translation. Did any of that come across in your experiences?
J: Humour doesn't always translate well but we tried to translate some lyrics to Dutch. There's a couple aspects to it, firstly it's nonsense humour. Stars like Sadat and Alaa Fifty [who's named after 50 Cent] are so big they can introduce new words. We'd ask what do they mean and they'd say 'nothing'. But also it's the humour of everyday life. The slogan of the Egyptian revolution is "The People Want" and they replied with a song called "The People Want Five Pounds Phone Credit". And then there's "Fuck! I Lost My Slipper" which was one of the first Egyptian songs to use a swear word in its title.

How do you see your relationship with the scene?
J: It's a difficult relationship because of the language barrier.

Y: Last year at Incubate festival we hosted a party with Sadat and Fifty and also performed with them in Switzerland. But we always have to speak through their manager who can translate, so it's always difficult to communicate.

J: In a way that's good because we respect them very much, they are great artists, and we don't want to copy them. So we try to introduce something of our own lives and influences into our performances.

Y: We're white, middle class guys from the Netherlands, we don't want to pretend that this our music at all. We just take influence from what's really interesting about the genre and introduce something of our own musical interests. I listen to a lot of Perc and Andy Stott for example and that's an influence I like to bring to the music.

What about the name you perform under, Cairo Liberation Front, is that a show of solidarity?
J: We were thinking about the best name and it would be stupid to call ourselves "electro shaabi DJs". But it had to be political so we thought we would satire the West's history of interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East, that attitude of 'We are the soldiers of freedom and we come to liberate you from your primitive culture and dictatorship'. So it's a tongue-in-cheek name.

Y: You have to be open about the fact that you don't belong to that culture, that you won't ever understand it fully. We're not from the streets of Cairo and we're not claiming to be ambassadors or that we know everything about their culture because we don't.

How would you compare the reactions of Western audiences to Egyptian audiences?
Y: The energy I think is universal. Wherever we go people go nuts. At first the energy made us think of punk shows and weirdly enough Western audiences often react in a similar way to a punk show: crowdsurfing, mosh pits, stagediving etc.

J: We also use tea towels in our performances as nod back to the performers in Egypt who also use them as props, it's great to have some physical element to it. But that's the same sort of energy that an Egyptian wedding party has.

Follow Cairo Liberation Front on Twitter and Facebook. Electro chaabi producers Sadat and Alaa Fifty's best of compliation album is out now on Generation Bass.

CLF are performing on the following dates:

22/11 Moussem Sounds @ Bozar, Bruxelles [BE]
29/11 Connexion Live, Toulousse [FR]
05/12 zubrOFFka Film Festival, Bialystok [PL]
12/12 Powerhouse, Moscow [RU]