What are you listening to?

 If you listen to an old song, won’t you remember some memories from your past?

What if that song was not in your language?

In the 1990s some Egyptian teenagers tended to listen to foreign music, and started to despise the kind of Egyptian or Arabic music that was popular in that era, despite that some of the foreign music at that time was of a low quality, but still gained more popularity, why then?

Maybe some of them thought they will be “cool” if they listened to foreign music, or felt they will be more open minded, or maybe because of the foreign education that was provided for them?

Anyhow, one can’t deny the above-mentioned factors, accompanied by the copied Egyptian melodies…

If I talk about the copying trend, I will have to write thousands of pages about the way the Egyptian music copied from their foreign counterparts, despite that such a trend can be found in different cultures, it prevailed more in ours.

We started by copying  melodies and notes from different cultures, like the Turkish (ottoman) and  the Persian,  and we monopolized one trend for a time, a  good example  of that from the past is Abd El Halim.

That man started in the1950s with short songs composed by Abd El wahab then ( a great copier) , these songs were considered unique and different then.

Then in the 1960s, the trend was more romantic and melodramatic, for example the poet Kamel El Shennawy-a sad exaggerating poet- wrote a sad poem reflecting his sad, one sided love story to a famous singer then (Nagat) and the funny thing is that she was the one who sang it! (check some of Halim’s too)

Moving to the 1970s, an era of open cultures, musicians-especially Halim-were more prone to spreading their music in the gulf countries, so the trend then was long boring concerts and the spread of the  percussions, nearly the only trend then!

 Starting from the 80s till the early 2000s the trend was how to make cool music, then copying Latin, Italian and Spanish melodies (check the track “ Bady adoob” for Elissa).

The result….

A similarity in the music each of each era, 90s music were the same, 80s the same, sad over melodramatic 1960s followed the same trend….

Till we reached the Egyptian “ Mahrganat” or festival music, which are  a mix of oriental, western, hip hop, a literally undefined genre of music with strange lyrics!

So, as an Egyptian, would you like to listen to one genre of music all your life?