History Sounds (Ep. 3) Cassettes and mass culture in Egypt with Andrew Simon

OLGA VERLATO

In our third conversation here at the Borderlines series History Sounds, Andrew Simon tells us about the history of cassette culture in Egypt from the 1970s through the 1990s and beyond, and gives us a chance to listen to some of the music that started to fill cassettes.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or click below:

Make sure to check out Andrew’s 2022 book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt published by Stanford University Press and forthcoming in Arabic with Dar El Shorouk (more below).

 

A collection of cassette tapes at a Cairo kiosk, 2015. Photo by Andrew Simon.

 

The songs you heard during the conversation are:

About Media of the Masses

Media of the Masses offers the first in-depth examination of cassettes as an everyday technology, and their role in shaping mass culture and notions of consumption, taste, the law, and circulation in Egypt. The book’s framework gives prominence not only to media technologies but also, crucially, to artists and their music. In so doing, it sheds new light on Egypt’s sociopolitical, cultural, and economic developments from the 1970s through the 1990s and beyond. What lies behind the writing (and writing out) of history is a key theme of Media of the Masses, one connected to questions of memory, archiving, and the modes of production, circulation, and consumption of media technologies. Cassettes, Andrew Simon explains, allowed for music consumers to become music and cultural producers and distributers, for example through the copying of cassettes and creation of mixtapes. Moreover, cassettes allowed for a new generation of performers and music genres to emerge. Yet oftentimes, these artists and their repertoire were labelled as “vulgar” and threatening to “public taste.” Media of the Masses paints a “counterhistory of Egyptian cultural production” (20) that shows us what can happen when this music, its listeners, and creators are put back at the center of the story.

Further readings and resources:

  • Armbrust, Walter. Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

  • Arnold, David. Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

  • Brand, Laurie. Official Stories: Politics and National Narratives in Egypt and Algeria. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

  • Danielson, Virginia. The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

  • Fahmy, Ziad. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

  • Hammad, Hanan. Unknown Past: The Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.

  • Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

  • ʿInaba, Sayyid. Hikayat Shaykh Imam. Cairo: Maktabat Jazirat al-Ward, 2013.

  • Ryzova, Lucie. The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

  • Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, NY: Destiny Books, 1994.

  • Siamdoust, Nahid. Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017.

  • Silver, Christopher. Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth-Century North Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022.

  • Weld, Kirsten. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

  • Winegar, Jessica. Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Interview and sound design by Olga Verlato.

Podcast, Conversations, History SoundsBorderlines CSSAAME