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Politics and festival rap songs
Hossam Badrawi
My student, the brilliant artist, asked me, saying: Every time, every new thing shakes the throne of the stable and the stable, and when Abdel Wahab appeared and after him a new generation of people of fine arts, a large number of them faced rejection before admiration, attack and criticism. These days, I read about festival songs, and about the Shakoush song that broke the world and transgressed in watching and following Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim and Farid, I asked myself and I ask you, could this not be a conflict between the past and the new as it was when Abdel Wahab sang “The World is a Cigarette and a Cup” in the year 51 . What is the space between creativity and out of style and usual. Isn’t every innovation a departure from the norm? Why the prohibition and punishment for the new?
I told him while thinking: You are right, but community leaders have a duty, which is to protect public taste from trivial words. When Umm Kulthum sang poems, the uneducated man in the street sang with her the most beautiful words of the Arabic language. And now, when Shakush, Becca, and Hamo sing, the learner sings with them. They may be creative, but is this what we want for our youth, the future of our beautiful language, and the level of our conversations?!
He said: How do we raise the ceiling of freedom of creativity and protect morals at the same time? Where is the dividing line?
I told him: Tariq Al-Shennawy wrote:
Profanity no longer arouses anyone’s astonishment. From its excessive circulation, it enjoyed an implicit social immunity. It completely dominated the traditional “media”, after it was weaned from “Social Media.” (Thermometer), which they follow its degrees up and down.
She commented on it:
A time when I used to go to Cairo Stadium for matches, I was very concerned that the audience participated in chanting against a referee or player who insulted the mother and her genitals, all of whom were protected against each other.
The strange thing is that those sitting in the cabin from among the elders of the state were chanting the same permissibility by moving the lips only, without making a sound embarrassed.
And I said that there must be a social study of the behavior of all the public in saying insults and being happy with that.
And when I was politically analyzing the actions of the masses in the demonstrations, I found Gustave Le Pen, the French sociologist and anthropologist, in 1895 saying in the study of the collective mind of the crowd and explaining the existence of a new entity emerging from the amalgamation of people together, where when they are together a magnetic field arises from the combination or for other reasons such as “identification.” » It is the imitation of the plural from individual behavior to become part of this collective formation, which seizes from each individual in the plural his opinions, beliefs and personal values.
As he said in one of his quotes:
There are 3 main processes that influence crowd behavior: anonymity, suggestion and contagion.
Anonymity gives a sense of loss of personal responsibility and the person becomes more primitive, emotional and unfettered, and gives him a feeling of invincibility.
Contagion means the spread of certain behavior during the crowd (such as riots, smashing windows and throwing stones) where one person takes the initiative and others follow, and behaviors such as sacrificing personal interest for the collective interest appear.
Suggestion is the mechanism through which infection is transmitted. Strong chants make the unconscious racist. The crowd becomes homogeneous, flexible, and receptive to the suggestions of its strongest members. Those who lead the march, crowd, or demonstration can, with their loud voices, lead and direct the group. A large demonstration can be largely predetermined by their leadership.
If Le Pen were a contemporary of us, he would have added the effect of the media and social media on making what is ugly acceptable and allowing individuals to feel societal protection without the crowd gathering, so words and language decline, as the writer describes.
Dr. Amani Fouad also wrote under the title “Who Makes Awareness”?
Usually those who create awareness are a middle class of teachers, university professors, writers and journalists, who transfer ideas from an abstract superior value produced by thinkers to a pragmatic value that reaches its realization at the level of behavior, and when the culture of that class declines, the general culture declines because they are the class that maintains collective awareness, It is formed from the beginning of the small family as a unit to all classes and segments of society.
Since the advent of the era of the image (cinema and television) and the prevalence of viewing culture, artists (actors and singers), athletes, and talk show stars have contributed to creating and shaping awareness as well.
In the contemporary instant, the awareness of young people is being formed through what is presented on television, cinema and all social media, including what these works and videos sometimes contain of parasitic models that are strange to the older generations, but they attract the younger generations for their violation of the prevailing and traditional. The hero, his general appearance and what he wears, presents a strange pattern about how he thinks and behaves when confronted by events, what are his dreams and ambitions, what he hears from songs and how he treats his family, friends and lover, the way he speaks and the vocabulary he uses, what he possesses, does he belong to something and feel By his identity?
Music and songs also contribute to the formation of awareness and the nature of the general mood of young people, which penetrates their conscience, feelings and taste from the melodies and words of the songs they hear.
As a politician, I thought about what the two writers say, and about the chaos of shaping the consciousness of Egyptian society. Why did these models appear, are they an expression of the reality of the societal conscience, or are they a methodology for its formation?
Political experience says that any political or emotional vacuum in society will be filled with something. For example, the state, over the years, has not succeeded in providing services that I consider rights in health care, education, transportation and housing, so what happened?
Primary health care was owned by the Brotherhood in mosques and had access to the heart of Egyptian families.
Over the years, the state has failed to achieve the goals of education, so private lessons have spread and society has divided into groups that are able to learn with superstitious amounts of money with a loss of identity, and the majority are unable to
It is claimed that she learns for free and that she pays the costs of education outside the state system, and the vision of education that was announced to the community is not implemented.
What happened in the means of transportation that the state did not provide, or did not keep pace in its size with the alarming population increase, filled with tuk-tuks and servers..
The void that occurred due to the lack of planning for construction was filled by slums until most of the residents became living in them.
Likewise, the cultural and emotional void is filled with low-key festival lyrics, body-moving music, and low-profile film productions. Here comes the question, how can we move society culturally and create a normal conscience without a publicly integrated vision.
I see efforts being made, but most of them are directed towards prevention and punishment. These are negative efforts that are neither constructive nor sustainable, because people have needs that must be met. If the climate that the government creates in society is not stimulating to the private sector and civil society, with declared rules and incentives borne by the state, then any vacuum will be filled with the chaos of poor service providers, and there is no blame on them. It is filled with political parties, and there is no balance in it between the constitutionally assumed freedoms for political action, which is what creates this void, with fears that the most organized and funded, most likely groups of political Islam, will fill it.
Gentlemen, the songs of festivals and the low level of art and the media are no different from private lessons, slums, or unlicensed tuk-tuks, and confronting this is not done with prevention and punishment, but by creating an atmosphere that allows the energies of society to work, with incentives to fill the voids that we see socially, culturally and politically to build the modern civil Egyptian state. Within the framework of specific governance and rules and standards for all these services, while raising the ceiling of freedoms that allow creativity and innovation in providing these rights.
