Remembering Ahmed Adaweyah: The mutinous voice of Egypt's working class

When was the first time I heard Adaweyah? As a child of the 1980s, it’s impossible to put a finger on the exact date. 

The music of Egypt’s greatest shaabi singer was as ubiquitous as television: it was everywhere, for everyone, at all times. 

It was catchy, unwieldy, and uncommon: unbridled in its sexuality, in its weariness of a changing Cairo, in its defiance to the bourgeois norms of good taste. 

Ahmed Adaweyah was a trailblazer – the man who singlehandedly changed the course of Egyptian and Arab music; the first Arab singer to capture the ethos and struggles and yearnings of the working class; the man who redefined what Egyptian shaabi folk music is and what it could do. 

He was not a “revolutionary” as one writer recently put: he was the “prodigal son” of the Nasserist failed socio-economic project; the child of President Anwar Sadat’s Infitah - the economic liberalisation that began to widen inequalities.

He was one of the most derided cultural figures in post-Nasser Egypt - and one of the most beloved. 

Adaweyah passed away on 29 December at the age of 79 to little fanfare. Little ink was spilt on his legacy in Arabic, and virtually nothing in any foreign language. 

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The scant coverage arguably tells the whole story of Adaweyah – the most influential Arab singer of the past half-century. 

The singer forced his way into the mainstream establishment, but he came from the margins and died in the margins – he was the star Egypt never wished it had. 

Adaweyah was born in June 1945 in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Minya to a livestock dealer father. 

Seven years after his birth, the Egyptian kingdom into which Adaweyah was born would be transformed into the Egyptian Republic. 

For kids like Adaweyah – who had 14 brothers and sisters – class ascension was no pipe dream. In Nasser’s new Egypt, class was a thing of the past, to be legitimately challenged and defied by a rural populace coveting the riches and attractions of urban Cairo. 

Adaweyah was one such dreamer, although class ascension would prove in later years to indeed be a pipe dream. 

He started his Cairo life in 1969 working as a server in local cafes and taking small singing gigs in different spots at the legendary Mohammed Ali Street – the Egyptian working-class answer to Broadway. 

Adaweyah’s big break arrived three years later when he was invited to perform at the wedding anniversary of singer and actress Sherifa Fadel which was attended by a host of the nation’s most prominent musicians, film stars and journalists. 

The manager of the Arizona casino, one of the biggest clubs in Egypt at the time, spotted him and signed him up. 

'An anomaly'

Soon, he would record two LPs with the Sout Al Fann (Voice of Art) label to swiftly become the biggest singing sensation in the country, eclipsing the old guard of Mohammed Abdel-Wahab, Farid al-Atrash, and Abdel Halim Hafez. 

From the get-go, Adaweyah looked like an anomaly in Egypt’s tame music scene. He didn’t have the dashing looks and soft features and demeanor of Hafez and al-Atrash. 

He didn’t possess the chivalrousness of veteran folk singer Mohamed Kandeil or the geniality of Mohamed Roshdy or Moharam Fouad, the shaabi singers who wedded folk to the pop music of the time. 

Adaweyah was a different beast: a scruffy-looking, gruff-sounding vocalist with a raw, brazen sexuality more James Brown than Elvis. 

His music was worlds apart from decorum of Abdel-Wahab and Hafez: his lyrics had little to do with the tame courtships of Roshdy and Fouad or the restrained longing of Umm Kulthum.  

Adaweyah was more carnal, explicit, and coarser. His biggest hits married this sexuality with a fierce social commentary on an Egypt drowning in chaos and confusion. 

The singer was not the voice of the Egyptian working class, he was the working-class. 

The period between the late 1960s and 70s, was one the most fascinating epochs in Egyptian’s modern history: loose censorship, a sexual revolution, and relative political freedom, which was a result of Nasser’s decision to give some breathing room to disaffected masses still reeling from the 1967 defeat. 

This was the period of Egyptian rock band Les Petits Chats; of the transgressive films of Hussein Kamal; of the discordant abstract paintings of Gazbia Sirry, and of Nawal el-Saadawi’s groundbreaking feminist study Woman and Sex. 

The cassette tape revolution

Adaweyah was the defining musical figure of the period; his hedonism often felt like a cry to demolish class barriers and indulge in fleeting sensuous pleasures. 

The emergence of cassette tapes was one another key factor in enhancing the Adaweyah legend. The cassette revolution, and its piracy sub-culture, broke the government monopoly on what could be listened to.

For the first time, it allowed the public to create their own icons.

The cassette revolution, and its piracy sub-culture,  broke the government monopoly on what could be listened to

Prior to Adaweyah, the route for mainstream success for aspiring singers entailed passing a singing examination set out by the national broadcasting organisation – a stamp of approval by the official establishment. 

Music, like all arts and media, was heavily regulated by the government, which decided what Egyptians listened to, watched, and learnt. 

Adaweyah bypassed this route, establishing himself as a pariah flourishing outside the system. 

He was therefore not a state-sanctioned artist but instead an outlier produced in Egypt’s underbelly whose songs were banned for years from public broadcasting. 

His success was an affront of what the state and the intellectual elite designated as good taste: he was a bourgeois nightmare and emblem of the nation’s cultural deterioration. 

The distribution of cassettes tapes would later be regulated by the government, but the new technology was too fluid and accessible for successive Egyptian regimes to control. Their popularity - and by default Adaweyah's - represented a mutiny against a paternalistic regime losing grasp of the Egypt it tried and failed to shape. 

Bourgeois disdain

As a member of Egypt’s self-serving, self-preserving middle-class, listening or professing any admiration for Adaweyah was either a faux-pas or an act of sheer exoticism. 

Adaweyah, we were constantly told, was too vulgar; too base; too “low class”. His dark-skin look was habitually ridiculed by an elite with rigid, racist criteria for beauty.

Abdel Halim Hafez and Mohammed Abdel Wahab expressed their love of Adaweyah during their lifetime, but the press abhorred him, treating him as a clown, or perhaps a fiend. 

Abdel Wahab astutely dubbed Adaweyah as the “the singer the marginalised listen to in public and the intellectuals in secret”. 

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Yet few if any ventured to dissect the aesthetics of his music. Listening to Adaweyah now with an advanced sound system, one is struck by the elaborate production values of his music. 

In Bint Al Sultan (The Daughter of the Sultan), a keyboard melody accompanied by a steady strumming on the darbuka (an Eastern drum) and riq (the Arabic answer to the tambourine) is interrupted by ney (the Middle Eastern flute) and, bizarrely, a horn. 

Accordions and violins join later, as Adaweyah croons the boorish, uninhibited colloquial poetry of Hassan Abu Etman, the great lyricist behind Adaweyah’s most famous tunes. 

The imagery, as in Adaweyah’s best work, is brilliantly concise and striking. There’s the Abbas bridge, the connective tissue between Giza and Cairo, with its endless crowds marching aimlessly into oblivion.

And there are the poorly connected neighbourhoods made inaccessible by an equally poor public transportation network; the reference to Cairo as “his country” in an evocation to the larger-than-life ambience of the capital. 

The imagery is augmented by Adaweyah’s growling voice, unabashedly lusting over his lover whom he likens to “fruits and pineapple”.

In El Sah al Dam Embo, penned by Adaweyah’s other famous frequent collaborator, El Rayes Bira, the mundane action of picking up a baby from the floor becomes a piercing look at the vagaries of parenthood in a country with changing family values. 

In Karkashangy, Adaweyah single handedly reinvents the Egyptian dialect in an utterly nutty telling of a butcher killing his ram, a metaphor for a tyrant using one of his subordinates as a scapegoat for his misdeeds. 

The wild wordplay and staccato recital stand now as a precursor to hip-hop; the dexterity, force and swagger of Adaweyah’s performance is a reminder of why he was once the most charismatic singer in the region. 

In Zahma Ya Dunya Zahma (Crowds, Oh, Crowds) – now a staple item in Egyptian sociology classes – the lyrics of Etman and the bouncy western melodies of great composer Hany Shenouda (composer of the Ramy theme song) capture the suffocating commotion of a godless Cairo lost in Sadat’s abruptly enforced capitalism. 

The portrait Adaweyah paints of Cairo evokes Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit – an inferno impossible to flee. 

With its clashing, jazz-like instrumentation and middle mournful section, Zahma is the sound of apocalyptic glee – a nation dancing to its irreversible ruin. 

This melodic overload, a signature of Adaweyah’s shaabi sound, mirrored the spirit of an unrecognisable Cairo that had become a shadow of its former glorious self: a hotbed of poverty, debilitating noise, and visual violence. 

Adaweyah’s musical project can therefore be seen as a diligent enterprise to find some meaning in the dehumanisation taking over the city; an effort by the invisible working-class for self-affirmation against a classist society trying in vain to maintain a polished image of itself. 

In 1989, Adaweyah’s career came to an abrupt and premature end. A famous accident nearly killed him and left him fighting for dear life for several years. 

The particularities of the incident remain unclear. The long-held myth that Adaweyah had a fling with the daughter of a Saudi prince who consequently castrated him has been repeatedly debunked by the singer and his wife. 

In a televised interview in the noughties, he did confess that a jealous Kuwaiti prince attempted to assassinate him by spiking his whisky with unknown substance (some claimed it was heroin) that caused his coma. 

Adaweyah was never the same again after the incident. His voice greatly suffered; his energy was drained; and Egypt got itself hooked once again to tame, unadventurous pop music, the propagated soundtrack of a reserved middle-class happy to safeguard itself from the vulgar truth with mediocre, hollow entertainment.  

'Godfather' of shaabi music

Today, Adaweyah has been elevated to the ranks of the greats: the venerated godfather of contemporary Egyptian shaabi music. But the shaabi that came in his wake was never as inventive sonically or as penetrating lyrically. 

The Mahraganat, the massively popular electro-shaabi music borne out of the nation’s gutters by similar pirating method, carried Adaweyah’s mantle in its insubordination and defiance of the system; while hip-hop carried the DNA of the legend’s socially conscious discourse.  

The Cairo he left behind is far more apocalyptic, far more segregated, than the one he lived in. 

Adaweyah was battered and punished for upending the governing system

Class barriers that Adaweyah heroically conquered have become more impenetrable. The tumult that defined the post-Nasser capital has become more intense, more deafening. 

The stuttering capitalism of Sadat and Mubarak has morphed into merciless neoliberalism under Sisi, and the gleam of compassion and communal solidarity have vanished in a dog-eat-dog world; with love becoming nothing more than a disposable commodity. 

Adaweyah was battered and punished for upending the governing system; for placing working-class art at the forefront of mainstream culture; for daring to be different. He antagonised the ruling class and invigorated subsequent generations of artists and musicians. 

Most of all, he represented the possible: the possibility of being a free outspoken artist in a restrictive and repressive environment like Egypt. 

Egypt has never witnessed the likes of Adaweyah, and it may never witness an artist of Adaweyah’s ilk again.