Turning Rhymes into Dimes: Intermediaries in the Egyptian Rap World

Over the past five years, Egyptian rap has achieved unprecedented commercial success. Much has been written about how “new school” rappers and producers were able to create a sound that resonates with a broader public than their predecessors. Conversely, music, marketing, and advertisement professionals who played an integral part in these artists’ careers have received limited attention. This paper follows in American sociologist Howard Becker’s footsteps by analyzing “not the genesis of innovations, but rather the process of mobilizing people to join in a cooperative activity on a regular basis” (Becker, 2008: 310). It sets the framework for a history of the Egyptian rap world centered on “commercial bets” (Hammou, 2012).

Many of these intermediaries (Lizé, Naudier, and Roueff, 2011) began their careers as musicians in the nascent “underground” scene of the 2000s before joining labels, advertising agencies, marketing departments, or streaming platforms. I suggest that they subsequently leveraged the social and cultural capital acquired during their musical and corporate careers to give “new school” rappers access to previously unattainable resources, spaces, and publics.

I attempt to analyze the practices of intermediaries in the current configuration of the Egyptian rap world without succumbing to a normative discourse on the “commodification” of art. I distinguish between aesthetic interventions, where intermediaries attempt to stage their version of authenticity, and strategic interventions that seek to “rationalize” the management of an artists’ career through knowledge production. I claim that these actors are not only intermediaries who insert the Egyptian rap world into global value chains by making it intelligible, predictable, and exploitable (Tsing, 2015), but full-fledged participants who shape rap songs and videos through their many mediations (Henion, 1993).