Egyptian Hip-Hop: Expressions from the Underground

Cairo Papers in Social Science Vol. 34, No. 1

This ethnographic study of the Egyptian underground hip-hop scene examines the artists who collectively molded the scene and analyzes their practices and explores how these artists have interacted with and responded to political and social upheaval and change. It reveals how rappers approached and reformulated the genre in times of revolution and stasis to reveal how rap acts as a multi-layered form of expression. More specifically, it examines the location of the art form within the broader history of oppositional cultural expression in Egypt, outlining the artists' oppositions to various hegemonic structures and critically deconstructing them to reveal that they often reflect dominant ideology.