The Increasing Popularity of Mahraganat Songs in Egypt

  The Increasing Popularity of Mahraganat Songs in Egypt Student Name Institutional Affiliation   The Increasing Popularity of Mahraganat Songs in Egypt Mahraganat is a relatively new music genre in Egypt with strange lyrics from Western and Arabic music. The genre has become popular in the country because it influences and get influenced by social, cultural, economic, technological, and political changes in Egypt, especially following the 2011 revolution (Elshamy, 2013; Zeid, 2019). The genre first started in Cairo before becoming popular among Egyptians, mainly the young generation between middle and high social classes (Prow, 2015). Holslin (2017) presents six videos that prove why Mahraganat is associated with slums and streets, thus attracting negative perception from some urban dwellers. "Mahraganat" is an Arabic word for festivals. The genre originated from Madinat El Salam, lying in the outskirts of Cairo (Simon, 2019). This innovative and creative genre was created by DJ Sadat together with DJ Amr Haha and DJ Figo (Sprengel, 2019; Sánchez García & Feixa Pàmpols, 2019). The genre has gained popularity in the entire country and receives support from YouTube viewers. An example of the music genre is presented by Kia (2012) in a YouTube video that shows how the music is played and what makes it street music. The video shows how rapping and dancing are done, and the video production shows the setup to be in slums. The research will apply both cultural capital theory by Bordieu (Pinxten& Lievens, 2014), and cultural omnivore theory by Peterson (Brisson, 2019) to explain why Mahraganat songs are becoming popular among slum populations in Egypt. The theories explain the negative perception of university students towards Mahraganat since it is associated with slums. The rese...