By Carla Angili
Deep down the rabbit hole, following that white rabbit into the history of Egyptian music, I started to realize that this wasn’t really a story about musical evolution. Not exactly.
It was a story about power. About who got to decide what counted as “real” Egyptian music. Who was considered legitimate. Who got a microphone, a recording contract, a place on the radio, and who was told to take their music somewhere else and make a living.
There were musicians whose music was dismissed as vulgar, unsophisticated, uneducated. Music that belonged to the streets, to weddings, to cafés, to people who apparently didn’t have the right credentials to define the sound of their own country.
And then something changed.
Musicians figured out that they didn’t necessarily need permission anymore. They could go straight to the people. Find an audience on their own terms. Make music outside the walls of the institutions that had spent decades deciding what Egyptian music was supposed to sound like.
So this is that little journey: a chronological history of changing musical authority in Egypt, told the way history is often best understood, not through the people who claimed to control it, but through the songs themselves.
Not because everything that came before Al Jeel was somehow ancient, and everything that came after was suddenly new. History is rarely that tidy. It’s messier than that, and usually much more interesting.
But Umm Kulthum sits at the center of something extraordinary, a moment when Egyptian music had accumulated an almost unbelievable amount of cultural authority around a relatively small circle of singers, composers, orchestras, radio stations, and institutions.
Music in Egypt wasn’t merely entertainment. It was part of the machinery of national identity. The soundtrack to a country figuring out who it was.
And then there was radio. Radio mattered enormously. If you controlled what came through the speakers, you had a pretty good seat at the table when it came to deciding what the nation itself was going to hear.
And so musical legitimacy acquired gatekeepers. It wasn’t simply a question of whether people liked a song. Popularity alone wasn’t enough.
The more interesting question was, Was this music worthy of being heard?
Who got onto the radio? Who got recorded? Who was considered serious? Who was respectable? And, perhaps most importantly, who got to decide?
Umm Kulthum sits at the absolute center of that world.
And in 1964, with “We Daret El Ayam,” you’re hearing not just a great song by one of the great singers. You’re hearing the sound of an institution at the height of its power.