INTRODUCTION
The project began by paying attention to the spread of rap music on social networking sites and various musical platforms, and its reflection on the Egyptian street, and then trying to analyze this spread, mentioning its social, political, and cultural factors, which cannot be ignored, in addition to following the project of every rapper as a leader on the scene at some point, and to emphasize the connection of these songs to their authors as writers, as rap, in particular is not separate from literature, as it is writing in a different way, which certainly depends on musical factors that contribute to its final form as a song, but its author is a writer who relies on a specific or general issue, and uses the mechanisms of writing literature to present a story through a poem!
I seek to find the idea on which each rapper’s project is based through extrapolation – i.e. re-reading each song as a short story or a blog post interested in something – in addition to that, I try in my book to compare the musical scenes with each other, the Egyptian with the Arabic, and the Arab scene as a whole with the global, in terms of the circumstances of emergence and motives, even to what the producers of these scenes have reached.
The book maintains its locality and approaches each surge with the one that followed it. During the first surge (2003 – 2007), the first singers appeared who relied on their writing and their limited capabilities in the music industry, and they succeeded in appearing in a small way. Then came the second surge (2009 – 2014) which brought a renewed appearance of pioneers after a break, in addition to the emergence of new names carrying more vibrant ideas, which succeeded in attracting greater attention with the beginnings of the rise of music platforms and social networking sites after the Arab Spring. Then came the most famous and mature surge beginning in 2017, which marked the beginning of the rise and spread of Trap Music as a musical genre emerging from Rap.
Therefore, we all have to pay attention to the fundamental difference between them, in addition to the deeper spread in the listener’s life of social networking tools and musical platforms, which contributed to paying attention to these artistic projects and including them in the general music scene and then adopting them as a special musical style that made its way to the forefront. This book attempts to ask critical questions about the reasons and to analyze the spread that began slowly many years ago and then came to prominence. This stands at the threshold of artistic projects and analyzes the reasons for the popularity of each artistic project independently. Tracing the social landscape and recorded marks is one of the reasons I wrote this book as a chronicle of what came previously.
Sayed Abdelhamied Egyptian Author and Journalist. Works As Freelance Writer With Egyptian and Arabic Magazines and Websites, Published 4 Books, “Lara” Short Stories -2019-
“Depression between living and suicide” Article Book -2020
“A passenge woman and alone man” Novel -2021-
” The Street’s Art” Critical study about Egyptian Rap and Music
-2024-
SULFUR 