On the evening of 19 July, Hani Shenouda, composer and conductor, will appear on the stage of the Cairo Opera House with a small group of new and young artists to perform the best songs of El-Masryeen, a band he created in the late 1970s.

El-Masryeen, literally “The Egyptians,” had a short but a very vibrant life. It was launched in 1977 and went out of business in 1988. However, during a single decade and at a time when Egypt had a strong and almost dominating presence of top Arab singers, including Abdel-Halim Hafez who had died earlier in the year, Shadia, Warda, Sabah, and many others, El-Masryeen’s songs, by all accounts revolutionary both in terms of music and lyrics, were instant hits.

Decades before the accessibility that YouTube and social media have created for every release and ahead even of the video clips that gave space and recognition to Egyptian songs, El-Masryeen reached large audiences. Their songs did not feature on the state-run radio and television channels of the time, but they were heard over and over again on the cassette tapes of the 1970s and 1980s.

It is hard for anyone to claim accuracy on the sales of these tapes because in the final decades of the 20th century songs were copied and recopied from one cassette tape to another. One thing is hard to contest though – and that is that El-Masryeen was the benchmark band that every other needed to match.

 With Shenouda himself were Mamdouh Kassem, Hani Al-Azhary, Tahssine Yalmaz, and Iman Younis, performing songs that were written by some of the top writers of the time, including the legendary vernacular poet Salah Jahine.

Despite the fact that the echoes of these songs faded slightly during the 1990s and first two decades of the 2000s, they have made a strong comeback in the past couple of years, following a special performance dedicated to the music of Shenouda in Saudi Arabia and the inclusion of five of the top songs in the soap opera Hala Khassah (Special Case) that was screened on the WatchIt platform in early 2024.

The songs were well liked by the younger generations, people who were born after El-Masryeen’s performances came to an end in 1988. As a result, there has been speculation that Shenouda might re-launch the group with a new group of singers, given that the original members are gone or are off stage for good. In June last year, Shenouda also received the State Appreciation Award.

Speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly earlier this week in his studio, Shenouda denied in no uncertain terms any plans to relaunch El-Masryeen. He said that the group cannot be replicated, relaunched, or rethought today. “It was there, and it had its impact, and that was that – but the music still lives on,” he said with a great deal of certainty.

Shenouda’s musical inventory is much larger than the songs of El-Masryeen and includes film scores for many iconic movies including Faten Hamama’s La Azaa Lel Sayedat (No Condolences for Women), Adel Imam’s Al-Mashbouh (The Suspect), and Gharib fi Beity (A Stranger in My House) featuring Souad Hosni and Nour Al-Sherif.

However, he is not pretending fake modesty when he states that as far as he is concerned “I cannot make a difference between myself and El-Masyreen. Had they not believed in what I wanted to do, there would have been no such thing as Hani Shenouda today.”

Factually speaking, this is untrue, as it was in the 1960s that Shenouda started performing with several bands, essentially playing rock songs, including those of the UK and US groups the Beatles and the Eagles. He joined Les petits chats, the most fashionable band in the country in the middle decades of the 20th century. In his memoirs published in 2020, Shenouda said that prior to his sad and sudden death in March 1977 the iconic Egyptian singer Abdel-Halim Hafez had planned to get Shenouda on board and asked him to compose some songs in the new style that Shenouda was already introducing.

It was after Halim passed away that Shenouda decided to launch El-Masryeen. “I spoke to him. It was clear right from the start that I had a different project. I wanted to change the Egyptian song that was firmly defined in terms of composition of rhythms, with very few exceptions including music composed by Andre Ryder and Ali Ismail,” he said.

When he decided to form a band, the idea was not to sing in the then dominant style, but rather to take the Egyptian song away from a barely evolving style that he thought needed to be challenged.

 “So, I told them I wanted to start a band and that this was my idea, and they just agreed and said let us go,” he recalled of his conversations with other musicians. Al-Azhary and Yalmaz were on the same wavelength as Shenouda. “They believed in what I wanted to do even before I started doing what I had in mind,” he added.

“I think this is a very significant part of the story – not just of El-Masryeen. Having faith in what one is planning to do or planning to join is crucial,” Shenouda said. This is why, he added, it would be impossible to re-launch the band without its founding members, simply because it was the thing that everyone subscribed to.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Prior to launching El-Masryeen, Shenouda had already launched one of today’s most popular singers, Mohamed Mounir.

Mounir made his debut songs with Shenouda, though it took two trials for him to make it with his song Allemouni Einek (Your Eyes Taught Me). Shenouda is also credited for launching another very successful musical career, that of one of today’s best-selling singers, Amr Diab.

According to Shenouda, the sequence counts, and El-Masryeen is part of the sequence.

“The first album I worked on with Mounir kind of flopped – that was late in 1976. A year later El-Masryeen started performing and the albums just sold like hot cakes. Then the company that produced Mounir’s first album called me and said it was time for a second try and so came Allemouni Einek.”

In this sense, he added, it is hard to separate the path of El-Masryeen from that of Shenouda.

There are many ways to qualify the contributions of Shenouda to contemporary Egyptian song. However, most critics would not think twice before saying that he revolutionised the way Egyptian songs were composed and also the way they were heard.

In this respect, many are fond of referring to the statement song of popular singer Ahmed Adawiya, Zahma (Crowded).

In his composition of the music for the song, which literally transformed Adawiya’s career, Shenouda employed drums, bass guitar, and electric guitar, a combination that was not common for this kind of shaabi songs (a form of popular music).

Critics might disagree about the impact of the Shenouda style of music on the larger scene of the Egyptian song. However, they would agree that what Shenouda offered when he launched El-Masryeen was bound to continue one way or the other, with or without the band but luckily with Shenouda himself.

The revolution that Shenouda introduced was not just about the music, which was liberated from the traditional forms, but also about the lyrics that “had to match the music in being revolutionary too.”

“A song like Bahebbek La, Mehtaglek Ah (I Don’t Love You but I Need You) was certainly a challenge to the dominate norms used in describing the woes of love. I thought it was time for lyrics that spoke the minds of the generation of the time,” Shenouda said

However, the most revolutionary thing about El-Masryeen was the band itself. Egypt, and for that matter the other Arabic-speaking countries, were not in the habit of producing Western-style bands. And those who were in the habit of listening to Western bands were not expecting to come across such an Egyptian band.

“True, there were not other bands like it beforehand, not a band like El-Masryeen anyway,” Shenouda said. This, he added, was a challenge.

“Because the idea of a band of this sort was far from common, most recording companies were quite apprehensive about endorsing what we were up to. They just did not grasp what I had in mind,” he said. He added that he eventually got an initial okay from the company Sawt Al-Qahera.

“They told me that they would allow us to play, and if they liked the songs, we would record them, but if they did not like the songs there would be no recording,” he recalled. “I understood that they did not understand the kind of music I was trying to put out,” he added.

At Sawt Al-Qahera, El-Masryeen started performing Yesaad Messaki ya Hayah (Good Afternoon Life). The lack of syncronisation in the performance, Shenouda remembered with a smile, was quite confusing for the team from Sawt Al-Qahera.

“I used the canon technique, which was not customary then, and they were just sitting there getting perplexed,” he said. Eventually, however, to the joy of Shenouda and the rest of the band, it was decided that the recording was on. Even so, during the course of the recording, there were still questions from the studio team.

QUESTIONS

One curious question came with the recording of El-Masryeen’s most famous song Matehseboush ya Banat En Al-Gawaz Raha (Girls Don’t Think Marriage is Easy).

At the beginning of the song, Shenouda employs the thick and deep voice of Mamdouh Kassem to speak the early lines of the lyrics. This was again perplexing for the studio team, who could not understand the purpose of having such a thick and deep voice talking on and off throughout the song.

“They did not like the voice, and they just did not find it to be a good voice, according to the norms they subscribed to. However, this was only because this kind of voice is very hard to find in countries with warm weather,” Shenouda said. What was a gem for Shenouda was considered odd at the time.

Throughout the recording of the first album, considered by many critics the most successful and most memorable album of El-Masryeen, Shenouda had to do a lot of explaining. This was not something that he minded, however. For this convinced and committed musician, explaining was fine, but interfering was just not part of the script.

As far as Shenouda was, and is still, concerned, he was not out there to appease the common taste or to follow market norms. He was there with a vision that he wanted to share, and for him to share his vision he needed to be liberated from pressure and intervention.

“I had to do the music that I wanted to do in the way I wanted to do it,” he said. He added that this was perhaps one key reason why the songs were very successful and why they have aged so gracefully.

In this sense, Shenouda agreed, the songs he worked on with El-Masryeen were and still are revolutionary because almost half a century down the road the songs still stand out and still sound fresh.

However, back in the late 1970s, Shenouda was not thinking about the shelf-life of his songs. He was not thinking that they might become démodé. “I was not thinking anything or expecting anything. I was just doing the thing I believed I wanted to do,” he said.

The success and longevity of the songs is something that Shenouda said could not just be attributed to his music, ground-breaking as it is. There was also, he said, the lyrics that were both witty and profound.

“I am willing to argue that any of the songs could be perceived in so many ways and at so many levels,” he stated. “The meanings of the songs are just absolute, and this is one reason they have survived the test of time.”

Over the past few days, Shenouda has been busy working with two new singers, Mona Al-Attar and Seif Khaled, to get them to do a selected list of songs from the discography of El-Masryeen.

He said he is generally happy with their talent and performances. However, he adds that this does not mean that he has any intention of working with these two young singers to re-launch the band that he created some 50 years ago.

“It is just not in the works,” he said.

 Back in the late 1970s, Shenouda decided to give his embryonic band the name of El-Masryeen out of pride in his Egyptian identity. Today, he is happy to see packed houses for every performance he gives and to see and feel the kind of engagement the audience, from different age brackets, is having with the songs.

This, he said, is not just about nostalgia, but is mostly about the revolutionary meanings that the songs are projecting.

Shenouda is happy with the new interest in the music of El-Masryeen, and he is counting on the evolution of technology to keep this heritage alive. He said that he is happy to learn that many young people who are listening to the songs for the first time, as they were when watching Hala Khassa, have come to memorise them and to clamour for more songs by the band.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly