• Can you give me a brief background about yourself and your work?

 

 

            My name is Shady Ahmed I have been playing music and writing music for the past twelve years as part of bands and as well as my solo project, the last year I have started to play and record music in Arabic which is something I have not done in the previous years and I’m taking it bit by bit to see where it goes.

 

• So through those years have you encountered any difficulties or restrictions on your music by officials or by people?

 

Me not so much in terms of music that I write, because being an underground musician means that you get the freedom to pretty much say whatever you want because there is not a lot of people listening to it anyway but then the more popular you become the more people start listening to you and the more you have to pay attention to what you are saying. Because you can be an underground band and you can be a popular underground band and then a lot of people would be interested in what your are saying and the minute that happens you have to have that social responsibility what your music should reflect and what you wanted to say. In a perfect world everybody gets to say and do whatever they want but I knew people who had certain restrictions, governmental, on certain things they said on stage that were kind of profound upon that they shouldn’t say that or it is not nice to say that so you are not allowed to perform for about a year maybe, and some bands because the way they acted they were banned by certain occasions so this cultural stigma of what music should be and the moment that someone does something different it becomes strange. It is what people fear because they don’t understand what it is. And then there is the social stigma of people who are actually listening to the music. Egyptians are really sensitive and the minute that they hear something that they do not agree with they don’t specifically say, oh! This is art and it is supposed to express something other than what I believe, people tend to take it personally for some reason the minute you start to say something they disagree with, they start disagreeing with you in person not as an opinion. That is a level of disagreement as well as restriction as you said. So there is the whole ethical and moral bit of restriction that the public demands and there is the governmental and the social restrictions.

 

• So like the governmental restriction are put more when the song is about politics or like about change?

 

It just depends on what is popular at the time, because sometimes you know it becomes popular to sing for change, so the minute you start talking about change they clap for you but when it is unpopular and what they are trying to sell to everyone is stability it becomes unpopular. So it changes every time depending on the cultural aspect of the country. So like the time the Muslim brotherhood was there the more you sang about change the more they clapped for you.

 

• So what you are saying is that there are no basic restrictions?

Well, if you want to break it down to something specific its more or less the narrative of what the government wants to sell people and if you are with it you’re great if you are not then you are not.

 

• So it is an agenda rather than systematic restrictions?

 

Absolutely.

 

• Is there a certain practical situation that happened with other bands like you stated, what did that band do so they can put restrictions on them?

 

A couple of years ago seeing a band and they were one of the very first bands to play music and perform, and all their music was Salah Shahin or Ahmed Fouad Negm very revolutionary words, at a certain time they had a song called “Istanbul” it is sort of this sarcastic imaginary about this character playing chess with the sultan, set in Istanbul but more or less talking about Egypt, they were performing the song on the very day Alaa Mubarak was getting married. Then the lead singer El Sherbiny said “today the son of the sultan is getting married” in these sort of venues there are a lot of police there for protection or actually to monitor so, as soon as he said this I can’t remember if they were took off stage or were allowed to finish but after they were banned for a year not perform so they weren’t allowed to play live anywhere for a specific amount of time I’m not sure for how long. Then you have certain promotions like Sakya that promotes certain things so if you go and do something out of the norm from them you are banned and you are not suppose to play there for like a year.

 

• So places also have restrictions?

 

Yeah, there are a lot of things you can do to ban a band like if you damage the stage, but to ban a band because a certain word that is where it becomes open up for debate. If I go on stage and I damage the stage or the instrument that is the least they can do but if you go and you get banned for saying something that is what does not make sense.

 

• I was talking earlier with band members from “Khayal” they talked about that it is hard here in Egypt to be registered in the syndicate for your songs.

 

First of all, you have to understand that the syndicate is a piece of shit, it is not something that helps bands it is just not a very well established thing and it runs on corruption from bottom to end. There is a funny story on how the syndicate goes I don’t think that a lot of musicians know this but I have been privileged to have older friends who have been there for a long time. The syndicate actually “mosanafaat” is what causes trouble for a lot of people but how they actually started was in the 80’s in the scene were there were belly dancers that you see in movies all the time so these belly dancers to stop them from going home with all these rich gentlemen to ban them they put together those “mosanafat” in order to put control over them. In the mid 80’s there was an Islamic boom so all those belly dancers started to disappear so instead of dissolving them they kept them there. They started to go after musicians just to keep getting money because it was all based on hush hush money, I’d pay you this to let me do what I want.  I have been playing music for a long time and I don’t carry a syndicate card. Those people stalk websites to see where people would perform and show up and say that he doesn’t have a card you should pay me to be quiet or there is another case where he has a card but he is playing the show for free and they ask for 10 percent, which is absurd because you are not making money but you pay. I once was performing and the band that was before me was playing and the dude came up and said that they would not be able to finish the show, they actually went on and the dude was settled outside. I personally have no respect for them because they weasel their way in just so you can give them an amount of cash. I would gladly pay if I know it was going to the right place.

 

• I wanted to talk about another side of restrictions, so you went to TED X, you first said that you got two x’s when you auditioned for Arabs Got talent because you sung in English so I wanted to ask you is language a restriction that you faced since we are in and Arabic speaking country?

 

I don’t really see it as a restriction cause I never felt bad for my self for singing in English, it was my choice. If I have had chosen another language we would not be having this conversation if I were singing in Indian or Greek nobody will come o the show but English is popular here.

 

• You have also stated that you recorded your album in Dubai, was that because of certain things that stood in your way here or was it easier there?

 

No, I’ve record everything here in Egypt, it was just I won a regional competition and the prize was to basically record an album there. So it was an opportunity rather than preference. And currently I am recording a new Arabic album that I’m going to record here I’m not even thinking of recording in Dubai.

 

• Another question I wanted to ask is whether there are restrictions by broadcast media radio/TV or the censorship board?

 

It is connected, anything banned by the censorship board will not be played in any broadcast media, but sometimes it goes beyond that as well because most of the television and radio stations a privately owned, so it comes to what they allow to be broadcasted. There is that radio station that banned the song “Matloob Zaeem” by Cairokee because of the use of the word “kahzoou” the owner of the station thought that it was not an appropriate word to be used in a song, and there was this woman who worked as a presenter and she believed in the song. There was a time when she thought that the song spoke in a lot of ways so she played the song and in return she got fired. So this is like a personal restriction that we talked about earlier. You can be singing about politics indirectly but they would take you and give you a hard time for a while and they can charge you and put you in jail, and they’ll want you to feel grief so you would stop playing. And those are just factors of living in a police state where there exists the emergency law.