You just arrived in Egypt. You hop on a microbus, and there’s a good chance a Hamo Bika track is blaring. The driver is in his twenties and has a few pounds folded behind his ear. His pinky nails are kept long, and hair shaved on the sides with the top blow-dried straight, curling slightly at the ends. It’s impossible to pinpoint his every detail. It’s nighttime, and the car is lit by a series of LED strings that tether between a neon blue to purple then pink. The dashboard is covered by a mountain of stickers, if not, it’s hiding behind a synthetic fur that either he or his friend in the passenger seat beside him are constantly dusting off. The sound system is almost deafening, but it’s not designed for you or me. It’s for the ‘Shabab el Famous’: the microbus driver and his friend—the backbone of Mahraganat, after its musicians of course. The genre might have been banned last year, but it's rifeness has yet to be stifled. It can’t be. This isn’t the first storm its pioneers and fans have weathered. Like Rai and Hip-Hop, Mahraganat is rooted in the adversity of urban life, originating in the slums of Cairo—in particular Salam City. If it’s not the state violating musicians’ artistic freedom, it’s that the birthplace of Mahraganat is also home to exorbitant unemployment rates, terrible school systems, and a hotbed for addiction. So, like Rai and Hip-Hop, Mahraganat is raw, gritty, provocative, and subversive; characteristics that are responsible for its rise as much as its fall. But you don’t have to be from Salam City or fall within the ‘Shabab El Famous’ archetype to enjoy hits like ‘Bint el Jiran’. Since its release in 2019, the Hassan Shakosh track counts over 478 million views on YouTube and over 9 million streams of Spotify. Since 2011, after a revolution toppled Hosni Mubarak’s regime and paved the way for a more socially-conscious artistic expression, Mahraganat artists like Alaa Fifty (who took on his stage name after Fifty Cent), Shakosh, and Sadat attracted tens of thousands of fans into stadiums and concert halls. If you step into any wedding venue, Mahraganat, which is also loosely called Electro Shaabi, has replaced the classic tunes of the Arab world’s past. It’s heard on the tuk-tuks blazing through the city’s narrow alleys, but hardly in the BMWs and Range Rovers of Cairo’s elite. Albeit, they might nod their heads and sway their hips to its frantic drums and electronic-infused beats if ever it plays at a bar they frequent. They might even repeat its auto-tuned lyrics, but the line is frequently drawn at bumping it through car speakers, because that’s too ‘bi2a’—that’s Egyptian for ‘hood’. “This type of music is based on promiscuous and immoral lyrics, which are completely prohibited, and as such, the door is closed on it,” Hani Shaker, a musician of his own right and the head of Egypt’s Musicians Syndicate declared last February upon announcing the organization’s state-sponsored ban on Mahraganat. “We want real art,” he said in an interview, as if only his love-drenched lyrics and slow, violin-heavy tunes qualified as such. The ban came two days after a Valentine’s Day concert held by Hassan Shakoush and Omar Kamal inside a 100,000-seat Cairo Stadium, filled to capacity. The setlist included Bint el Jiran, a track whose lyrics bear a mention of alcohol and hashish. That, of course, was deemed far too vulgar and an impossible representation of an Arab society. The verse hadn’t stopped the genre from making its way past borders, repeatedly played at Berlin clubs, London bars, and at Lebanese protests. It didn’t stop Mahraganat from being repeatedly played in Egyptian homes. But it led to a spokesperson for the Egyptian parliament to deem Mahraganat more of a danger to Egypt than coronavirus. What was proclaimed more dangerous than a virus of pandemic proportions falls beyond a mention of drugs and alcohol, though. It’s more or less the core of Mahraganat: lyrics that characterize the reality of Egypt’s marginalized communities, a reality that includes poverty, drug use, sex, obscene words, as well as discussions of family dynamics, love, and attraction. And while that may not be up to par with representations of Arab cultures in state-regulated cultural productions and the eulogies of the bourgeoisie, it is undeniably an Arab narrative.