Shaabi baby | El Sah El Dah Embo (1973)
Egyptian Wedding, 1970s As Ahmed records the track, everyone in the studio is convinced it's destined to become a hit; accordingly, Montaser prints 1,000 copies and gives five freebies to the shop below his office. He later notices a crowd has gathered around the shop, which turns out to be a collection of random folks listening over and over to the soon-to-be hit single. By midnight, the first pressing of 1,000 has sold out. A new, urban, as-yet-unnamed genre is emerging in early '70s Cairo: shaabi. Ahmed immerses himself in its incipient culture, studying Mohamed Abdel Muttalib, Shafiq Galal, Mohamed al-Izabi, and Mohamed Rushdi, who all, according to James R. Grippo, "tirelessly work the [Cairo] nightclub circuit." Grippo distinguishes between two distinct shaabis. The word literally means folk, traditional, and popular, and the OG traditional folk is rural, based in longstanding oral tradition, passed down "by hereditary musicians." The mawwal is presuma