Camouflage and Confrontation: The Trajectories of Musicians Cairokee and Ramy Essam in post-Tahrir Square Egypt

Abstract

This study examines the music videos of two prominent musicians of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Cairokee and Ramy Essam. Furthermore, it charts the career trajectories of these two musicians and the changes in their artistic output as they go through the aftermath of that revolution up until the present day. Through a long term, multi-modal, close reading analysis, this study asserts that the two artists have slowly diverged from their common start at the beginning of the protests and Tahrir Square, Cairokee moving in a more commercial direction as a sort of camouflage for their political views and activism and Ramy Essam continuing to directly confront the Egyptian state in his music after his exile from Egypt. Furthermore, this study asserts that these divergent results were in part the result of the different class backgrounds the subject artists came from.