Shobra El General Puts the Street Back Into Mahraganat on ‘I Want to Pay the Rent’

This review is also available in Arabic.

At the start of every month, I transfer my share of the rent to my roommate, who then sends it to the owner of the apartment we rent under a yearly lease – one that’s renewable, with the rent increasing according to “developments.” The moment I get the transfer confirmation on the morning of the first day of the month, I light a cigarette and start mapping out my expenses, which have become increasingly complicated and painfully stripped down across many categories amid the current global crisis brought on by war.

Every day, I play a mental game of self-persuasion, trying to accept this new austerity by telling myself everyone is caught up in it. No matter our class differences, we’re all under the same Middle Eastern sky, going through the same crisis.

But with the nonstop flood of developments and headlines, I can’t stop myself from asking a nosy question: where are the musical releases reflecting this crisis? I find myself boxed in by the basics. While the youth music scene remains divided between love songs and boast tracks, one question keeps forcing itself forward: Will I still be able to pay the rent?

For a musical genre that has always belonged to the street and emerged from it, it’s refreshing to get a mahraganat track that doesn’t ask us to forget reality in order to enjoy it. Singing lyrics written by Ashraf Madani, Shobra El General opens with: “I want to pay the rent,” grounding the song in a burden humanity has carried ever since housing stopped being a right and became a privilege you have to buy.

From there, he moves into the economic pressures we feel so sharply in the streets and in the details of everyday life: the fear of losing shelter, the growing difficulty of securing basic food necessities, and the inability to keep up with monthly financial obligations. All of it comes wrapped in language that feels like an internal monologue, or the kind of repeated daily conversations we have with strangers we run into on the street.

Shobra shifts back and forth between the personal, the local, the regional, and the global, while maintaining a strong sense of immediacy – almost like a political and economic analyst. But he never sinks into overcomplication. Instead, he frames things in simple bars that don’t try too hard to manufacture a distinct poetic language. As far as he’s concerned, the bottom line is simple: “We’re in deep.”

Alongside this “sha‘balet el-kalam” approach – a reference to late shaabi singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim’s style of simplifying complicated political and social realities – director Ziad Mohamed Ali’s visual style, developed in collaboration with creative director Ali Ashraf Ali, blends scenes following the clip’s protagonist, played by Shobra himself as a repair worker, with street imagery shot in a language that feels native to it. From portraits to medium shots, the visuals revolve around one shared thread: people working day-to-day jobs, earning money hand to mouth. The imagery captures an anxiety rooted in worry and confusion, visible both on their faces and on the face of the protagonist himself.

This is reinforced by the heavy visual presence of basic necessities – bread, vegetables, gas cylinders, transportation, and old apartment buildings with rent-controlled units. Their repeated appearance recalls the strange gravitational pull essential resources and survival needs acquire during times of war and crisis.

Shobra El General composed the track himself, while Maheb Selat produced it with a fast-paced, heavily electronic mahraganat beat. The production captures the contradiction between the overwhelming pace of the protagonist’s day and his inability to fully process what’s happening around him, leaving him with no choice but to drift along with it.

A month before “I Want to Pay the Rent,” Shobra released the mahraganat track “Everything at the Mawlid” with Katy. There too, he explored a state of collective instability spreading through society under the weight of recent pressures – something reflected in crime pages and everyday conversations across all corners of life, from social relations to sports, through a haze of darwasha, a trance-like state of spiritual and mental escape.

Shobra takes that darwasha – the kind people once sought out in moulids as a form of spiritual pleasure – and transforms it into a means of mental escape through physical acts resembling dancing and running deep through crowded or neglected streets, all while chanting disconnected phrases with no clear link between them. The longing for the moulid and its rituals becomes both a necessity and an obsession imposed by the General’s deteriorating state.

“I Want to Pay the Rent” is the kind of work that restores the reputation mahraganat once carried at its birth: the ability to absorb and express the voice of the street with real craftsmanship across its three core tools – language, visuals, and music. On first listen, it may sound like little more than a direct transfer of everyday reality without much interpretation. But sometimes, simply finding a rhythm or structure for our collective exhaustion and confusion – and presenting it exactly as it is – becomes an artistic achievement in itself.