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Abstract
This article is an investigation into the different semiotic resources used in three music videos (MVs) of the January 2011 Egyptian revolution by the youth band Cairokee. The three videos (“Voice of Freedom”; “Oh Square”; and “Stand your Ground”), recorded at different periods during the first year of the revolution, portray the shifting sentiments and emotional states of the protesters from euphoria at the beginning of the revolution to disappointment and nostalgia several months later, to a tension between dejection and resoluteness by the end of the first year. I argue here that a full appreciation of the layers of meaning of the three MVs and their visual design can best be established through a multimodal analysis as opposed to focusing only on the lyrical and the musical compositions. Such an analysis is significant as the MVs integrate a number of semiotic modes such as still and moving images, frame, camera angle, spatial organisation in the composition of images, and the gaze, facial expressions and gestures of individuals to create meaning. In my analysis, I use the theoretical framework proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen in their work on visual design and multimodality.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks are due to Dr. Eman El Bakry, musician and an associate professor of English Literature at Ain Shams University, for her lengthy discussion with me on the music composition of the three songs analysed in this paper. Thanks are also due to Cairokee band for permission to reproduce stills from its MVs.
Notes
1. See the band’s website: www.cairokee.com.
2. At the time of finalising this article (June 2014), each of the music videos (MVs) had over 2,500,000 views on YouTube.
3. Information about the band was obtained by the author in an interview with Amir Eid on 11 February 2014. Unfortunately, the other band members were not available. I had communicated by phone with Amir Eid in January and August 2013 to discuss certain aspects of the band’s MVs.
4. Author’s interview with Amir Eid on 11 February 2014.
5. Aida El Ayoubi is an Egyptian female singer who became popular in the 1990s. She stopped singing on the birth of her first child, and on wearing the hijab. In 2009, she started singing again, mainly national and religious songs.
6. Zap Tharwat (Ahmed Tharwat) is a young Egyptian rapper and song composer, who started his career in music in 2009. He has collaborated with Cairokee in a number of songs, and frequently appears with the band in their live performances.
7. Author’s interview with Amir Eid on 11 February 2014.
8. The band’s dedication of the MV on YouTube (my translation).
9. See Bloor and Bloor (Citation2004) for a discussion and application of Halliday’s functional grammar. Also see Forceville (Citation1999) for a detailed discussion of Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, and Oleksiak (Citation2012) for a review of Kress’s (Citation2010) Multimodality.
10. The lyrics from the songs are my translation from the Arabic original.
11. See Arduino’s CNN interview with the band, 19 February 2011.
12. See Keraitim and Mehrez (Citation2012) for a discussion of the revolution as a mulid or carnival.
13. A reading of the poem was uploaded by the rapper on YouTube on 8 February 2011, two days before Sout El Horeya. Along with the reading, we see images of the protesters in Tahrir.
14. See Kress and van Leeuwen (Citation2006) for a discussion on the independence of images.
15. To the right of Sheikh Emad Efffat, part of a photograph with the handwritten statement “gada‘ ya basha” is a reminder of the eye sniper of the Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud, and intertextually relates this MV to the MV of Ya Al Midan.