While the debate about the songs of festivals escalates and the media is divided between supporters and opponents, the Egyptian poet and critic Yusri Hassan decided to deal with the matter in a different way, and he worked on collecting these songs, analyzing their content and looking beyond their owners in a book called "Cheering the forgotten."

The 243-page book by Dar Battana for Publishing and Distribution in Cairo bears the sub-title "Songs of Festivals ... From Slums to Children of Sisters."

Initially, the author explains how the idea of ​​the book came to him after the songs of festivals surrounded him in stores and means of transportation, and reached his house and took over the ears of his younger son. He said, "My goal was to discover, know and analyze ... not to make judgments of any kind."

The book describes it as "ijtihad that may be mistaken and may be right. The important thing is that someone has tried to present something, even if it is simple about a phenomenon that he sees as worthy of research and reflection." Although he is not a social researcher, the author tries to investigate the roots of the phenomenon and know its origins, which he traced back to before 2011, unlike the media circulator, as many stuck to the popular uprising that toppled the rule of the late President Hosni Mubarak within some aspects of chaos at the time.

He said about her origins, "No one has the right to specify the time or place in which the songs of the festivals appeared accurately or rigorously, there are those who say that they started from Mataria, and who says they are from the city of peace, and even those who say that they started from Fayoum, and if I doubt this story of Fayoum and consider it Just (Effie) ... but it is likely that it started before the January 2011 revolution, maybe five years or more. ”

Before delving into the reasons for the emergence of festival songs, the author distinguishes between festive songs and folk songs, saying that the first is the daughter of informal settlements that arose on the outskirts of cities or outside them, which differ in their demographics and characteristics from traditional folk areas.

It summarizes the reasons for the emergence of festive songs in nine points, the most prominent of which is "the desire to revolt against everything that is official or firm or celebrated, and the ease of making these songs" without a studio or even a composer and the "technological revolution" represented in the ability to post any content via YouTube ».

As for the main reason from his point of view, it is that the festivals' singers, “When they went to their people, they went as they are with their camels, I mean, people found people among them presenting festivals to them, living their lives, dressing in the same clothes, speaking like them and singing to them in a language close to them even if they were filled with verbal abuse” .

The author tries to define that type of song: “Festivals are not one. Rather, a single band cannot hold them with a fixed line that distinguishes them from others.”

One of the performers of these songs is quoted by the reason for calling them festivals, “because the music that I sing about expresses the state of the lyrical festival, and also because of the possibility of more than one singer participating in one song.”

And then the author is exposed to the names of the teams, some of which seem strange, such as (Al-Dakhlawi), (Al-Madfaya), (Rockets) and (Speck to Beck). On the simple occupations that they have practiced before singing, some of them worked as a butcher, including the driver, the blacksmith, the barber, and the coffee shop.

Models do not scratch modesty

The bulk of the book is devoted to presenting the content of the festivals songs, some of which deal with analysis and reading, knowing that the author chose the least scratched forms of modesty, as these songs are filled with harassment words and crude insinuations.

The book also addresses a phenomenon that has emerged from the heart of the slums, whose language comes at times sound Arabic and at other times colloquial, as its style came sarcastic, which may be due in part to the nature of the personality of the author, and in part to the nature of the subject.

The book deals with a phenomenon that has emerged from the slums.

No one has the time to determine the songs of the festivals.