Ramy Essam, the singer who is known as the bard of the Egyptian revolution, stood on a street corner near Washington Square Park last Thursday evening, waiting for his friends to finish debating the best way to get to Harlem. It was Essam’s first visit to New York, and he was due uptown in less than an hour for his first proper American gig, at Silvana. “Whatever you guys decide,” Essam said quietly, as he handed off his guitar and scoured his iPhone for messages.
Essam, who is twenty-seven years old, is typically warm and effusive, but at the moment he bore the brooding manner of a nineties rocker, and he was dressed like one, too: a cut-off denim jacket, tight black pants, leather boots with laces untied. (His musical influences, he says, are Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, and the Egyptian composer Sayed Darwish.) His hair, which is long, black, and wavy, draped around his face like a shroud, a style that Essam had resumed only recently. In March of 2011, less than a month after Hosni Mubarak stepped down as President, prodded in part by crowds in Tahrir Square singing Essam’s anthem “Irhal” (Leave), Essam was arrested by the military and tortured for hours in a room at the Egyptian Museum. “They pulled on my hair while they beat me,” he recalled. “When it was over, I cut it all off. For years I had a hair phobia. I had it cut every two weeks.”
Essam’s tour of America—after New York he was scheduled to travel to Washington, Los Angeles, and Boston—comes as he prepares to release his first new album in years, in January. Called “Forbidden,” the album includes a song lionizing the student movement that constituted the activist prelude to Tahrir Square, and will be accompanied by a single titled “The Age of the Pimp,” a searing attack on the country’s current leader, the former general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Since seizing power in a coup, in 2013, Sisi has overseen an often brutal crackdown on civil liberties and human rights that critics have compared to the worst abuses of the Mubarak era. Unlike the rest of his new material, Essam refuses to play the Sisi song in public before its formal release date. “I know that Sisi will not like it,” he said with a grin earlier in the day, during a presentation at New York University. “He will be very angry about it.”
Moustafa Aamer, an Egyptian friend of Essam’s who now lives in New York, walked over and suggested taking his S.U.V. to the Harlem show. “Let’s do it,” Essam said.
Inside the car, he folded his long body into the back seat and resumed tinkering with his phone. “I haven’t had service in a day and a half, so I have like a hundred messages.”
Until recently, Essam hardly used social media, preferring to express his activism in person. (Many of his songs take their lyrics from words he heard chanted or exclaimed at protests.) But the past few years have increasingly forced him into the virtual world. After Sisi came to power, Essam struggled to find spaces where he could perform in Cairo; his friends discouraged him from attending large protests out of fear that he would be targeted by the authorities. (He often participated by releasing new songs on YouTube at the scheduled time of demonstrations.) Then, a few months ago, Essam reluctantly accepted an invitation from the Swedish government to spend two years there studying music. “It’s a chance to develop myself and learn more about my art,” he said, although he acknowledges that the detour is also providing a retreat from three discouraging years of protest. “People get tired and they want to take a rest, reboot, refresh,” he said. “Then they come back again.”
Essam intends to go back to Egypt as well, and he is sensitive to charges that he has abandoned the revolution by moving to Sweden or going on concert tours. “It’s very complicated,” he said. “On the one hand, the fact that some people say that if Ramy is not here, there is no revolution—that means a lot to me, of course. But I also don’t want them to be disappointed. I want them always to have hope.” Earlier, at N.Y.U., he had said, “I hope something will happen in the streets of Egypt again soon. I just want them to wait for me.”
In the meantime, he was enjoying the Cairo-like disorder of New York (“Sweden is so clean, so orderly”), as well as the fact that his fame appeared to have preceded him. A few days earlier, when he first arrived in New York, Essam had stopped by a T-Mobile store in midtown to purchase a SIM card, and the cashier recognized him from his appearance in “The Square,” last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary about Egypt after the revolution. “He wanted to take a picture with me,’” Essam said. “And he wasn’t even Egyptian!”
In the West Village, Aamer’s S.U.V. got stuck behind an ambulance, and one of the passengers jumped out to help navigate a reverse, through a busy intersection. Mark LeVine, a musician and Middle Eastern history professor who had helped to coordinate Essam’s visit, exhaled anxiously and checked his watch. “We should have taken the subway,” he grumbled.
When Essam arrived at Silvana, a few blocks from the campus of Columbia University, he made his way to a basement room filled with the smells of felafel and water-pipe smoke. A small crowd of admirers was waiting for him—some young Egyptian students, a few friends from Cairo, a trio of activists from Burkina Faso. His voice was raw from two days of singing at small gatherings and, as he took the stage, he asked for some water. “I have some experience with this from the eighteen days” of Tahrir, he said later. “Playing the same songs over and over, with no water, no breaks, no sleep. I think I can handle a nice bar, and a fancy university.” He smiled widely, and started to play.
