In Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt, Andrew Simon explores how cassette production and related listening habits affected Egyptian society, particularly in the seventies and eighties. Approaching the subject as a history of modern technologies and material culture, Simon quite correctly emphasizes that cassettes and cassette players were a critical form of mass media that predated satellite television and the internet but have received proportionally less scholarly attention.
Simon is particularly interested in the differences between Egyptian “high” and “low” cultures as reflected in these media and is keen to emphasize the significance of often-overlooked artists and producers whose stories have not been well documented. In the context of music cassette production and consumption, the book aims to present a “counter-history” that examines the dialogic interactions between subversive and state-sponsored voices (p. 10). Drawing from an impressive and wide-ranging collection of photographs, newspapers, magazines, ethnographic interviews,...