glee by the protestors and were incredibly important to the protesters. According to professor and musician Mark Levine who was on Tahir square during the upheaval, it gave the public adrenaline and new hope when Ramy took the best of chants and slogans and incorporated them in his music. His song became representation and a commodity, going viral on YouTube and Huffington post before being picked up by CNN and the TV networks around the globe.

Ramy Essam documented a piece on Aljazeera claiming that his “music and politics were fused together” similar to all the other artists of the revolution. In Egypt music and action were braided into new forms of revolutionary practice, repeated call for dignity and to awaken people’s sense of radical possibility. This is very apparent if you watch the interactions between musicians and crowds at street protests. In this perspective, people have basic human needs for identity, security and recognition. When the state lacks institutions to provide for these needs and protect human rights, people become angry.

“Irhal” and “Rais Lebled” reflect two entirely different ways in which music impacts revolutionary events. El Général never performed his song live during the Revolution. Indeed, it was Essam’s physical presence in Tahrir during the key fighting, his literal embodiment of the struggle that helped make “Irhal” the anthem of the revolution. “If I were just a singer coming to the square and then leaving, it wouldn’t have had the same impact,” Essam believes. It was his physical presence, his performance of what I have elsewhere described (with Bryan Reynolds) as “theater of immediacy,” that overcame any possibility of government control or repression of the music, the message or the messengers. Essam explained to me that “my job is to listen to all the things Egyptians are saying, distill them into their essence, and share it as widely as possible.