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Music, Egypt
Aestheticised, algorithmised and appropriated: Welcome to the ‘habibification’ of house music
Text Mai El Mokadem
A girl is twirling in front of a DJ booth near Petra. She’s wearing wrap-around Miu Miu sunglasses, a slinky white tank top, and a scarf loosely tied around her hips, coin-embellished, obviously. There’s body glitter in the hollow of her collarbone. She has an Eye of Horus tattoo peeking out from under her ribcage. Behind her: speakers, sandstone, and influencers adjusting their ring lights. Someone (non-Arab) shouts, “ya habibi!” as the beat drops.
It all started with a party in Egypt. Berlin-based collective Kienemusik’s first event in the country was roughly a year ago, in April 2024, and the hype? Unreal. Servers crashed within minutes. Tickets sold out instantly. Then came the resale spiral: triple the original price, buyers scrambling, DMs flooded. People paid. Because it wasn’t just about music. It was about access. About being there. About saying you were there. The desert wasn’t just a destination for a party; it was a gate-kept experience, and that experience came with a price tag. A steep one.
We’ve all seen the clips: Adam Port playing Egyptian pop icon Amr Diab’s ‘Tamally Ma’ak’ during one of his sets, or Egyptian singer Ahmed Saad’s ‘El Youm El Helw Dah.’ This wasn’t just a crossover, but a cultural turning point, a habibification, if you will. Since then, the Adam Port x Amr Diab pipeline has only intensified. The two have now started performing together, a pairing that’s quickly becoming a fixture; Diab’s vocals, Port’s lethargic house beats, a scenic backdrop, and a dress code wrapped in beaded backless tops. These events now blur the lines between a concert, a soft-power flex, and a state-approved export. What started as a WTF crossover moment has snowballed into a whole economy of exclusivity and is priced accordingly.
And just a year before that, in 2023, Egyptian DJ and producer Misty collaborated with Alan Dixon on ‘Wala Ala Balo’, a track that borrowed Amr Diab’s iconic vocals and blew up. It was interesting, no doubt, but many listeners had no idea what the lyrics meant. Diab’s own vocals are treated like exotic instruments, rather than the cultural touchstones they are.
Recently, it also feels like no DJ set taking place anywhere that remotely resembles a desert is complete without Pablo Fierro’s remix of ‘Ya Baba.’ The track titled ‘Sidi Mansour,’ originally a Tunisian folk song and later made popular by Sabre Rebai’s 2000 rendition, has become a go-to for DJs looking to Arabize their set just enough to feel regionally relevant.
The same detachment is also evident elsewhere: Take Peggy Gou’s limited “Habibi” merch. Gou has previously said “habibi” is her favourite word and uses it quite often, but it reflects a broader pattern of cultural cherry-picking, where Arab identity is exoticised. In the hands of a non-Arab, even a word as intimate as ‘habibi’ becomes an aesthetic shorthand. One of the designs even had her name, “Gou,” stylised in Arabic; another featured a cartoonish camel, because of course.
While her merch flew off shelves, Gou’s past statements including “It doesn’t matter if it’s Israel or North Korea. If there are people who want to hear my music, I will go. I don’t give a f***.” have raised questions about the ethics of such cultural detachment, especially when paired with her past bookings in Israel and visible engagement with posts expressing support for Israel.
She’s not alone. Plenty of international DJs, from Blond:ish to Marie Montexier, have played in Israel only to turn around and headline raves in the rest of the region, choosing to ignore the atrocities we’re witnessing daily entirely. After backlash from pro-Palestine activists and fans, both artists had shows in the region cancelled or quietly dropped, including Montexier’s scheduled appearance in Egypt earlier this year at Sandbox Festival. The silence around it says everything.
These are artists whose aesthetics or careers often draw or benefit from Arab culture, whether it’s Peggy Gou’s selective cultural borrowing for her merch, Blond:ish remixing Egyptian songs like ‘Arkb El Hantor’ and profiting from regional gigs while staying silent on Palestinian genocide.
The Arabization of house music is becoming hard to ignore, with DJs remixing golden-era vocals they don’t understand, dropping oud loops and Umm Kulthum samples as background flavour. This trend, which we’ll call habibification, flattens Arab sonic identity into an aesthetic, more exotic garnish than cultural expression.
Meanwhile, desert raves have turned sacred landscapes into luxury nightlife stages. From the Pyramids to Jordan’s Wadi Rum, DJs like Adriatique, Mochakk, and Bedouin perform at invite-only parties dressed up as cultural events but curated more like exclusive clubs than community-rooted parties.
Lately, the “desert muse” look (coin belts, keffiyehs for headdresses, dusty tones, linen wrap skirts) has made its way from capsule collections into curated raves and pyramid tours. It’s not inherently evil, but it’s exhausting. Take, for example, New York-based Brazilian content creator Luisa Piou’s recent trip to Egypt. With a YouTube vlog titled ‘best trip of my life??!’, her outfits echo a now-familiar “desert-chic” palette, styling choices that wouldn’t look out of place at a themed hotel night or desert rave.
She isn’t the problem, but the aesthetic she participates in is telling. Bedouin signifiers are being turned into travelwear, stripped of their lived context and repackaged as global boho. It’s the kind of look that’s visually arresting, algorithmically rewarded, and increasingly divorced from the culture it borrows from. The fashion world has always loved a good costume, but there’s a difference between homage and Halloween.
Many people are walking the line between appreciation and appropriation without even realising it. A headscarf gets called a “balaclava scarf” on TikTok and an Emma Chamberlain podcast. Silky wraps, curved drapes, and satin textures, visibly inspired by hijabs or tarhas, are relabeled as “boho.” It echoes the dupatta vs. Scandinavian scarf discourse, but this time, there’s barely any discourse at all, and that’s the problem.
Middle Eastern aesthetics are being rebranded while the people behind them remain sidelined. Bedouin communities, for instance, rarely benefit from these initiatives. They don’t own the platforms, the parties, or the profits. They’re asked to set the scene, brew the tea, pitch the tent, pose for the photo, while their culture becomes a costume. Like Tulum-core before it, this represents a new wave of aesthetic tourism, with Arabic calligraphy and keffiyehs replacing crystals and Mayan motifs. The desert is a real, living place with histories, people, and meaning, and it’s time to question who gets to dance in it, and who gets danced over.
This isn’t about purity tests or about locking culture in a box. But it is about asking who gets visibility, and who gets archived. Who gets booked at the sunset slot, and who only gets to play when the cameras aren’t rolling? Who actually gets to attend these parties, even when they’re happening in their own city, with ticket prices hitting 6,000 EGP (just over 100 USD, a casual swipe for foreigners, but out of reach and an entire month’s budget for many locals). It’s about recognising that being Arab-coded when it’s cool is different from being Arab when it’s inconvenient.
To understand how we arrived at this point, we must go back to the source. House and techno emerged from the basements of Chicago, Detroit, and New York, created by Black, Latinx, and non-heteronormative communities that transformed the dance floor into a sanctuary. Dance music founding father DJ Frankie Knuckles famously called the Warehouse “a church for people who have fallen from grace.” House music, at its core, preached unity, freedom, and resistance. Yet the same pioneers who created the genre are often excluded from the stages they helped build, while others remix their legacy for clout, content, and brand deals. The seeds of today’s habibification were already being sown, just with congas and darbukas instead of Zokras and Oud loops.
Even now, the genre’s original creators are still left behind. While Black artists comprised nearly 38% of top-charting acts over nine years, they held less than 10% of executive or production roles, according to the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. The live stage tells a similar story: in 2019, only 14% of artists booked at European electronic festivals were Black.
Even in the UK, considered a musically diverse country, the average was just 18%. And in the “World” category, ironically named, acts from “Other” ethnicities made up just 25% of the rosters, despite the category’s heavy use of non-Western sounds. Following 2020, many hoped the racial reckoning would lead to genuine change. But a Technomaterialism study of 45,000 events found bookings for Black artists in France actually declined post-COVID. The industry’s memory, like its lineups, remains selective.
So what do we do with all this? Let’s start by naming things. Not desertcore. Not spiritual ravewear. Let’s call it what it is: a borrowed fantasy. Then, let’s ask who gets to sell it, and who has always lived it. It’s not about cancelling people wearing keffiyehs at festivals. But I am here to ask: Would you still wrap that scarf if it made you less desirable instead of more? Would you even go to the party if you couldn’t post about it or brag to your friends that you went to Kienemusik at the Pyramids? And maybe most importantly: if you’re borrowing from indigenous, are you the least bit informed about their heritage, or are you just using their story to soundtrack your weekend?