Chapter 03
Benghazi, Merskawi and the Eastern Song Imagination
5 min
Benghazi is a production city, not a lesser Tripoli
Benghazi has its own speech, audiences, performance histories and routes toward Egypt. Its singers and bands worked through radio, weddings, festivals, cassettes and cross-border studios. Eastern Libya's musical geography extends through towns and pastoral networks beyond the city.
Writing Benghazi only as a site of war erases decades of ordinary musical work. Writing it only as a source of “folk” erases synthesisers, electric guitar, reggae and rap. The city has repeatedly absorbed external technologies without surrendering local phrasing.
Hamid El Shaeri and Ahmed Ben Ali make this clear from different eras. One helped remake Egyptian and Arab pop; the other built a home-studio reggae catalogue that later travelled internationally.
Merskawi places poetry before easy genre labels
Merskawi is associated with eastern Libya and Bedouin poetic traditions. A performance may centre an extended vocal line, local dialect, emotional address and rhythmic support. The form has social and regional meanings that a short definition cannot contain.
Do not call every long eastern song merskawi. Use the performer or community's description. The distinction matters because commercial catalogues often apply familiar tags to anything difficult to place.
Mohamed Hassan's long recordings provide an audible bridge between poetic song and arranged public performance. Dazitlak Marsoul lets the message and melodic return accumulate over more than eight minutes. Its scale resists the algorithmic demand for immediate chorus.
Mohamed Hassan made duration popular
Mohamed Hassan entered Libyan radio in the late 1960s and released his first song in 1970. His catalogue includes extended love songs, poetic sequences and politically commissioned material. Those strands should not be collapsed into one judgement of the artist.
Hear Dazitlak Marsoul for vocal control and repetition. Then compare Rit El Fares, a shorter recording that places a different dramatic shape around the singer. The orchestra frames dialect and poetic image without turning the voice into generic pan-Arab tarab.
His relationship with state media requires context. Under authoritarian rule, major singers could gain resources and face obligation simultaneously. Musical analysis must identify propaganda when it occurs without declaring every love song a political document.
Cheb Bakr makes the archive argue with the present
At the turn of the 2000s, Cheb Bakr combined eastern Libyan material with contemporary electronic, hip-hop and R&B production. Samh Amea'ad and Rjana Lamta, reissued together in 2024, are compact demonstrations of that method.
The programmed beat is not a modern shell placed over an untouched folk core. Sampling, keyboard voicing, vocal delivery and reference all create the recording. Listen for where the older melodic gesture remains clear and where the production deliberately interrupts it.
His Allom, restored on the 2025 Libyan tapes anthology, places him inside a larger cassette field rather than as a lone fusion experiment.
Bands made Benghazi audible in new colours
The White Bird Band, Group Hewaya, Stars of Africa and City Lights Band appear on surviving tapes with distinct repertories. Their names already reveal outward-looking imagination, but the music is not simply imitation of foreign pop.
Hear The White Bird Band's Ya Ummi for reggae-derived space around an Arabic vocal. Group Hewaya's Irja uses electronic arrangement and melodic sentiment differently. City Lights Band's Kul Ghrub stretches past six minutes, allowing dance-floor repetition to become form.
Band personnel and original cassette dates remain unevenly documented. The 2025 issue date marks restoration, not composition. Keep that uncertainty rather than assigning every track to the year of its reissue.
Hamid El Shaeri carried Benghazi into Cairo's studio revolution
Born in Benghazi, Hamid El Shaeri became a singer, arranger and producer at the centre of Egyptian cassette pop. His debut Ayonha appeared in 1983, followed by Raheel, Akeed and Janna. Drum machines, keyboards, electric bass and concise hooks helped define a new urban sound.
El Shaeri's importance is larger than solo success. As producer and arranger he shaped records for Ali Hemeida, Amr Diab, Hanan, Simone and others. Lolaki, recorded by Ali Hemeida in 1988, became one of the era's defining cassette hits.
This is a Libyan-Egyptian story. Calling it only Egyptian pop loses Benghazi; calling it a national Libyan export loses Cairo's musicians, labels and market.
Current Benghazi rap has its own address
KA7LA writes from Benghazi with an approach informed by American boom-bap and British drill but grounded in local experience. AI, made with Norf in 2026, moves into a more experimental space without abandoning the city's speech and pressure.
Rap names conditions quickly: blocked opportunity, violence, masculinity, neighbourhood reputation and the desire to leave or remain. That directness can attract moral restriction. It can also attract outside coverage that treats every lyric as testimony rather than art.
Hear flow, beat architecture and rhyme before turning the rapper into a political symbol. Benghazi rap deserves criticism at the level of craft.
A city route needs current confirmation
The Benghazi Summer Festival returned in 2024 after a long interruption, bringing large regional performers and public attention. A festival of that scale is not the whole local scene. Smaller studios, rappers, wedding musicians and instrument teachers continue between headline events.
Use current official programmes, artist announcements and venue confirmation. Security conditions and schedules change. An article from a previous year is evidence that an event happened, not a promise that it is open tonight.
The practical goal is not to collect a city badge. It is to hear at least one local artist in a setting where the credit and date are clear.
