As Sono Cairo established its dominance in Egypt’s post-revolutionary music industry, its visual identity grew increasingly standardized. Picture sleeves from this period tend to fall into two camps: patriotic and performative.
The first features iconic images of Egyptian culture (Tahrir Square, boats on the Nile, or staged dancing in front of the Sphinx) meant to evoke a nationalistic ethos.
These sleeves
accompanied both traditional and popular releases, subtly reinforcing
state-sanctioned unity.
The second type revolved around the stars themselves. Photographic portraits of singers like Nagat al-Saghira, Sherifa Fadel, and Mohamed Abdel Wahab helped cultivate a glamorous, celebrity-forward aura.
Rarely adventurous, these sleeves marked Sono Cairo’s conservative visual turn in the late 1960s and beyond, a stately, controlled aesthetic befitting what became in a sense Egypt’s “Grey Lady” of record labels.
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