Heavy Metal Fail

Though I suspected it nearly from the start, I didn't fully realise that Mark LeVine knew not what he was writing about in Heavy Metal Islam on page 78 when he writes he "still couldn't tell the difference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic, grind-core, hard-core, thrash, and a half dozen other styles of metal". It's really not all that complicated--for instance, grindcore is fast, doom is slow. And LeVine is supposed to be an academic, for fuck's sake (though in this book he's posing as a really shit Bernard Henri-Levi with a guitar), so it really isn't unreasonable to expect that he'd do at least basic research on his subject.

In any case, I was about sixty pages late in figuring out that LeVine had no clue. Maybe because it was the start of the book and I was being open-minded and giving it a chance, I missed the significance of this passage:

[Sheikh] Anwar [al-Ethari] responded, "I don't like heavy metal, not because it's irreligious or against Islam, but because I prefer other styles of music. But you know what? When we get together and pray loudly, with drums beating fiercely, chanting and pumping our arms in the air, we're doing heavy metal too." (p. 15)

Which is his opinion, and he's quite entitled to it even if he couldn't be any wronger, but LeVine takes it up in the next paragraph ("The difference between the two forms of metal--playing and praying") and runs with it throughout the book. I should have returned the damned thing to the library right then and there.

LeVine's combination of not knowing anything about the aesthetics of metal and not being able to usefully differentiate between heavy metal and religion lead to the following:

The difference between them [metalheads and the Muslim Brotherhood] is in how they respond to this situation [discriminiation]. While Marz [guitarist for Egyptian death metallers Hate Suffocation, now Scarab] wants a space to be left alone, Ibrahim [no last name given, but "an editor of the official website of the Muslim Brotherhood"] argues, "Here's the thing I know: If I fight for just myself and my rights, then I'll never get them. Only if and when I'm ready to fight for everyone's rights can I hope to have my full rights as a religious Muslim in Egypt." This is a radically different approach to politics from the one that has traditionally existed among Islamists in the Muslim world, who haven't been very interested in the rights of other oppressed groups in their societies, particularly those that don't follow their conservative views on religion and morality. It's also quite different from the depoliticized metalheads, who have given up on the idea that their struggle could be society's. Yet giving up on society is precisely what has made the metaliens' music so dark and their sense of possibility so narrow. (p. 93)

This comes in a bit of the book where LeVine sits someone from the Muslim Brotherhood down with a bunch of death metallers. LeVine notes, with some puzzlement, that as soon as the MB guy introduced himself that "they started fidgeting in their seats and glanced around the room uncomfortably" (p. 90). A couple things of note here:

-Just because both metalheads and the Muslim Brotherhood "are both searching for an alternative yet authentic identity to one offered by the Mubarak regime" (p. 91) doesn't mean that they have anything in common. Throughout the book LeVine tries to build bridges between disparate and sometimes conflicting groups (in the Israel/Palestine chapter, he half-seriously suggests that a "hard-core, oriental-tinged, rap-metal version of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall"" (p. 138) might actually help along the peace process), he doesn't actually listen to, or care about, what the individuals themselves want. Metalheads are absolutely right to be wary of god-botherers, even if they dress themselves up as moderates.

-The "metaliens" music is dark because it's metal. You don't play metal in a major key. Also, this passage: " ...the metalheads are using the "ritual" of playing or listening to music as a way to cope with the stress they face as a marginalized group in an oppressive society. When Egypt's metaliens describe problems such as loneliness, alienation, or having little hope in the future, I don't see a psychological issue so much as a social and political one that can't be expressed politically because of the country's patriarchal, highly authoritarian political system" (p. 80). Except for social and political systems, and for that matter, psychological explanations, have little to do with it. Scandinavian metal--also dark! Metal from Quebec--also dark! Metal from Florida and Latin America--also dark! And, for fuck's sake, as if loneliness and alienation aren't a part of the human fucking condition. Moreover, playing or listening to "dark music" isn't necessarily related to "giving up on society" or having a "narrow sense of possibility". Maybe it has to do with being impressed with metal's often breathtaking levels of musicianship. Maybe it has to do with metal just moving some people in a way that other styles of music can't (the Costa Rican band Acero put this brilliantly: "Jazz and classical don't seem bad to me/But they don't make me explode/Salsa or merengue I don't want to hear/Only metal makes me fly"). Again, if LeVine spent some time before writing the book listening to metal, hanging out and talking to metalheads, reading about it, or whatever, instead of holding to dumb myths about metal and the people who listen to it, he wouldn't come up with this shit.