Heavy Metal Islam (6 page)

Amine wouldn’t let on how annoyed or insulted he was to have been replaced by a cell phone as the logo of the festival he’d helped create. But he did rightly point out how expensive it has become to put such a festival on, particularly the battle of the bands that helps bring local talent from around the country to national and even international attention. But the activists who created the Boulevard didn’t need Nokia to push them away from their original vision. By 2006 they were ready to leave the old-school, grassroots imagery behind, if the symbolism of the poster and the accompanying television ad for the festival were any indication. The image was of a beat-up old Mercedes taxi (the kind driven by taxi drivers across the Arab world), filled with a ragtag band of Moroccan musicians of various stripes, their incongruously ultramodern equipment on its roof, literally flying toward a beautiful, gleaming city of the future that towered above a more traditional cityscape of a Moroccan medina. On the surface, such imagery clearly signified the artists and organizers of the festival bringing Moroccan music, from Gnawa to metal, to the rest of the world. But look deeper and a more contradictory image appears, one in which the organizers see the festival as helping to modernize—but through it, whether the organizers want to or not, corporatize and commodify—not just Moroccan music, but Moroccan culture along with it.

Amine admitted that while the “militant spirit remained” among organizers, it has been at least partly replaced by a “new identity, based on image and notoriety—of the sponsors.” Because of this, a scene that only a few years before had scared the authorities so much that a “satanic music affair” was needed to tamp it down, is now being patronized by the Ministry of Culture and sponsored by the biggest cell-phone company in the world. It’s still a great festival, but its political force is getting harder to feel unless you already know where to look.

Yo Nigga! Moroccan Rap Hits the Big Time

Metalheads like to brag—and there’s at least a measure of truth to their claims—that metal helped bring down the Iron Curtain by serving as an important source for alternative, antigovernment identities for young people in the last decades of communist rule. If heavy metal showed its global reach in the fall of communism, hip-hop has become
the
music of the age of globalization. From the projects of the South Bronx and Los Angeles to the slums of Lagos and São Paolo, rap’s combination of sparse, menacing beats, angry and sometimes violent verses, and uneasy worship of money and power captures the experience of being poor and marginalized better than any other art form. But if American rap has largely been co-opted by profit-hungry entertainment corporations and rappers willing to trade in political relevance for a piece of the corporate pie, in Morocco rap still retains much of its subversive spirit. And no one represents this trend better than the new king of Moroccan rap, Bigg.

Bigg is, in fact, quite large, at about six feet and 280 pounds—certainly as big as Heavy D, Notorious B.I.G., and other “big” American hip-hop stars. Bigg has been rapping since his early teenage years, and it comes to him naturally. He can spit out rhymes in a variety of styles and cadences that remind one of Outkast one minute and Tupac the next, in a melange of Moroccan Derija, French, and English, and set to the latest beats from L.A. or Atlanta. Yet he fancies himself something of a Moroccan Frank Sinatra, if one can picture a sumo version of Sinatra rapping in Arabic. Watching him sashay across the giant stage of the Boulevard working the crowd with an expertise that belies his twenty-two years, it’s not hard to imagine a bit of Old Blue Eyes in him. Bigg’s lyrics, however, are uniquely Moroccan. At times he raps of the fear (
al-khouf
) so many Moroccans experience, whether warranted or not, of the emerging global system. Other times he discusses the humiliation they experience on a daily basis.

There’s another reason hip-hop has quickly become so popular in Morocco and across the Muslim world—more so, in many places, than heavy metal or other genres of rock. Just as in the inner-city ghettos of the United States a generation ago, it’s a lot easier to become a rapper and rhyme over prerecorded tracks than invest a lot of money in a guitar or drums or a keyboard, spend years learning how to play the instruments, and then cart all the equipment around in a van to various gigs (which could then get destroyed or confiscated in police raids). Rapping and wearing hip-hop clothing is also a much better way of gaining the “street cred” that’s important in urban ghettos around the world than would be growing long hair, wearing death-metal concert T-shirts, and playing guitar.

That is why, according to the manager of the rap group H-Kayne, the hip-hop scene is “the Big Bang right now…or at least similar to Brooklyn in the early 1980s. The number of practitioners is constantly growing. The local cultural or municipal organizations, who were quite good at turning hip-hop projects down, are now very keen on anything urban (thanks to the work of Boulevard des jeunes musiciens mainly). Even advertisers are recognizing its importance, and clubs are promising to start having hip-hop shows.”

Whereas in the Occupied Territories, Hamas supporters have physically attacked rappers and their fans, in Morocco rappers have escaped the persecution by religious forces that has bedeviled their rocker comrades. Perhaps that’s because rappers have focused on hip-hop’s roots as political and especially social commentary, which in the United States have been all but buried under two decades of bling. According to one rapper (who asked that I not use his name), “The hip-hop spirit is not seen as an agnostic or atheistic one, and the fact that Morocco is a Muslim country has meant that MCs will generally avoid cursing or describing girls with negative words. Nor will they make the apology of guns, cars, and bling-bling, simply because that stuff doesn’t reflect Morocco’s reality.”

This is not to say that all rap in Morocco is politically and culturally correct. Many rap artists, like the Mekness-based group H-Kayne, can be explicitly political. But there are also groups like Camelkos, who are content to copy the form and language of gangsta rap, with lyrics such as “Yo nigga, this is my life” and other stereotypical gangsta language, while avoiding the substantive critique of their society that made the genre so powerful and threatening in the United States.

What the best rappers are trying to create, however, is a kind of “hip-hop madrasa,” what pioneering American rapper KRS-One calls a “temple of hip-hop”—a kind of public sphere for educating their young audience about the realities of the world in which they live. H-Kayne is clearly well schooled in hip-hop; its 2005 Boulevard performance blew the other bands off the stage (including the American headliner of the hip-hop day, Jah Stimuli). Mixing hard-core rap with traditional Moroccan Gnawa and other genres, H-Kayne represents hip-hop at its best.

With both Bigg and H-Kayne you get the feeling that, in Bigg’s words, “Hip-hop isn’t mediated yet in Morocco. We don’t rap for money or nice cars, but to improve ourselves and our society.” What makes the best rappers so good is precisely their recognition of how important music is as a “strong voice” for young people’s struggles in Morocco. Yet while it’s clear most rappers share such sentiments, if rap were this overtly political, it is likely we’d be reading about a satanic rap affair. Why such a crackdown hasn’t occurred was explained to me by a young rapper performing at his first Boulevard: “The government doesn’t bother you as long as you don’t cross the lines.” That’s why most political rappers remain largely off the Mukhabarat’s radar screen.

Morocco’s Riot Grrrls: Caught Between Algeria and Iran?

One of the most talked-about performances of the Boulevard’s eight-year history was that of the Moroccan hard-core metal band Mystik Moods. What made the band and their performance so special was not the music, which was in the early stages of development. Rather it was who they were and what they stood for: a bourgeois Arab all-girl version of the Sex Pistols, whose members, all in their teens, sported a goth-trash schoolgirl fashion style and a reckless disregard for the craft of musicianship. All this somehow managed to enhance the appeal of their music.

Certainly the band’s performance caused quite a stir; much of the crowd of mostly young men spent the first half of the show screaming and gesturing “fuck you” at the band in anger at the very idea that girls would be playing heavy metal. But the sheer determination and courage of the band members, and their willingness to give the finger back to the crowd, eventually won over much of the audience. As one of the band members (who didn’t want to be quoted by name) explained to me, “It’s not easy to be a girl in the metal scene, no matter what country you’re living in. But especially in Morocco. It’s even hard for boys to play metal without being treated like shit by Moroccan society. But did you see our show? By the end there was a mosh pit, so the crowd moved past our appearance and gender and just dug the music.”

And it wasn’t just the crowd of rowdy teenage boys that dug Mystik Moods. The band’s anarchic, disheveled “riot grrrl” act earned them a segment on the French channel Arte and, more important, fans in the royal family. Soon after the festival they were invited by some of the princesses to perform at the palace. Later that year they performed at a festival sponsored by the king (in fact, running along the bottom of the stage under the rock-’n’-roll light show were the words “Under the patronage of His Royal Highness, King Mohammed VI”).

While the highlight of their career might have been the endorsement by a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, they would never have come this far without the support of their families. “Even our grandmas supported us, and they’re very conservative,” said one of the singers, sixteen-year-old Ritz. “Some people want to show off their religion, but you know what, not everyone. Look at my father,” she added in explanation. “He prays
and
loves music too. In fact, he’s doing the sound for the festival!” Indeed, all the band members have family members and friends who were “traditionally” religious, and none of them were opposed to their music.

Given the support they’ve received, the members of Mystik Moods are naturally more sanguine about the prospects for their future and that of Morocco than are most of the male metal musicians I’ve met. As Mystik Mood’s other lead singer, Rita, put it, “In Morocco, women have more opportunities because our regime is more liberal than in other Arab countries.” (Despite this sentiment, however, most of the band members were living and studying in France when I met them.) Bass player Kenza elaborated, “This country is always moving, on the way to developing. You know, they say that tradition and modernity are supposed to be contradictory, that if they become more globalized or westernized, young people automatically become more European and renounce their tradition. But this is a false idea of what religion and tradition are.”

Perhaps, although nothing in the dress, language, or attitudes of Mystik Moods says that they incorporate “traditional” Islam into their lives very much. As the band’s guitarist, Anaïs, saw it, “Young people are torn between two trends, two kinds of extremes. On the one side are young people who listen to everything Western, and on the other, they are only religious, they can’t be open. But it’s wrong to call them ‘traditional,’ because tradition is more temperate than this.” Ritz added, “You know, young people who like metal also are Muslims and pray.” At the same time, however, the whole band agreed that it was impossible to get along, or even have a conversation, with extreme religious forces. In a clear dig at the JSA’s Nadia Yassine, Ritz explained, “The Islamists say, ‘Yeah, we want democracy and a republic,’ but what kind? Like Algeria and Iran?”

Ultimately, Mystik Moods represents a very political moment in Morocco, but for the group’s members the political is most definitely personal: the freedom to dress, act, and play however they want. Some scholars, such as the Columbia University historian Thaddeus Russel, argue that such personal, sexualized politics is ultimately as powerful a force for social change as the more overt politics of their male counterparts. As he put it after studying the regional popularity of pop stars like Beyoncé, “in the Middle East, Beyoncé is a freedom fighter.” This may yet prove true. But in an environment where DVDs of the latest porn movies easily outsell the jihadi videos on the next shelf—even in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province—and
Sex and the City
has aired on Arabic Show-time, there’s as good a chance that sex will be as liberating in the Muslim world as it is everywhere else—that is to say, liberating for women of a certain class and temperament, but irrelevant or even insulting and oppressive for their less fortunate compatriots.

The King and the Witch

The members of Mystik Moods aren’t the only mystical women in Morocco. Nadia Yassine, “spokesperson” of the JSA, is the heir to the most important mystical movement in the country. Although not technically outlawed by the government, its members are constantly harassed and its publications largely banned. Indeed, Sheikh Yassine spent almost two decades under house arrest for writing an open letter to King Hassan II in 1974, calling on him to repent of his autocratic ways. A little over two decades later, his daughter Nadia was indicted by the government for treason for daring to suggest, in an interview at a conference at UC Berkeley that we both attended, that a republic was perhaps a better form of government for Morocco than the monarchy.

Yassine is simultaneously one of the most nurturing and one of the most mischievously sarcastic people I’ve ever met. Such traits seem natural to someone who’s had to simultaneously fight the Makhzen and be spiritual guide to several million Moroccans. She is a French teacher by training, and discussions with her send one running to the
Encyclopedia of Philosophy
and the works of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

The JSA has been thumbing its nose at the king and the Moroccan elite for more than two decades. While some metal artists get invited to the Royal Palace, the closest most JSA members get to the king is his photograph in a courtroom or jail, and that’s fine with them. Between father and daughter, the JSA evolved into one of the most formidable religious and political movements in the Muslim world. Its commitment to nonviolence, its refusal to play the political game, and its focus largely on Moroccan rather than pan-Islamic issues (such as Israel or Iraq) make it unique and distinctly powerful. Yet while the JSA is interesting as a movement, it is Yassine who gives the group its high profile and edge. She is, one could say, more “heavy metal” than the young women of Mystik Moods.