The Rhetoric of Heavy Metal Resistance: Musical Modalities in Iraqi Public Life

brill.nl/mjccMEJCC

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 4 (2011) 320–338

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI 10.1163/187398611X590183

Th e Rhetoric of Heavy Metal Resistance: Musical Modalities in Iraqi Public Life

Lisa Foster * University of Oklahoma, USA

Email: [email protected]

Abstract Th is article explores the possibilities of heavy metal as an active and vital part of Iraqi civic life. Using a rhetorical analysis, the public dimensions of Iraqi heavy metal are shown to off er cathar-tic relief and public critique, craft identities and community, and foster modes of identifi cation between Iraqi and Western public spheres. A survey of resources (over 100 texts total) was conducted primarily around the bands Acrassicauda and Dog Faced Corpse. Texts for analysis narrate artists’ relationships to their music, to Iraq and to their sociopolitical condition. Th is article concludes that heavy metal acts as a modality, or way of crafting publics, in Iraq. Rooted in the sounds and social fabric of today’s Iraqi youth, heavy metal modalities off er a unique amalgam of personal pain, public commentary and global cultural ties that succinctly capture the tension and struggle of a transitioning new Iraq.

Keywords heavy metal , Acrassicauda , Dog Faced Corpse , public sphere , public modalities

Remember, we are not children of rock’n’roll, we are children of war. —Marwan, drummer, Acrassicauda

Popular culture use worldwide can be viewed as one piece of a complex nego-tiation between the self and global culture in the context of a lived local expe-rience. Since the 2000s, the lived experience for the members of Iraq’s heavy metal bands has been one of turmoil, violence, and war. Th is article investi-gates Iraqi heavy metal as a timely and signifi cant opportunity for understand-ing public voices of Iraqi metal musicians and fans. Th e use of heavy metal in Iraq is part of a global phenomenon of appropriating popular music for the

* Th e author would like to thank MEJCC reviewers for their insightful comments in the initial review of this manuscript. She is also indebted to Glen Hogard, Dan Emery and her writ-ing group for their insight and support, Courtney Paddock, Annie Nagle, and Norman heavy metal fans for their research assistance, and Iraqi metal bands for their inspiration.

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articulation a uniquely hybridized voice (Bergeron 1987 ; Baulch 2002 ; Avelar 2003 ; Liew and Fu 2006; Recours, Aussaguel and Trujillo 2009 ), and is an example of how music can serve a deliberate or inadvertant civic purpose (Eyerman and Jamison 1998 ; al-Taee 2002; Randall 2005 ; Nooshin 2005b; Peddie 2006 ). In the case of Iraqi heavy metal, young musicians are not simply consuming heavy metal from other countries, but making their own bands, their own songs and their own sounds. In identifying with Western forms of heavy metal, they can be viewed as participants in a global youth culture (Nooshin 2005a : 470). However, in creating their own music that comments on the Iraqi experience, they are participating in crafting local publics.

Iraqi heavy metal will be studied in this article as a public discourse. 1 Public heavy metal discourses off er a unique insight into the ideas of young Iraqi citizens who comprise the emerging heavy metal scene. 2 Th e article examines how heavy metal acts as a way of crafting public life amidst the con-straints of the US invasion and the rise of sectarian violence. It relies on ‘public modalities’ as a useful conceptual tool for understanding heavy metal as a civic discourse (Brouwer and Asen 2010 ). After exploring the concept of modali-ties, the article off ers a rhetorical analysis of media texts compiled of inter-views with band members, songs, documentary footage, and music blogs and social media. Th ese texts highlight the various levels of heavy metal resistance at the level of the individual, within Iraq, and between Middle East and Western publics. In examining heavy metal discourses, this article argues that Iraqi heavy metal acts as a mode of civic argument, a site of community, and a way to transcend national ideologies and geographic locations in the forma-tion of cosmopolitan publics.

Heavy Metal and Public Sphere Building

Young Iraqi citizens have been caught within an American war and violent internal resistance (Powers 2006 ). Th e United States entered Iraq in 2003

1 Rather than undertaking a project that looks at heavy metal through ethnographic or quali-tative work, I will undertake a rhetorical approach that asks questions of the impact of heavy metal as a civic and a political discourse of the public sphere.

2 Th e ‘scene’ referenced in this article is a music scene in transition. Th roughout most of the 2000s heavy metal was an underground or emergent underground movement. Having pre-cise numbers of fans, or exact sociological data, is beyond the abilities of this article’s focus on heavy metal as a public discourse in Iraq. However, prior to the US invasion, Acrassicauda band members said that as many as 600 people would show up for shows, indicating that it was war and instability in the region that both changed the music, and sent them ‘underground’ (Manzoor 2008 ).

322 L. Foster / Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 4 (2011) 320–338

under the name Operation Iraqi Freedom. As the American presence grew in the region, and Saddam Hussein was removed from power, internal sectarian clashes ignited. Young metal musicians and their fans navigated not one, but multiple ongoing wars in their homeland. As the bassist for Acrassicauda describes, ‘we are caught between the troops and the terrorists outside, this is it’ (Jonze and Smith 2008 ). Th e intricacies of ‘being caught’ between fi ght-ing factions place the nonviolent Iraqi youth who are part of heavy metal as distinct entities from warring spheres. Heavy metal became a path individu-als could take to transcend their private realms and participate in the public sphere. Wood ( 2010 ) uses the concept of musical pathways to explain how music can become a ‘dynamic forum’ in which musical participants are ‘not only able to change how they thought [think] about their everyday reality, but also change that reality’ (Wood 2010 : 167). Although heavy metal music does not neatly fi t the participatory requirements of Habermas’ (1989) early theo-rizing of public spheres, music can be a path toward publicness.

One of the ways we might hold onto the political signifi cance of public spheres while breaking free from its normative features is to turn toward understanding public modalities, or the ‘productive arts’ people use to act in and create publics (Brouwer and Asen 2010 : 19). Modalities open a broader space for understanding civic practices by critiquing previous models of the public sphere as dismissive of important political discourses. Modalities also provide guidance on recognizing civic agency amidst constraint. Agency amidst constraint was a particular problem for heavy metal musicians during the US occupation. Brouwer and Asen root modalities in a rhetorical concep-tion of techne, which suggests that publics are formed through an ‘active pur-poseful process’ emphasizing how ‘individuals and groups … craft their lives, even as people act amid constraints’ (Brouwer and Asen 2010 : 19–20). Th is perspective highlights the civic nature of heavy metal discourses as musical pathways into public life. Rather than holding Iraqi heavy metal to ‘rational’ criteria for public making, modalities recognize the ways in which metal musi-cians and fans use the medium to enact a kind of civic-social practice.

Playing heavy metal music in Iraq was constrained both before and after the 2003 US invasion. Prior to 2003, public performance required approval from the Culture Ministry, headed by Uday Hussein, and at least some part of the performance needed to honor Saddam Hussein and the regime. According to one metal musician, ‘Before the invasion, life was clear—you had limits and rules—but afterward it was just chaos and that is frightening’ (Manzoor 2008 ). Th is context is signifi cant because it highlights heavy metal as an action of consequence for young Iraqi metal musicians and fans. In 2008, Culturesofresistance.org (2010) claimed that the US invasion had made ‘life as a musician in Iraq today … more unstable and risky than at any other


moment in the history of modern Iraq’. Citing the Iraqi Artists Association, the group states that ‘nearly 80 percent of the singers during Saddam’s era have fl ed the country and at least 75 singers have been killed since the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq in 2003’ (Cultureofresistance.org 2010).

In addition to modalities, counterpublic theory can also help in un -derstanding the relationship between heavy metal and Iraqi public life. Marginalized peoples can challenge dominant publics by participating in their own counterpublics (Negt and Kluge 1993; Fraser 1996 ). Th is article does not argue that Iraqi metal musicians and fans are engaged in oppositional counter-public formations; however, counterpublics can be ‘both safe spaces and launching pads for constructive engagement’ (Doxtader 2001 : 63). In this way, counterpublic theorizations of the public sphere are relevant to under-standing heavy metal as a public modality.

While music scholars have not used the language of counterpublics and modalities, they have off ered arguments that suggest that these theoretical extensions can be usefully summoned to understand the relationship between music and the public. For example, while heavy metal scholars have spoken in terms of subcultures rather than subaltern counterpublics, most locate the emergence of heavy metal as a discourse of marginalized, under-classed, British youth (Walser 1993 ; Harrison 2010 ). Heavy metal became a way for British youth to articulate an oppositional experience to the dominant public. Band members channeled emotion into a modality that helped to create a kind of working class heavy metal counterpublic.

Iraqi metal voices do not sound from this same class position. Th e public voices of Iraqi heavy metal are middle class, not working class. Working class counterpublics, according to Negt and Kluge (1993), emerge from people’s relationships to consumption and production within capitalist society. In the case of British youth, it was their material relationships to a working class mode of production that characterized them as operating within a separate public sphere. In reference to Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman has witnessed that violence reproduces these modes of production; where capitalist forces give way to violence, ‘capture is analyzed as a mode of production, as a form of social death’ (Feldman 1991 : 98). Iraqi metal voices are not subaltern by class, but by the dissolution of Iraqi public life due to American and sectarian violence in the region. Iraqi metal musicians cite being forced out of the pub-lic due to violence (Jonze and Smith 2008 ). Iraqi artists’ locations in a post/ongoing war culture, and their feelings of exclusion and eventual physical exile, mirror the alienation felt by early heavy metal musicians, if not the par-ticularities of their class position. Accordingly, heavy metal bears scrutiny as a discourse from a socially marginalized location amidst the constraints of war and occupation.


3 In 2004, almost a year after the US invasion of Iraq, American alternative culture magazine Vice wrote a story on Acrassicauda, ‘the only heavy metal band in Iraq’ (No War for Heavy Metal, 2004). In 2005, Vice began fi lming Heavy Metal in Baghdad , a $75,000 ‘do-it-yourself ’ docu-mentary about the trials and tribulations of Iraqi heavy metal. Th e documentary followed Acrassicauda’s journey and brought the band broader media attention.

4 Extreme forms of metal emerged in the late 1980s as a response to the excesses of American ‘glam’ and ‘pop’ metal. Extreme metal diff ers from both pop and classic metal sharing ‘a musical radicalism that marks them out as diff erent from other forms of heavy metal’ (Kahn-Harris 2007 : 5). Furthermore, ‘in contrast to heavy metal’s mainstream commercial reach, extreme metal is dis seminated through small scale “underground” institutions that extend across the globe’ ( ibid .).

5 MideastTUNES, a website devoted to music for social change in the Middle East, marks Semi-Death as a ‘pioneer’ of heavy metal in Iraq (Pazhoohi 2010 ). And while Acrassicauda is more widely known as the fi rst metal band in Iraq, both bands probably emerged simultane-ously. Semi-Death does diff er signifi cantly from Acrassicauda both in sound and story. Semi-Death lacks the speed and thrashing that is endemic to Iraqi metal today, favoring a progressive-metal instrumental style with a slower tempo, and a ballad-like quality to their music. Semi-Death also left Iraq years earlier than the members of Acrassicauda. In some senses, Semi-Death’s sound signals a clear distinction to how the context of the decade has impacted the creation of metal and the signifi cance of metal as a public modality. Brutal Impact and Xerosis are bands of the contemporary moment and have been noted alongside Dog Faced Corpse as part of the resurgence of metal in Iraq.

While there are numerous metal bands in Iraq today, two bands, Acrassi-cauda and Dog Faced Corpse, have become staple public voices and broader global signifi ers of contemporary Iraqi metal. Th e struggles of Iraqi metal bands during the 2000–2010 time period were largely introduced in the West through the story of Acrassicauda. 3 Acrassicauda, whose name in Latin means black scorpion, is self-described as a thrash metal band. Th rash metal is a ‘speeded-up and stripped down’ form of extreme heavy metal (Kahn-Harris 2007 : 2). 4 In recent years, the band has since added death metal to its musical profi le (Acrassicauda 2010b ). Death metal is another extreme metal form, and the rising metal genre in Iraq. Formed in 2008, Dog Faced Corpse claims to be the fi rst true Iraqi death metal band. Dog Faced Corpse ( 2010a ) takes its name from ‘a shocking and brutal murder in Baghdad during the sectarian clashes, when a decapitated body was found with a dog’s head stitched onto it’ (Dog Faced Corpse 2010a ). In addition to Acrassicauda and Dog Faced Corpse, bands like Semi-Death, Brutal Impact, and Xerosis also represent the emergence and continuance of Iraqi heavy metal. 5

Th e analysis that follows examines the music and media presence of Iraqi metal bands to illustrate heavy metal as a civic discourse and public modality. A variety of media have been chosen for analysis: traditional news media in Iraq, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as a variety of new media sources: websites, Facebook and Myspace sites, and blogs. A survey of


resources (over 100 texts total), including the documentary fi lm Heavy Metal in Baghdad , was conducted, looking for places where artist voices narrated their relationship to their music, to Iraq, and to their sociopolitical condition. Th e texts used in this analysis are those rich with musicians’ voices rather than the commentary of journalistic reports.

Heavy Metal Argument: Catharsis and Critique

If you could teach every prisoner how to play/smash drums, I believe they will turn out to be good citizens. I can’t believe how much this instrument helped me.

—Marwan (in Jonze and Smith 2008 )

In interview after interview with Iraqi metal bands, young men cite the playing of and listening to heavy metal music as a public voicing to their private hell. Raad Ibrahim, a guitarist in an unidentifi ed heavy metal band, noted that he ‘had to fi nd a way to show my [his] pain and anger’ after militants murdered his father (Sarhan 2008 ). Marwan Hussein, drummer for Acrassicauda, did not reference a personal loss, but a loss of his youth as the impetus of his pain. In Heavy Metal in Bagdad , Marwan discusses how he and his band mates are trapped and how the prime years of his life for having fun are slipping away (Jonze and Smith 2008 ). In an interview with the Observer , Marwan states, ‘I was an angry person … and I found that when I listened to metal rather than getting angry at myself I could channel it; rather than beating people up, I could beat on the drums’ (Manzoor 2008 ). Heavy metal voices claim no other genre of music could encapsulate the pain, anger and suff ering of growing up in an Iraq occupied by American troops and ravaged by internal resistance.

Catharsis is a signifi cant aspect of heavy metal performance (Henry and Caldwell 2007 ; Kahn-Harris 2007 ; LeVine 2008 ). However, catharsis is com-plex and can be disconnected from the material conditions and experiences that give rise to the need for cathartic relief in the fi rst place. Th is is not the case for young Iraqi metal musicians, whose emotional pain is the product of the restrictive and violent conditions of their immediate environment. Faisal, the bassist for Acrassicauda, states ‘I saw a bomb explode just 20 metres away … It killed everyone around me’ (Manzoor 2008 ). His band mate, Marwan, further refl ects on those conditions, stating that he saw ‘a lot of innocent people getting killed, rivers turning to blood’. He goes on, explain-ing how their music is:

just like … the images … we have to live daily in our lives … Sometimes something bad happens in your life that you can’t just get over it. You know, you’ll


dream about it. You’ll think about it the whole time, you know? So we’re just trying to get this off our backs … if we do that, these songs, mostly like a tribute for the people who … got killed … in the war. So we’re seeing … these innocent children, innocent people, elders and seniors … who got killed. And some people, like a lot of people got killed in vain, you know? (National Public Radio 2010).

Here, heavy metal discourse connects personal pain to the public atrocities of war. Th e connecting of personal pain to life experience transforms individual catharsis to political commentary. Heavy metal moves its musicians and fans from private seclusion into the public. In another media interview, Marwan reiterates the entrapment he felt as a young Iraqi, ‘Th e life there, it doesn’t give you much choices and options … We fi nd that heavy-metal music at fi rst is a release’. However, the musician connects this cathartic function to a public speech act, ‘Later when we got more mature about it, we found we can actu-ally use it [heavy metal] as a good guide to direct and to say whatever you want, as loud and as fast as you can’ (Ryzik 2008 ). In this statement, Marwan illustrates how heavy metal becomes a pathway for a public voice. Metal acts as a modality, or a way of crafting publics, as heavy metal is ‘used’ as a tool to ‘direct’ and ‘say’ musicians’ ideas about Iraqi life.

In interviews with mass media, band member after band member connects catharsis to a lived political experience. Th is connection is signifi cant, allowing individual pain to act as political indictment. Heavy metal modalities tran-scend individual emotions. In connecting a personal pain to the political exi-gence of war, heavy metal discourses become political anthems of youthful resilience and survival. Members of Dog Faced Corpse discuss the relationship between emotional pain, lived experiences and the ability for music to act as a political voice: ‘I’ve lived the war here and I’ve tasted all the bad and horrible events during the sectarian clashes and that inspired me a lot,’ says Ahmed, the drummer [for Dog Faced Corpse]. ‘I really have so much to talk about in this band’ (Sarhan 2008 ). ‘Sometimes I hear from people that it is the devil’s music, but I think that killing innocent people is much more hellish than singing in protest at the chaotic and infernal situation in which we are living’ (Sarhan 2008 ). Th e band’s comments show an inability to divorce emotions from the material conditions of their young adulthood in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion. Th ey have ‘lived the war’ and have funneled those life experi-ences into songs of protest. When Ahmed says he has ‘tasted all the bad and horrible events’ he signals not simply a cognitive awareness but an embodied experience. Th is marriage of the personal loss with the material conditions of war opens the door for heavy metal criticism.

Th e movement from catharsis to critique is best noted in the way heavy metal becomes a way of off ering arguments about life in Iraq. Heavy metal


musicians engage in a deliberative process by employing heavy metal as a fact claim concerning the state of Iraq. In classic argumentation studies, a fact claim makes an argument about the existence of a controversial position. ‘Life in Iraq is heavy metal’ works as a fact claim that helps band members advance arguments about the violent instability in the region. In response to a question of heavy metal’s inherent politics, Marwan (drummer for Acrassicauda) says, ‘I think that’s true, because … metal presents facts and nothing but facts … politics is one of these … miserable facts that we need to deal with every single day of our lives’ (National Public Radio 2007b).

Heavy metal makes fact claims visually as well as verbally. In an interview with Faisal, Acrassicauda bassist, the young musician begins laughing to him-self, examining the front of an Iron Maiden album cover for Death on the Road . Th e album cover features a dark, horse-drawn chariot, driven by a skel-etal corpse, emerging from a background of fi re and fl ames. Th e image suggests a feverish out-of-control ride. Faisal pauses, holds the album cover directly into the camera closing off peripheral vision, and says, ‘Th is is what life looks like here, death on the road, dude’ (Jonze and Smith 2008 ).

Th e visual image of Iron Maiden’s Death on the Road acts as support for Faisal’s implied claim that life in Iraq is like the death and destruction of heavy metal music. In another segment of Heavy Metal in Bagdad , Faisal explains his attraction to heavy metal, stating, ‘if you really want to know what is the attraction, look around, we are living in a heavy metal world’ (Jonze and Smith 2008 ). To say one is living in a ‘heavy metal world’ is not merely a description but an assertion. Th ese moments are signifi cant because they illus-trate reasoning present in and around the performance of heavy metal in Iraq. Heavy metal music becomes part of political argument.

Furthermore, the evolution of Acrassicauda’s heavy metal sound, from thrash metal to death metal, helps to further heavy metal argumentation when coupled with their lyrics. Sound has symbolic meaning that impacts musical argument making. Death metal’s ‘chaotic’ and complex guitar riff s, gutteral/growling vocals, and dominant drums and bass often ‘mimic the sound of a machine gun fi ring’ (Purcell 2003 : 9). Lyrics deal primarily with themes of death, violence and war (Kahn-Harris 2007 ; Purcell 2003 ). Acrassicauda’s lyrics speak to these ‘facts’ through their description of the injustices of war. In ‘Massacre,’ the band sings, ‘My child is crying/ My child is starving/ His mother’s heart inside is burning/ Th ey stole my land/ Th ey stole my home/ Th ey ripped my fl esh/ Th ey stripped my bones’ (Acrassicauda 2010b ). Th e visual allegory of war coupled with the death metal sound creates a sonic argu-ment about the devastation of war. As Purcell’s study of death metal subcul-ture in the United States notes, ‘this is not the sort of music one would ever


hear on a commercial radio station or on MTV’ (Purcell 2003 : 9). Th e emer-gence of death metal as a ubiquitous characteristic of heavy metal in Iraq is signifi cant to the heavy metal argument. Iraqi media report that death metal bands seem like a ‘natural outcome’ of ‘the brutalities committed every-day in Iraq’; ‘they show what is most violent and grotesque in the new Iraq’ (Sarhan 2008 ).

Th ese musical arguments clearly counter claims that life in Iraq after the US invasion is better than during the rule of Saddam Hussein. As heavy metal claims shift from describing reality to commenting on it, a new set of value claims emerge. Heavy metal arguments shift from describing the state of Iraq to evaluating that state. Ibrahim, a death metal guitarist from an unidentifi ed band, states ‘No one likes to hear the truth, and metal music shows exactly what is happening in Iraq today, from bad to worse ’ (Sarhan 2008 , emphasis added). Th e marriage of fact (what is happening) and value (from bad to worse) furthers the political commentary of heavy metal discourse. Taken one step further, band members suggest that heavy metal performance allows them to demonstrate these ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ to the world. Drummer Marwan states, ‘I think, like, we’re bringing people together in this matter … politics separate [sic] people … the music, it’s all about facts, it’s bringing people together, make people see reality’ (National Public Radio 2010). Iraqi heavy metal musicians begin their relationships to the music as personal catharsis. But in using their music as argument, as a way to describe the material condi-tions of their existence and its life-threatening diffi culties, that catharsis makes way for political critique and public making.

Heavy Metal Networks: Identity and Community

Th e fi rst concert we played was in 2000 … and it was in this small club, maybe 250 capacity, and it was full—we were surprised that so many people were craving

this music. —Faisal (quoted in Manzoor 2008 )

Public metal voices in Iraq cite a long history with the music, at least in rela-tion to their own lives. Firas, Acrassicauda’s bassist, has been playing heavy metal for over ten years and says playing bass guitar is ‘kinda whole life for me, I mean I’m so crazy about it. I would rather play than do a lot of things in my life’ (Jonze and Smith 2008 ). Th e same is true for Lateef Ahmed, drummer for Dog Faced Corpse. Th ough he does not have the same history with his instru-ment, Lateef has been listening to metal since he was 13, approximately the


year 2000 (Sarhan 2008 ). Heavy metal has been a constant discourse in these young Iraqi lives. Th ese heavy metal identities are not individual communica-tion phenomena; they are communal. Heavy metal is a shared signifi er, a shared music and a shared politic that sustains music community in Iraq.

Th e musicians of contemporary Iraqi metal barely remember a time prior to the 1991 Gulf War. Following this war, UN sanctions heavily shifted peo-ple’s access to Western popular music. Acrassicauda’s drummer explains the early peer sharing used to acquire heavy metal music:

We didn’t have CDs. We had the tapes, cassettes. And—or somebody, like, will travel outside Iraq and come back with … a collection of stuff … heavy metal rock ‘n’ roll, like Dio and Black Sabbath and stuff like that … we’ll just copy them … just trade between each other. And sometimes by the time that you get the tape, you can’t really like hear [it] (National Public Radio 2010).

Th e same peer-sharing element that makes new media scholarship optimistic about its democratizing potential was very much at work in the way young Iraqi metal fans acquired their music (Dalgren 2009 ). Tapes went from one person to another, to another, so much so that the sound quality itself would refl ect the number of people who had copied the music. As Faisal noted, ‘there was just no other way to get the music we loved’ (Anderman 2008 ). Young Iraqis who are fans, but are not currently part of bands, noted this music-sharing phenomenon as part of their adolescent coming-of-age narratives (National Public Radio 2007a ; Jonze and Smith 2008 ).

In addition to sharing music, Iraqi metal fans share t-shirts, aesthetic styles and other signifi ers of metal fandom. Th ese markers are the symbolic and socio-material practices of heavy metal community (Snell and Hodgetts 2007 ). Heavy metal practices and discourses allow participants in Iraqi metal scenes to articulate an individual identity in opposition to the dominant cul-ture while being part of a larger community. Indeed, multiple musicians cite growing long hair or wearing black metal t-shirts that are controversial in the public domain (Jonze and Smith 2008 ). However, sharing in heavy metal’s material and aesthetic conventions allows individuals to ‘transcend material space’ in the maintenance of social ties (Snell and Hodgetts 2007 : 444). Th is function of heavy metal modalities is particularly important as public spaces for communing shrink and as band members are forced into exile. Aesthetic and material components of heavy metal modalities maintain a sense of com-munity even amidst volatile and unsafe public conditions. As early as 2004 ‘venues played by groups before war’ became ‘off limits due to seizure by new government and rise in street crime’ (Dreazen 2004 : 1) and between 2006 and 2008 every member of Acrassicauda eventually migrated from Iraq.


Both before metal bands were forced underground, and today as heavy metal returns to the public, the do-it-yourself nature of Iraqi heavy metal is another important element of heavy metal modalities. Returning to the peer-to-peer networks that sustained their early relationships to heavy metal, Dog Faced Corpse recently released their fi rst demo track online. Th e band’s Facebook page notes that ‘Consaguinity was recorded in Latif ’s [Lateef ’s] bed-room and the drums were recorded with one cheap mic because of the lack of studios in Iraq and there is no metal production company in here, so we are sorry for the bad quality!’ (Dog Faced Corpse 2010a ). Iraqi heavy metal requires communal ties to sustain its creation. Lacking the recording studios, labels and practice spaces that metal bands throughout the United States and Europe have come to rely on, Iraqi bands rely on each other to sustain the production and distribution of their work. Th is relationship to the production of Iraqi metal politicizes the community, particularly as insurgents bombed practice spaces and equipment.

Perhaps one of the most signifi cant socio-material markers of Iraqi metal identities and communities is the music. As previously noted, the rise of death metal corresponds with the rise of instability and war in the region. Iraqi metal songs refl ect sounds, lyrics and metal subgenres that further solidify the com-munity of Iraqi metal. Lyrics from Acrassicauda’s ‘Message from Baghdad’, released on the album Only the Dead see the End of the War in March 2010, showcase narratives of war that symbolize the bleak realities of life for Iraqis during occupation: ‘Dead bodies, walking coffi ns/caged souls locked in pris-ons/they might forget but still unforgiving/fearless zombies walk among the living’ (Acrassicauda 2010a and 2010b ). Th ese lyrics, though unintelligible in performance, are sociopolitical markers of Iraqi metal communities. Caged souls and fearless zombies lose their political weight outside of the commu-nity, but within it refl ect the entrapment and numbness of metal fans exis-tence. In an interview with the US-based National Public Radio, Suroosh Alvi notes the signifi cance of the distinctions in sound as another specifi c marker of Iraqi metal:

they [Acrassicauda] wanted to make the guitar solo sound like a mother who lost her child—like, that kind of wailing sound. Th ere’s a fusion of Arab and traditional heavy metal that’s been brought together, which really sums up who these guys are. And they’re not trying to ape an American sound. Th is is their sound. Th is is heavy metal coming from Baghdad (National Public Radio 2007b).

When guitar solos take on the sounds of Iraqi life, the music acts rhetorically to signify a certain geographical and political context. Th is fusion allows Iraqi metal music to work as a speech act from a community of Iraqi musicians.


Making that speech act works to solidify local identity and community, but it also becomes an important political message for broader social contexts.

Heavy Metal Diplomacy: Identifi cation and Cosmopolitan Publics

So on these grounds they receive death threats on a regular basis. Y’know, growing up a headbanger in a small rural, conservative Kentucky town was pretty tough. Or so I thought at the time. But I never got one death threat. We have it pretty

damned easy here. —Billy Tackett

Iraqi heavy metal spans transnational metal communities, advancing depic-tions of the realities of war and pain in Iraqi life. As Iraqi metal discourses circulate beyond state borders, they begin to cultivate heavy metal cosmopoli-tan formations. According to Turino, cosmopolitan formations come into being as

ideas, practices and technologies of a given cosmopolitan formation travel through communication loops independently binding people culturally who are not, otherwise, related by location or heritage. It is this feature that makes cosmopolitanism unique as a type of cultural formation, and particularly impor tant as a specifi c analytical concept. It is this feature that makes cosmo-politanism closest to what is typically referred to as ‘global culture’ (Turino 2003 : 62–3).

Mindinversion.com is a blog that is part of the communication loops of heavy metal cosmopolitan culture. Self-described as a vehicle for music and culture from a perspective in the midwestern United States, the blog features com-mentary on the resurgence of heavy metal in Iraq. Binding people who are otherwise not related, the blog states, ‘no matter where you come [from] it only takes the passion inside to be a part of the global metal community. Th is situation [Iraqi metal resurgence] is a perfect example of how youth around the world can use metal both as voice of dissent and a source of personal therapy’ (mindinversion.com 2010). While the blog uses the term ‘global’, it is better conceptualized as transcending national, cultural, or ethnic boundar-ies between specifi c heavy metal actors. Th e commentary shares identifi cations with the passion, catharsis and dissident politics of heavy metal over those of the nation. Th ese communicative functions of heavy metal move past cultivat-ing a ‘global’ fan base and toward cultivating a cosmopolitan public. Very little about the actual sound of Iraqi metal is mentioned; instead, points of identi-fi cation revolve around the music’s personal and political functions in com-munities and publics.


6 Th e George W. Bush administration discourse for ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ highly mir-rored the discourse in the ‘War Against Terror’ which sustained an either-or distinction for American citizens to align either with the nation or with terrorists.

Two elements reside inside cosmopolitan formations that open heavy metal discourses to diplomacy and public formations. Heavy metal acts diplomatically as people identify with circulating heavy metal discourses. Identifi cation not only binds people together, but is a building block of argument, deliberation, and public building. Kenneth Burke ( 1969 ) argues that identifi cation results in persons becoming ‘consubstantial’ or simultaneously one with another in the communicative exchange. Identifi cation is signifi cant for diplomacy in this context because US administration policies during Operation Iraqi Freedom worked to distance the West and the Middle East. Both policy and ideology worked against identifi cation between Iraqi and American subjects. However, from an analysis of public discourses, heavy metal can be viewed as transcending these ideological and political divides via people’s relation-ships to music. Second, as heavy metal discourses circulate through commu-nication loops, and people attend to them, these circulating discourses, according to Michael Warner ( 2002 ), become a primary constituent of public formations.

BillyTackett.com is another US weblog illustrating heavy metal cosmopoli-tan publicity. Billy Tackett is an artist specializing in zombie art (aesthetic repre-sentations of the living dead) from the southern United States. Iraqi metal band Dog Faced Corpse asked Billy to create the cover art for their debut album. Tackett chronicled his decision to accept the off er on his blog, acknowl-edging a hesitation rooted in loyalty to his nation and fear of retribution:

Before I accepted the off er [to create Dog Faced Corpse’s cover art] I did a little soul searching. I am not a hardcore political activist but I am a hardcore patriot. I love my country, what it stands for and what it allows me to do for a living. Regardless of what my opinions are of the war in Iraq, which can diff er from day to day, I know a few people that have served there … I didn’t want to do anything to undermine what our guys are doing over there and I also didn’t want to do anything that could refl ect badly on me later on (2009).

Tackett struggles with the false dichotomies used to structure US relationships with Iraq. For him, identifying with Iraq meant identifying with terrorists, a disloyalty to the United States. 6 Billy’s engagement with Lateef of Dog Faced Corpse unravels these dichotomies. He learns ‘not everyone over there [Iraq] is hell-bent on seeing America go up in fl ames’ and that Lateef ‘was a good guy. Just like most of the metal heads I know here’.


Billy’s words disrupt normative relationships between the United States and Iraq. Th e false binaries fall away. Heavy metal identifi cations allow Billy to remain a patriotic American and to accept and support the diffi cult posi-tion of Iraqi youth. Th ey also allow for cosmopolitan formations as Billy and Lateef share ‘cultural similarities’ that are based in heavy metal (Turino 2003 : 62). As the blog entry continues, Billy takes on important civic roles. He acts as a media critic , stating ‘It’s the violence driven minority you see on the news everyday. Everyone else just ain’t news worthy I guess’. He acts as an activist , ‘So here I am, one of the most non-activist artists out there deciding that by doing their [Dog Faced Corpse] CD cover I could play some small part in spreading the news that Iraqis are not all that diff erent than us’. He is an empa-thetic listener ‘in our conversations the terrible environment they [Dog Faced Corpse] live in became clear’. And perhaps most importantly, he acts as a teacher :

Th ey like what they like regardless of where I am, who I am, who I worship, what color I am, etc. Some of us could learn a thing or two from them … After we completed the article I really wanted to get the band’s views on what we [the US] were doing over there. I won’t post them here because I don’t know if they would want me to, but I will say that things aren’t as black or white as people here would have you believe . Th ere seems to be a lot of choosing the lesser of two … or more … evils there (emphasis added).

Over and over again, Billy identifi es with his country but also with Lateef and Iraq, allowing him to make more nuanced political sense of a complicated ongoing confl ict, without the need for black and white categories. In this sense, he becomes both consubstantial with Iraqi metal musicians and part of a cosmopolitan public. He continues:

But this [crafting cover art for Dog Faced Corpse] wasn’t about if what we’re doing over there is right or wrong. It’s about showing that even though we’re diff erent in a lot of ways we are alike in a lot of ways as well. And we as a global society need to focus and build bridges from those similarities. We’ll be better off when we do (2009).

In this passage, Tackett’s blog builds on his identifi cation with Dog Faced Corpse to extend a social call to action transcending heavy metal itself. While he acknowledges diff erences, he urges readers to build connections around similarities, evidencing Iraqi heavy metal’s potential as a diplomatic discourse.

From the perspective of the young Iraqi musicians, the United States is a similarly complicated terrain. For Acrassicauda, it represents the chance to play their music openly but it does not resolve the oppression of war and the separation they feel from their communities and families:


Firas: It’s not easy—it’s not easy as it seems. It’s a lot more complicated … trying to describe … two nations’ policies and political views … can’t do that … But I would say … killing living souls…that’s wrong, you know? … A lot of people got killed in these wars and lot of people just … had to live with … the daily sorrow of missing someone or … part of their families—part of their lives.

Marwan: Even here [the United States] … a lot of families lost their own kids and sons and daughters in the army, I mean over there, just like—it isn’t fair, you know, both societies have been destroyed.

Firas: Well, that’s what we’re saying … we can’t justify war. I mean like if you expect like two musicians just to come and talk about war, like, you know, I wouldn’t like drag myself to that.

Marwan: Yeah. Firas: But I would say it’s monstrous, it’s hideous. And we don’t want to

sound hippies, but you know, wish there was peace on Earth, but I don’t think this is possible (National Public Radio 2010).

In this passage the points of identifi cation and diplomacy revolve around mutual loss and injustice. Firas and Marwan’s comments focus on the loss of American and Iraqi life and the universal monstrosities of war. While the men acknowledge that state policies and politics are complicated terrain, they tran-scend this particular situation, identifying instead with anti-war publics. Taken together, US and Iraqi conversations highlight heavy metal modalities’ abilities to form cosmopolitan publics. Heavy metal acts as a site for transna-tional identifi cation that surpasses national boundaries in favor of forming ‘global’ metal communities.

Conclusion

Th is study off ers insight into Iraqi heavy metal as a legitimate political dis-course of contemporary public life. Th is article has not sought to measure heavy metal public spheres, but to view Iraqi heavy metal as a modality, a discourse and a path toward publicness. Th e fi rst path is toward catharsis and critique. When catharsis is connected to musicians’ lived experiences, metal modalities also function as public arguments about the state of life in Iraq. Inside Iraq musicians and fans cited a second path of heavy metal modalities—a way to connect with other metal musicians and fans amidst instability in their physical realms. Where national and political discourses enforce divi-sions, heavy metal modalities off ered a third path for connecting individuals between nation states. Th ese fi ndings suggest the presence of vital political activity via Iraqi citizens’ relationships to heavy metal music.


Th ere are, of course, many unresolved tensions lurking inside Iraqi metal discourses. Many musicians have since left Iraq but are still part of the Iraqi metal scene. Th is growing diaspora of Iraqi heavy metal artists will be signifi cant to understanding the evolution of heavy metal as a public dis-course. Th e musicians and fans of this analysis are primarily male even though recent reports cite a growing presence of young women within heavy metal communities. Why these women’s voices are seemingly absent in public metal discourses, but present in local scenes warrants further theorization. Finally, the relationship of Iraqi heavy metal to local music and cultural traditions in Iraq also bears further study (Edwards and Edwards 2008 ).

Th ese are all important elements for future investigation. Iraqi heavy metal continues to be a complex social, political and cultural phenomenon. However, that Iraqi youth have resisted local challenges through the appropriation of heavy metal music speaks to the capacity of popular music to sustain civic publics. As Nooshin has noted in relation to the rise of ‘grass-roots’ popular music in Iran, ‘by taking control of the music, musicians have once again transformed the meaning of popular music in Iran, or at least added another layer of meaning: music as active engagement’ (Nooshin 2005b: 261). Iraqi heavy metal discourses suggest music as active engagement. LeVine believes that ‘these artists, secular and religious alike, are devoting their lives to creating an alternative system that builds an open and democratic culture from the ground up, against the interests of both the political, economic and religious elites of their countries and, many believe, of the United States and other global powers as well’ (LeVine 2008 : 19). Iraqi heavy metal may not yet be an organized force for social change, but from the perspective of this analysis, Iraqi heavy metal may off er something far more interesting. Rooted in the sounds and social fabric of today’s Iraqi youth, heavy metal modalities off er a unique amalgam of personal pain, public commentary and global cultural ties that succinctly capture the tension and struggle of a transitioning new Iraq.

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The Rhetoric of Heavy Metal Resistance: Musical Modalities in Iraqi Public Life

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