Heavy Metal Islam by Mark Levine Read Free Book Online

East, where the music is more depoliticized. Reda Zine explains this situation using the same language—an “invasion of foreign cultures”—bandied about by Muslim critics of Western globalization: “We’re estranged from the dull Lebanese music clips that invade our media…In the end, it becomes a question of identity—musical and personal.” In response, the Moroccan metal scene, and Marockan roll more broadly, has acted as a counterpoint to the domination of the production and distribution of popular music by a few Arab media conglomerates. It’s not an easy struggle or a fair fight.
    But it’s getting harder to counter the power of global capital in Morocco, as became increasingly evident at the 2006 Boulevard. The festival was in many ways a more professional affair than in previous years. But that’s because it was more corporate as well. Formerly free to the public, the festival now charged for entry (although only a modest fee, equivalent to about two dollars, just enough to keep the really poor out), and had enough security to ensure that those who couldn’t pay couldn’t sneak in. But something was also missing from the 2006 festival, and troublingly so. The year before, when I first attended it, the festival grounds were ringed by tents put up by grassroots NGOs from around Morocco. Many of them were associated with bands at the festival; the volunteers were often young women with headscarves, and they worked on issues ranging from homelessness to AIDS, drug addiction, and human rights. One of the musical highlights was the performance of an all-girl thrash-metal band, Mystik Moods.
    In short, the 2005 festival pushed political and gender boundaries as much as musical ones. Walking through the various NGO booths was as exhilarating as standing on the stage. In 2006 all the booths were gone, save for a giant tent selling Red Bull at the back of the field. Few fans needed the energy boost provided by the drink; the music more than sufficed. But with the booths went the grassroots spirit that had made the Boulevard a unique combination of art and activism, and, because of that combination, a unique and valuable cultural and political space.
    Perhaps the most telling image suggesting that the balance of power had shifted from the festival’s grassroots organizers to its corporate sponsors was the logo. In 2005 the logo was a silhouette of Amine, in a guitar-god pose—legs apart, head bowed, long hair flowing, ripping into a guitar solo—which was also featured on seventy-five-foot banners on each side of the stage. The T-shirt featured the same image, with the logo of Nokia, the main corporate sponsor, relegated to the side of a sleeve. In 2006, however, Amine was replaced by a rip-off of the old Aerosmith logo, in this incarnation a winged cell phone with the word “Nokia” inside it. Both the T-shirt and the giant banners on each side of the stage bore the same image.
    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