Heavy Metal Islam by Mark Levine Read Free Book Online Page A

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