Heavy Metal Islam (24 page)

The Roots of Iranian Rock

Rock ’n’ roll has long been popular in Iran. It came of age in the mid-1970s during the reign of the secularizing Shah, who placed far fewer restrictions on foreign cultural practices and products than did his successors in the Islamic Republic (one metal musician explained that his mother “was a big fan of Pink Floyd, Hendrix, and the Stones”). Heavy metal joined the sonic environment around the end of Iran’s brutal eight-year war with Iraq. Perhaps the first band to achieve something of a breakthrough in the metal scene was O-Hum (Illusions), founded in 1999. The band plays a well-orchestrated blend of Western hard rock and Persian traditional music and instrumentation, with many of the lyrics taken from the fourteenth-century poet Hafez. After its first album was rejected by the Ershad, or Culture Ministry, band members created their own website and offered free downloads of the album—one of the first Iranian examples of using the Internet to get around state restrictions on cultural production. By 2000, there were roughly fifty bands just in Tehran, but the scene had a hard time growing because it’s so difficult to make it as a musician in Iran and the government routinely cracks down on alternative cultural expression.

O-Hum also began playing publicly—or rather, privately—at venues such as the Russian Orthodox church in Tehran and at a few charity concerts. This was a period when the Khatemi government mainly policed public “Islamic” spaces. So churches, foreign embassies, and private homes became quasi-public spaces where musicians could perform for sometimes hundreds of people without fear of harassment or arrest. This would change in 2007, when the Ahmadinejad government began to invade private homes and arrest metal fans.

Paradoxically, during the last five years more underground bands have approached mainstream popularity, even when officially banned. For some this has been a sign of success: “Unlike in other countries, we’re aggressive, we keep fighting to keep metal alive,” one artist told me. Others would prefer never to see the light of day: “Maybe it’s good that the best music is all underground. It keeps us on the edge. It keeps us fresh,” another musician said with a sigh. But everyone believes that the music must go on. “The death of metal would be the death of Iran,” explained a guitar player, “so we keep fighting to keep it alive.”

Despite the crackdowns, as recently as 2007, 3,000 fans could be expected to show up for shows such as the one performed by the band SDS at the University of Tehran, even though it wasn’t allowed to perform with vocals. “We were not allowed to headbang or even stand up,” one fan present explained to me. “It was ‘metal theater,’ not a metal concert,” continued Pooya, one of the founders of the scene who did the first, and to this day one of the only, public metal concerts with vocals. “Everyone had to sit politely. At one gig, at Elm-o-San’at (Science and Industry) University, we managed to play for forty minutes before the
basij
tried to force us to stop. They weren’t supposed to enter the university. So they drove up to the front and started roaring their motorcycles, and the manager of the place begged us to stop. We were the last metal concert with vocals.”

Even without vocals, explained another musician, when bands played classic death-metal anthems, like the songs from Slayer’s classic 1986 album
Reign in Blood,
“the whole crowd would fucking explode with headbanging, nobody could control them. They’d go so wild, you know? Needless to say, the next gig was canceled, because the whole thing was about control, and we were out of their control. We were arrested and charged with satanism.”

A professor who works closely with the Miras Maktoob Institute (Institute for the Written Heritage) explained the larger phenomenon reflected by Iranian metal this way: “On the one hand, in the current political situation you can’t come to the surface here; the ‘real underground’ is in Iran these days, and one would imagine that because of this we are isolated from the rest of the world. Yet Iran has been at the crossroads of culture since Cyrus the Great. We’ve always been open, that’s why the Iranian government has tried, and failed, to suppress our instinctual drive to reach out and absorb other cultures.”

Censoring the Uncensorable, Foregrounding the Underground

The restrictions the regime has imposed on the performance of music are many. As Behnam explained, “The most important thing is that you can’t see women singing on TV, and they aren’t allowed to sing solo in public, so musicians have to do special arrangements of their music in order to have at least two women singing, or singing in the chorus of a performance featuring a male singer.” Women are clearly the most heavily censored and filtered “item” on the Internet in Iran as well. Tens of millions of websites are blocked, as part of what one scholar terms the “gender apartheid of Iran,” just because they contain the word “women” in them. The government automatically assumes that any website with women as a subject is “immoral.”

Politicians, prophets, and even philosophers have been warning societies about the threat posed by music, and especially the female voice, to the social order since Homer introduced the Sirens to literature and Socrates urged the banning of eight types of music in the
Republic
on the belief that they encouraged drunkenness and idleness. Early Muslim leaders—although not the Qur’an—held similar views. After the Iranian Revolution, one newspaper explained, “We must eliminate music because it means betraying our country and our youth…Music is like a drug, whoever acquires the habit can no longer devote himself to important activities.”

The mullahs weren’t that far off the mark in comparing music-listening to drug use: more than one musician explained to me, in the words of one of the country’s leading metal guitarists, that “buying music was like buying drugs” when metal first arrived in Iran in the late 1980s. Even getting a black-market cassette was comparable to scoring; you had to take two taxis and meet at a neutral location and make the hand-off as quickly as possible before hiding the tape in your pants for the ride home.

On the other hand, the late Ayatollah Khomeini wavered on his opinion of music. He argued that “music dulls the mind because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs,” but he became more lenient after hearing a musician playing something he thought sounded beautiful outside the window of his home one day. Ultimately, the near-total ban on rock music during the Revolution’s first fifteen years was loosened a bit under the presidency of Mohammad Khatemi, who was more responsive to the demands of the younger generation than had been his predecessors Khamenei and Rafsanjani. Metal bands even managed to get permission to hold a few concerts during this period, but President Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005 led to the banning of all Western music from state-run TV and radio stations, making it harder—but not impossible—for fans to hear live metal in Iran.

To make a government-approved CD, without which you aren’t allowed to perform legally, you have to take your music to the Ershad, or Culture Ministry, where several committees determine whether the music, lyrics, and presentation are technically professional and Islamically acceptable. The absurdity of the categories that must be approved in order to receive permission to release an album reflects the larger absurdities of Iran’s political and social orders today. Bad grammar, shaved heads, an “improper sense of style,” and even “too many riffs on electrical guitar and excessive stage movements” can all get your music banned. “It’s like this,” Behnam said. “When you submit a request, they have a department to check the music, especially vocal content. The Ershad will often order a singer or band to change the lyrics, melody, or rhythm in a song. Lyrics are especially important for them. They need to check whether it’s against the system, which is forbidden.”

By “system,” Behnam meant the entire ideological, political, and economic apparatus of the Iranian state. So if a censor listening to a song decides that the guitar distortion is too intense, and therefore threatens state security by exciting emotions that the state can’t control or that could be turned against it, the band will have to lighten up on the guitar. Or perhaps the melody is too Western, or just not Iranian enough, or the lyrics are a bit too risqué. You can imagine how death-metal bands might fare against an Iranian censor, which is why most don’t bother trying to obtain government approval. But this tactic can be dangerous during periodic crackdowns by the government, which can use the “illegal” circulation of an artist’s or band’s music as a convenient excuse to arrest or otherwise harass them.

Schools have been on the frontline in the struggle for the soul of young Iranians since the Revolution. High schools were both where most metalheads were introduced to the music and where the government tried to clamp down on it from the start. Guitarist Ali Azhari, one of the most important artists in the Iranian scene, recalled with a smile, “The principal of my school had a shelf in his office filled just with my T-shirts and bracelets. He was trying to demetalize me,” Ali said, coining a new word to explain exactly what was being done to him. “But it didn’t work.” Later on, when metalheads started to become a more public, if strange-looking, presence on the streets, the government began to accuse—and soon after, indict—them for being satanists, spreading Western culture, and simply for being in a metal band (which didn’t seem to be part of the criminal code when I checked). Convictions of musicians were almost always overturned, but the government’s point was made.

Almost every Arab/Muslim country has some sort of official censor of music, but Iran’s has proved more proactive and aggressive than others’. Iran’s mullahs have legitimate reasons to fear metal: it reflects the mood of a young generation (65 percent of the country’s population) roiled by drug use, prostitution, increasing AIDS, and, most important, a nearly complete rejection of the values of the Revolution.

Perhaps the best indication of how strongly the country’s metal community—and, by extension, a large share of the rest of Iran’s younger generation—oppose the ethos of the Revolution comes from the popularity of the pioneering British metal band Iron Maiden. “For sure, Iron Maiden would have to be the most important band for us,” explained Armin Ghaouf, a twenty-eight-year-old mechanical engineer and guitar player who’s been on the metal scene since its inception. Tall, with shoulder-length hair (it was much longer until the police cut it after arresting him) and a pleasant face, Armin plays a role similar to Slacker’s in Egypt: he knows everyone and everything about the scene and connects all its dots, even though he doesn’t play much these days. Sitting next to him, Ali Azhari agreed: “Maiden gives me a vision at a time when the chief symbol of Iranian culture is that of the martyr. Maiden is so visual—just think of the album covers with their tanks and other images of war and death—it’s like a dream combined with music. The band allows you to imagine being somewhere else you can’t physically be.”

Just a few weeks earlier, Ali, Armin, and I had stood about twenty feet from the stage watching Maiden’s first-ever performance in the Arab world, at the Dubai Desert Rock Festival. The images of war’s violence and futility—particularly as embodied by the band’s mascot, the skeleton-monster war robot Freddy, blundering across the stage pretending to shoot the crowd—served as the perfect rebuttal to Khomeini’s valorization of war and martyrdom as the holiest acts within Islam. As Ali pointed out afterward, “There are so many images of war and guns on the streets and buildings of Tehran, it’s the same symbolism really.” Except that the Revolution’s martyrs died “in the path of God,” while Iron Maiden’s die for nothing.

The mullahs celebrate violence; the metalheads critique it. Being a metal fan offers—however paradoxical it might seem—a “community of life” (as one musician described it to me) against the community of death and martyrdom propagated by the Iranian government. But the risks are both real and substantial. As Pooya explained, “Even my family thought I was dangerous.” Pooya was arrested so many times he stopped counting. “I just wanted to dress like a metalhead, and I was arrested and beaten, first in the cars of the
basij,
then in jail.” It wasn’t just long hair that could get one in trouble. Ramin Sadighi, the founder of the innovative and respected Iranian world-music label Hermes Records, said that during the long period when Western instruments were effectively banned in Iran, he had to rent delivery vans and travel well before and after rehearsal times to get his upright bass to rehearsal and performances. “We sacrificed so much,” he informed me, “more than the current generation of musicians can understand.”

Other musicians were accused of being Jewish or of looking like “savages” because of their long hair and metal attire. In response, one metalhead offered the most pejorative insult in the Iranian repertory: “The government is Arab! It’s like we’re occupied. That’s why the music is so strong.” (Many Iranians are intensely nationalist, and harbor a millennium-old grudge against Arabs for supposedly overshadowing them in the larger Muslim world.) Armin recounted one such incident: “I was walking down the street and a passing police patrol car stopped and the cops asked, ‘Where are you going with long hair?!’ I said, ‘What’s the matter? None of your business,’ and they took me in and said, ‘We’ll call your father, we’ll take his documents, and if you let us cut your hair he’ll get them back.’ What could I do? After that I started to put my hair in a ponytail, tuck it in my collar, and tie it up, and walking around on the street it didn’t look like I had long hair. When we were playing or jamming, I took it out, that was it.”