Authors: Mark LeVine
While not quite so avant-garde, both rock and heavy metal have long been extremely popular in Lebanon. The genres were ubiquitous on the country’s most popular radio programs because they appealed to young people during the civil war. Once the violence ended, an actual scene developed. But as in Egypt, the Lebanese metal scene suffered a serious blow in 1997, when a depressed teenage metal fan, Michel Jammal, whose father was a ranking army officer, killed himself. This was followed by a severe crackdown by the government on the music.
Yet the crackdown also carried the seeds of metal’s renewal in Lebanon. Elias Abboud, a Christian from the north of Lebanon, was a classmate of Jammal’s, and five years later he founded one of the most distinctive Death Metal/Grind bands in the MENA, Oath to Vanquish, with his brother Carlos. With his shaved head and goatee, Elias looks like a harder version of Moe; and indeed, Oath to Vanquish’s music is a harder and more industrial version of The Kordz’s classic rock metal sound.
“A friend slipped me a tape and that was it,” he explained as we chatted in Moe’s living room in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Khoreitem. “You’re exposed to so many kinds of music here that everything becomes a part of it. By the early nineties the scene was actually quite big, but there was also constant harassment that culminated in the 1997 scare. After my classmate’s suicide we were brought into the principal’s office and shown TV programs to teach us how bad metal is. They even showed a video of someone playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ backwards in order to scare us.”
The government also banned the sale of CDs by bands such as Metallica and Nirvana, although they remained easily obtainable in record stores and, increasingly, on the Internet. And the scene continued to grow, albeit slowly. By 2002, after returning from the UK, where both brothers obtained degrees in mechanical engineering, Elias and Carlos divided their time between running a profitable plastics manufacturing business and performing as Oath to Vanquish every few months at some of the biggest clubs in Beirut and at other venues across Lebanon. Their songs took on many social and political issues facing the country. “But not directly,” both point out. Instead, playing off the same psychosocial distress that motivated Soap Kills, they developed what they call an “applied schizophrenic science,” exploring and developing political commentary “through the veil of allegory and unsettling imagery.”
The formula seems to have paid off. Oath to Vanquish is one of a handful of Arab metal bands signed to a foreign label, the UK-based Grindethic Records. But the farther you are from the mainstream in Lebanon, the greater the risk of persecution. “The police have continued to harass and even arrest rock musicians. So have the intelligence services, especially during the Syrian era, because metalheads were activists.” Even today, Carlos added, undercover cops would come to shows and plant drugs on people, then raid the club a bit later and close it down.
Moe has also had his run-ins with the police in the last few years. “They asked me questions like, ‘Do you think your fans worship Satan?’ What they were really asking was whether our fans follow the official political line and obey authority.” At one point the Ministry of Culture sent two men to film one of The Kordz’s weekly shows. “We knew in advance, and made sure our crowd did as well. But after a half hour of a subdued set, I couldn’t take it anymore and just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and played the rest of our set at full energy. Anyway, the owner made sure to get the guys drunk enough so that they couldn’t remember anything. After the show, one of them actually stumbled over, slapped me on my shoulder, and slurred, ‘Great job! Don’t stop singing.’”
Perhaps the best evidence of the resilience of Lebanese rock are bands like Blend, Nadine Khoury, and the post-punk group the New Government. Founded only a year after the 1997 satanic scare, Blend was the first Arab rock band ever signed to an international label, EMI. Their biggest song was the 2003 hit “Belong,” which deals with the post-civil-war generation’s search for identity in the midst of the continued conflict and growing sectarian and class divisions.
On the other end of the sonic spectrum, Nadine Khoury’s folk-inspired rock offers trenchant analysis of the violence, rampant inequality, and the easy escapism into drugs and alcohol to which many of her peers have fallen prey. But the most overtly political lyrics in Lebanese rock today belong to the group the New Government, whose debut album featured the lyrics “I killed the prime minister / I killed the famous journalist” as a way of critiquing the mafia-like tactics that continued to govern the country’s politics after the Cedar Revolution.
Despite being well outside the Rotana mold, all these bands have used the Internet, festivals, and other networks for cultural transmission not controlled by the mainstream media to reach a growing audience. They have taken to heart the words of the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, who declared not long before his death that “music is the weapon of the future.” Beirut-based rock journalist and radio DJ Ramsay Short, who often began his popular show with one of Kuti’s hits, feels that Kuti’s point couldn’t be more relevant to Lebanon: “Music is the one medium of expression with the power to cross all borders, speak the truth, be political, and affect change in societies across the globe.”
Similar to the man from Morocco’s Makhzen in Reda Allali’s story, however, Short is only half right. Music is clearly a powerful motivator and organizing tool for change. But much like Morocco’s Justice and Spirituality Association, in Lebanon Hezbollah sees itself as possessing the very same qualities Short and Kuti ascribe to popular music. And it has real weapons, not just good songs. The problem is that the majority of what could be termed Lebanon’s musical jihadis are the well-educated, cosmopolitan, and politically progressive Lebanese young people of central and northern Beirut and other big cities. If they can’t connect to the mass of working-class, often less educated young Lebanese, whether in the Shi’i neighborhoods of southern Beirut or the Sunni, Druze, and Maronite villages of the country’s interior, it’s hard to imagine how the outstretched arm with a Fender guitar can compete with the outstretched arm with a Kalashnikov—Hezbollah’s brilliant yet disheartening riff on the cover of Bob Marley’s
Uprising
album, which not so long ago helped a generation of Lebanese make it through another war-torn day.
The Sheikh Who Said Yes
Not far from Moe Hamzeh lives Sheikh Ibrahim al-Mardini, who has his own way of preaching peace and tolerance against the power of war. He lives with his wife and two small children in a tiny two-room apartment on the roof of his family’s building in the working-class neighborhood of Verdun. Despite possessing a keen mind and an advanced theology degree, his unorthodox ideas—particularly that secular music, including rock and heavy metal, is not prohibited by Islamic law—have meant that he has to work in a pharmacy to support his family. “The Dar al-Ifta’ [the official body responsible for issuing fatwas and approving Sunni imams] told me it would be better if I stayed away from mosques and madrasas,” he said with a wan smile when explaining why he doesn’t have a mosque at which to preach the
qutba,
or Friday-afternoon sermon, as do most religious scholars with his training.
Al-Mardini, whose smile and lotus-crossed legs radiate equanimity and wisdom even in the face of adversity, has refused to give up his interest in music despite the financial and professional costs. Though he doesn’t have specific musical training himself, his writings on music and its permissibility in Islam have been circulated across the Muslim world. For him, support or opposition to music represents the fault line between an Islam that is open to the world and tolerant, and one that is not. As he explained to me, “There is nothing in the Qur’an that says music should be prohibited. In fact, it can play a positive role in society as long as it’s not insulting or offers views against Islam.”
Al-Mardini’s writings on the subject are more explicit. He bluntly reminds readers that “there is no Qur’anic text banning music,” and explains that seventy of the eighty sayings of the Prophet Muhammad traditionally used to prove music unlawful are considered legally “weak or very weak” (and so not binding for Muslims). For him, when the Prophet Muhammad said to one of his Companions, “You came with a very good ear,” he meant an ear both for music and for wise political judgment. And if this is how the Prophet felt about music, its prohibition must “exist mostly to preserve regimes, not Muslim societies of some sort of Islamic personality.”
Once again, we see a religious scholar offering a critique of his country’s political establishment that echoes those offered by musicians. But Sheikh al-Mardini didn’t take up the cause of promoting the Islamic legitimacy of popular music because he’s a fan of heavy metal or hip-hop. His musical tastes are more traditional. What he does believe is that the opposition to music by conservatives indicates an even more serious threat to the public sphere in Lebanon. In a political environment riven with factionalism and hostility toward anyone who wants to change the status quo, music is one of the few channels for positively critiquing, and even transcending, the present situation.
As we concluded our first meeting, al-Mardini explained, “A musical culture is necessary for people to develop themselves; any limitations on the arts will encourage the opposite of what a healthy religious system should call for, because culture is something owned by everyone, and not something that a few persons should decide upon.” Ultimately, al-Mardini wants Muslims to go back to the original sources and learn what they have to say about music and even more crucial issues.
Moreover, just as the opening of the Muslim public sphere allows seemingly marginal religious thinkers to reshape the contours of Islam, it allows musicians to claim a space in which a different vision of Lebanon can be articulated. As the Kordz urge listeners in their song “Deeper In,” “Your mind is in despair and lost in a dream / Bring it out again from somewhere deeper in.”
Rotana’s “Dominate or Die”
Versus Metal’s DIY
It is no secret that religious forces can be regressive when it comes to artistic and musical freedom. Today, however, conservative religious groups like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Morocco’s Justice and Spirituality Association, and even Hezbollah, are adopting something approaching a live-and-let-live policy toward most artists. Direct government censorship, whether motivated by political or religious considerations, has also silenced musicians. But these days, being censored by the government in the MENA tends to increase sales in much the same way that “explicit lyrics” stickers do for artists in the United States.
In today’s globalized media environment, many leading Arab artists have come to feel that today the growing power of the major Arab media companies poses a greater threat to their artistic freedom than do either government censorship or religiously grounded attacks. The epitome of this trend is Rotana. Founded in 1987, and with a market capitalization valued at over $1 billion, the Saudi-owned media conglomerate is the biggest Arab media company by far. Under its umbrella are television stations in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Dubai; recording studios; record labels; at least six music video and cinema channels; production companies; management and publishing divisions; and even cafés where you can purchase the company’s products and get them signed by one of the company’s stars if they happen to be doing an in-store promotion.
As the company’s publicity boasts, Rotana’s “portfolio of more than 100 stars from the entire MENA region…certifies an 85-percent market share for Rotana in the Arabic music industry and four of the top ten channels viewed in the Arab world.” Its roster includes perhaps the most popular male singers in Arab music today, such as the Iraqi Kazem Al Saher; Egypt’s Amr Diab; Lebanese singers Najwa Karam, Julia Botros, Elissa, Georges Wassouf, and Wael Kafoury; and leading Kuwaiti singer Abdullah Rweished, who had a fatwa of death handed down against him by a Saudi cleric on an unsubstantiated charge of singing the opening verse of the Qur’an.
Along with its main Lebanese competitor, Future TV (founded by Hariri in 1993), Rotana’s economic and cultural position in Lebanon epitomizes how deeply rooted globalization has become in the last two decades, thanks in good measure to the late prime minister’s liberalization and privatization programs, which reshaped the country’s economy toward the financial, service, and tourism sectors. But the price, as elsewhere in the MENA, has been increased inequality and poverty, skyrocketing foreign debt, and a retrenchment of sectarian and specifically Islamist politics, as personified by Hezbollah, in the poorer Shi’i communities that have experienced few benefits from the reforms. Not surprisingly, Hezbollah has developed its own increasingly globalized media structure centered around its al-Manar television network.
What makes Rotana different from its Western counterparts is that no Western entertainment company monopolizes every facet of the entertainment industry the way Rotana does, from managing an artist, owning her publishing rights, and distributing her album, video, and maybe even movie, playing them on its video music channels, and organizing her tours, the way Rotana does.
Rotana is both an international conglomerate and a “family business,” one that remains tightly under the control of one person, Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal. In fact, Rotana is a new exemplar of the type of “family capitalism” that is not just typical of the wealthy Gulf petro-monarchies and sheikhdoms, but has long been the basis of Lebanon’s grossly unequal distribution of wealth. While the company doesn’t control every major artist in the Arab world, most of the ones not in its stable are established enough to demand similar budgets for recording, video production, and marketing their music from the few remaining labels that are willing to compete with it.
But with all but the biggest artists in the Arab world, Rotana doesn’t have to negotiate or compromise. Operating under the same “dominate or die” philosophy that the
New York Times
once described as the modus operandi of contemporary corporate globalization, Rotana can make it very difficult for an artist to achieve mainstream success if he or she refuses to play by its rules, or decides to move beyond criticizing Israel and the United States to taking on the authoritarian political and social systems of the MENA, and especially the Persian Gulf.