Mini Asia: Heavy Metal in Baghdad
[Baghdad, Iraq] Iraq, a country submerged in its own blood and tears, where vultures feed on corpses of children and families of war, bomb shells are cafe seats and nights are never silent; all created by political and religious extremities. Heavy metal band, Acrassicauda seems to say, “Fuck that, lets play some music.”
Iraq fatigue is a term coined by the media on how news, documentaries and whatever TV, movies, radio and news articles inclined to poor old Iraq have been rather tiresome. It’s the usual suspects of fanatically loud extremists blowing themselves up with homemade TNT stuffed in turkeys, dead troops, teary parents and how all parties seem to be wrangled deeper in their political and religious banters. That’s the main course and as stale as it has become, there’s of course the inclusion of Yellow Journalism, where doctored images of war (intentionally place a disfigured baby doll on the foreground and freshly bombed buildings on the background and you’ll get a prized photograph) are thrown in for good measures - the conspiracy theories.
News on Iraq are similar to bad re-runs of the Oprah Winfrey Show every fucking minute of every fucking day. It has come to a point where every man on the street in every single nation is a self-graduating political analyst. They know much more about Iraq than old man Bush does. But if you’ve given up on Iraq devolving to the stage of the Stone Age, you might want to reconsider that the film, “Heavy Metal in Baghdad”, gives political and religious propaganda a good bitch slap on the face.
THE FILM
Executively produced by Spike Jonze in conjunction with VBS.tv (the online video venture of VICE Magazine, of which Jonze is creative director), “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” is a feature film documentary that follows the heavy metal band, Acrassicauda - allegedly the first (and probably the only) Iraqi heavy metal band - from the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the present day.
Playing heavy metal in a Muslim country has always been a difficult (if not impossible) proposition but after Saddam’s regime was toppled, there was a brief moment for the band in which real freedom seemed possible. That hope was quickly dashed as their country fell into a bloody insurgency. From 2004 to 2007, Iraq disintegrated around them while Acrassicauda struggled to stay together and stay alive, always refusing to let their heavy metal dreams die. Their story echoes the unspoken hopes of an entire generation of young Iraqis.
Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti (co-founder of VICE Magazine and head of VICE Films, respectively) had been following the Acrassicauda saga for three years before ever meeting the band members. MTV’s Gideon Yago wrote a story on the band for VICE in 2003, and two years later, the magazine sponsored an Acrassicauda show in war-torn Baghdad. At that point, the situation in Iraq was already so epically bad that between death threats, blackouts and US military red tape, the show almost didn’t happen and when it did, Alvi and Moretti found themselves locked out in Lebanon. A year later, fully aware that the violence in Baghdad was escalating on a daily basis, the filmmakers embarked on a trip to Iraq “to see if [the band members] were still alive.” The week they departed, a TIME Magazine cover story on the war ran with the headline, “Life in Hell.”
Heavy Metal in Baghdad Trailer
Adoption of this kind of intentional apathy becomes necessary to survive life in Baghdad. It’s only when the band watches some of VICE’s footage that they come to understand the price they’ve paid–literally and figuratively, physically, mentally, historically, emotionally, financially. At this point, Heavy Metal in Baghdad becomes a story about the birth of political consciousness under the worst possible circumstances. For anyone who changes the channel every time, news about the war comes on, it should be required viewing.
ACRASSICAUDA
Born out of a basement rehearsal space in Baghdad, Acrassicauda (Latin for “Black Scorpion”) is Iraq’s only heavy metal band. Tutored by music instructor and guitar virtuoso Saad “Yngwie” Say and inspired by western bands like Metallica, Slayer and Slipknot, they began writing and playing metal in 2001. They soon learnt that their dream of performing live in Iraq was going to be no easy task.
Original members Firas (bass), Tony (lead guitar), Marwan (drums), Faisal (rhythm guitar) and Waleed (lead vocals) were only able to play 3 shows before the war started in 2003. Soon after, Waleed retired from the band and fled the country, leaving Faisal to fill the void of lead singer.
Most of the members of Acrassicauda (with the exception of virtuoso guitarist Tony) speak impeccable English - picked up from the careful study of Hollywood movies and Metallica bootlegs. But their passion for the very American genre of metal seems to defy academic theories of cultural globalisation. They don’t love metal because it’s American, they love Metal for the reason that it is a voice for the beliefs of what America stands for - mass cultural home and democracy for every individual.
A TICKET FOR THE PRICE OF DEATH
Due to increased security precautions throughout Iraq, it became difficult to practice or to even get through a show without serious problems. As the situation worsened in Baghdad, they began receiving death threats from insurgent groups and religious fundamentalists accusing them of Satan-worship.
In order to get clearance to play a public concert when Saddam Hussein was in power, the group had to agree to write and perform a song saluting the dictator. Acrassicauda complied, with just one, perhaps unintentional gesture of symbolic protest: they performed the song in English. The band members were angry that they’ve been displaced from their homes, that they’ve lost their rehearsal space to a SCUD missile, and that they’ve been forcibly demoted from normal, financially stable, college-age kids to the lowest rung of the lowest rung of the immigrant ladder.
FROM ZERO TO NON-EXISTANCE
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the boys of Acrassicauda were reasonably fun-loving, apolitical kids (in an early scene, the drummer says that every time he changes the channel, something about the war comes on TV), who were more or less able to eat their metal hearts out–as long as they respected Saddam and steered clear of head-banging, which can be mistaken in the Muslim world for Jewish prayer. But as the war drags on, their real-life circumstances begin to imitate heavy metal mythology: separated from one another by streets full of fire, corpses and (maybe most dangerously) justified paranoia, in five years the band is only able to play six shows. By late 2006, these educated middle-class twenty somethings became “rock n’ roll refugees,” struggling to hang on to a less-than-zero existence in Syria after literally running for their lives from Baghdad.
In Syria, in order to afford basement apartments “like three meters underground”, the boys wash dishes for 15 hour days, seven days a week. But throughout it all, they never stop dreaming of breaking into the US metal scene, of touring with Metallica, of earning the adoration of metal fans half a world away. They risk their lives again and again, not only to play music, but to meet with the American VICE camera crews, in a climate in which merely speaking English on the street can get a person killed.
It’s not just that the members of Acrassicauda that have suffered a severe quality-of-life downgrade; it’s that their lives have become so brutal that they’ve resigned themselves to not caring whether or not they live or die. The war has now all but destroyed their dream to live in peace, grow their hair long, bang their heads and play metal as loud as they want.
NO PLACE FOR HOME
The members of Acrassicauda were in danger of being deported from Syria back to Iraq. The website was created to solicit donations to help the band members find safe haven in a third country, with the ultimate end goal of ending up in the U.S. “We’re not going to rest until they’re opening for Metallica,” Alvi says. They have raised about US$14,000 so far and the band was able to leave Syria on 10 October and escaped to Turkey. The amount raised bought them airplane tickets and put some survival cash in their pockets but they’ve burned through it due to Turkey’s high cost of living and are now officially broke. Life in Istanbul is proving extremely difficult for Acrassicauda.
NEXT STOP AMERICA
Acrassicauda has a 1 month visa on Turkey’s soil as Iraqis and after that they might get sent to prison or back straight to Iraq, and as the band said in their latest blog, “…some people now say we are out of the reasons to let us make this dream come true but it takes more than reasons for us to give up what we believe.”
Images and video courtesy of VBS.tv and Vice Film & Magazine
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