Heavy Metal Islam (25 page)

Of course, musicians aren’t the only group targeted by the Ershad. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, a well-known documentary filmmaker in Tehran, has also had his run-ins with the government, for two documentaries (
Back Vocal
and
Off Beat
) he made about the difficulties faced by Iranian musicians today. We watched the films in his apartment, since naturally they are banned from public view. Mojtaba explained that one Iranian jazz band had two concerts approved by the government, only to have the second show canceled hours before it was to start.

The government can prevent public performances, but in other ways music censorship is increasingly irrelevant in Iran. After three decades of a revolutionary regime, Iranian artists have gotten very good at making the best of a bad performance environment. Among the most interesting examples comes from Farzad Golpayegani, one of the top two or three metal guitarists in Iran, and one of the country’s most talented graphic artists as well. Although he loves to play outside Iran, “where at least kids can headbang,” Farzad remains committed to building the rock scene in his country, and has become expert at putting on shows that defy the restrictions placed on him, often at the last minute, by authorities. “The last concert was half unplugged because we were not allowed to bring drums, so I tuned my acoustic guitar like a setar,” he laughed. (The setar is a three-stringed country cousin of the sitar.) “Another time I played with percussionists and a video of my paintings projected on a screen behind me; we had about 500 people for that show.”

It’s also relatively easy to buy foreign music in stores, while the Internet and music downloading have made it impossible to control the spread of “illegal” music. Yet if the central government has reached a seeming truce with young Iranians concerning what goes on between their headphones, local governments are closing music schools and jailing and even lashing people caught listening to “thumping tunes in their cars.”

Is This Music or Magic?
How Metal Invaded Iran

The practice of tightly policing music goes back to the start of the Revolution, but it is one of the ironies of Iranian political culture that the very technology and clandestine means of communication that made the Iranian Revolution possible (in particular, the circulation of contraband cassette tapes of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s speeches) were also used by the early metalheads to spread the word about, and the music of, heavy metal. Khomeini realized the possibility for cassettes to be used against him in the same way he used them against the Shah, so he banned them after taking power. Nevertheless, by the time Khomeini died, cassette tapes of the world’s best metal were circulating to a small but fanatical community of metalheads in Tehran and other major cities like Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashad.

Indeed, metal “fever” had spread among young Iranians at the very moment that the fever of the Revolution began to dim. As Pooya put it during yet another four-course meal at the home of a musician, “Out of the death of Khomeini the flowers of metal grew.” Another musician picked up on the paradoxical image of metal as beauteous and life-affirming, explaining that when it first hit Iran, metal was “like a flower growing in the middle of the desert” of Iranian politics and culture.

I never thought it was possible to find a musician as devoted to death metal as Marz until I met Ali Azhari. “I remember when I was thirteen years old,” Ali said during our first meeting in his apartment, “I was looking for serious music, not just party music or music to get drunk to. I was into reading books and wanted to be, I dunno, an important guy. And I remember I listened to—can you believe it—Def Leppard, and I said, ‘Whoa! What is this? Is this music or is this magic? Is it a kind of spell?’”

I got lost trying to find Ali’s house in northern Tehran, the upscale part of the city whose numerous high-rise condo developments, many of them with apartments costing well over $1 million, begin to look the same after a while (in one neighborhood the high-rises are all painted white, blending into the snow-covered mountains above them). Ali’s apartment is in a nondescript building in a neighborhood where dozens of satellite dishes are illegally set up away from the street. “It doesn’t matter, though,” he explained. “They [meaning the
basij
] know it’s here. They’ll come by and rip them out eventually, and then everyone will wait a while and put them back in.”

Ali is one of the best guitarists in Iran. He plays incredibly fast and cleanly, and he has a taste for the theatrical that gives his music an added sense of importance. His round face yet sharp features, long jet-black hair, and black metal T-shirt give him the look of a young Iranian Alice Cooper, although his videos might make even Alice Cooper a bit queasy.

The first thing you notice about Ali’s apartment (after realizing that he seems to be one of the few metalheads in the Middle East who doesn’t live with his parents) is that it’s quite dark, even in the middle of the day. The second thing you notice is how neat it is. This is not the abode of the typical metaler; there are no beer cans or crumpled fast-food wrappers or potato chip crumbs lying around. Ali is much too artistic and professional for that.

As I inhaled the scent of Persian incense burned to keep out the malevolent spirits of the Revolution, my ears were assaulted by an extreme metal video by the group Hate Eternal, blasting from his television. Slowly the apartment came into focus. It was laden with 1970s goth-futuristic furniture and stuffed animals—real ones, including a fox with a squirrel in its mouth and a couple of birds of prey as well.

At the other end of the apartment is Ali’s control room, a two-by-three-meter padded room with just enough space for his computer, a mixing board, and a window to connect to the even tinier “live” room. The walls are covered with posters and stickers of metal and rock bands, including Hendrix and Bob Marley. Ali’s Marshall TLS 100 amp and a couple of microphones took up the entire room. “I used to have the dual-lead Marshall,” he explained, but even though he had almost no chance of ever playing in a space big enough to use it, “I moved up to the triple,” an even more powerful amplifier.

On Ali’s computer desktop is a huge photo of Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snyder. “Metal owes him because he stood alone against the PMRC [Parents Music Resource Center], and others trying to demetalize the world,” Ali said proudly. “When you’re a kid in the middle of a war, it stays in your mind for a long, long time. Heavy metal was considered totally Western and unacceptable, but we heard it and said, ‘We like it and we’re gonna get it.’ We started trading tapes and starting bands with old instruments not destroyed during the Revolution, and when people would travel we’d ask them to buy tapes.”

Armin, a long-time friend of Ali, remembered, “Everyone was greedy and hungry to get albums, and they would be copied literally a million times, which meant you wanted to make sure to get one of the first copies, because cassettes lost quality with each copy. And we were also tricky. We’d always keep a song for ourselves, and people would have to beg to get it. Of course with the Web, you can’t play those games anymore,” he said with a laugh.

Ali laughed too, at the thought of all the changes that have occurred in the last decade. “I remember a female friend asking, like this sixty-year-old guy, ‘Would you please bring me this CD?’ and it was, like, a Cannibal Corpse CD. Naturally the guy hears the name and says, ‘Lady, this kind of music is not for you!’ And she lies and says, ‘Oh no! I don’t want it for myself, it’s not for me, it’s for someone else.’”

The clandestine “microshows” that characterized the early Iranian metal scene (and are still one of the few ways to hear metal performed live today) were ad hoc and improvised. To many of the attendees, the shows could be truly disorienting, almost like religious experiences—the perfect antidote to the hyper-ritualized, formulaic, and in-your-face Islam propagated by the Islamic state. For Armin, “The first show I played at left me so dizzy. It was in someone’s home because there were no discos to play in, and there were maybe thirty kids. The host asked my band to play ‘Altars of the Abyss’ by Morbid Angel, and everyone just freaked out, they couldn’t bear the level of extremity, they couldn’t take it after five minutes. You know, the timing was perfect, because metal hit Iran at the same time DM [death metal] became big. It was the perfect time because it was just after the war ended and death was everywhere, and then, boom, it [metal] exploded.”

Strolling Down Tehran Avenue

As the sun set, I headed with Behnam to the apartment of Sohrab Mahdavi, on a pretty, tree-lined street in the well-heeled Fereshteh neighborhood in the hills of northern Tehran. Sohrab is one of the gentlest and purest souls I ever met. He and his wife, Mahsa Shekarloo, a UNICEF official in Tehran working on women’s issues, are keen observers of Iranian culture and politics.

Sohrab and Mahsa’s apartment is a bit sparse, but tastefully decorated, with a nice sound system. As soon as we arrived, Sohrab laid out a delicious meal of
kuku,
an omelet with minced vegetable, rice, and yogurt, and some fresh
sabzi,
a plate of local herbs that normally includes mint, basil, dill, parsley, coriander, cilantro, tarragon, and watercress.

After dinner, we had tea and snacked on salted marijuana seeds. Not surprisingly, these are popular with college students because they help them to stay awake during long nights of studying for exams (before going to bed, students will chew poppy seed to come down). As we drank and ate, we listened to some traditional setar music.

Like the sitar, the setar has movable frets that make it possible to play various modes of Persian music and the combination of semitones, quarter-tones, and
koron
s that characterize it. I was aware of how versatile the instrument was, but I’d never listened to the kind of traditional Persian music Sohrab was playing for me, particularly the songs based on the
segah
mode, which combines a
koron
with a semi-flat
re,
or second, for a truly haunting sound.

Sohrab is the founder of
Tehran Avenue,
where Behnam works. The online zine was created in 2001 to explore cultural life in Tehran. “Basically,
Tehran Avenue
is a bunch of people trying to find out what’s going on in their society,” said Behnam. While it was started with only a small group of writers, in the last six years it has grown into a sizable community to “push the limits of understanding” of Iranian culture. Sohrab and his team see the site as a means of bringing the vibrant underground scene of Tehran aboveground. Aided by the “back alleys of the website,” they employ both English and Farsi to bring expatriate and local Iranians into one community.

The activity that put
Tehran Avenue
on the global cultural map was Sohrab’s idea to hold a virtual battle of the bands in 2004. Called Tehran Avenue Music Open, the competition prompted interest from hundreds of bands—itself an indication of how big the underground music scene is just in Tehran—with dozens sending in their music to be judged. A couple of years earlier,
Tehran Avenue
ran an “Underground Music Competition,” the existence of which was spread entirely by word of mouth and, in a non-publicized manner, via the Internet. But sympathetic officials from the cultural establishment let them know that calling the competition “underground” could actually put the bands who participated in harm’s way, so they decided to make it an open, albeit virtual, forum. Both competitions helped to solidify the identities of the country’s emerging rock and metal bands.

The submissions showed how many great young musicians were coming of age in Tehran, and also pointed to the desperate need for an accessible space for them to get together and share their music. As of 2007, there were three Web-based competitions. Sadly, it’s not yet possible to arrange live competitions to determine the winners, but the competitions have helped Iranian rock artists learn more about their own scene, and have opened their music to the world at large.

Like Walking Without Legs

Very soon after the Revolution, Tehran was transformed into what the anthropologist Roxanne Varzi aptly describes as an “Islamic revolutionary space.” Old monuments were replaced by new ones celebrating the Revolution, billboards featured photos of clerics and Islamic symbols instead of ads for the latest Western goods, and women could no longer walk the city’s wide boulevards in anything but the full-length outer garment known as a chador. “An all-encompassing Islamic reality” was created, according to Varzi, and it didn’t include rock ’n’ roll.

The Islamic public sphere became even more narrowly focused once Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in late December 1980. The war intensified the already powerful cult of martyrdom in post-Revolution Iran. The massive casualties produced by the war, and particularly by the Iranian tactic of using human waves to counter Iraq’s superior firepower, required that Iranians—not just the young men fighting, but the families sacrificing them—have a thirst for martyrdom.