When Black Metal's Anti-Religious Message Gets Turned on Islam
An underground scene of bands in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East are finding new use for heavy music's blasphemous potential.
Jul 11 2012, 3:08 PM ET
By Kim Kelly - Kim Kelly is a New York-based writer, music publicist, and promoter. She has written about extreme metal and the culture surrounding it for NPR.org, Terrorizer Magazine, Invisible Oranges, The Boston Phoenix, Brooklyn Vegan, Metal Maniacs Magazine, and others. She blogs at Ravishing Grimness.
"Burn the Quran! Burn the fucking Quran!" a woman screams hoarsely, over and over again. Tinny guitars course beneath her howls, sawing away at any semblance of melody. Sampled snippets of fundamentalist Islamic rhetoric filter through, and muffled voices exhort their unseen audience to praise Allah and to destroy the infidel.
To fans of heavy music, the hallmarks are immediately recognizable. This is raw, mid-tempo black metal, a lo-fi example of heavy metal's most evil subgenre. Black metal feeds upon hatred, nihilism, and anti-human behavior. Extremity is everything. It drinks the blood of Christ, turns upon its own, and takes almost carnal pleasure in the theory and imagery of war. The music from the early days of this scene conjured images of the ashes of burned churches and the dried blood of murder, and yet the genre, in its middle age, often doesn't shock the way it once did. The hellish noise of this particular song, though, does. There's something different about it. This is real.
The overall effect is chilling, which is, of course, exactly its creator's intent. Her name is Anahita, and she is the 28-years-old voice and vitriol behind Janaza, Iraq's very first female-fronted, black-metal band. Allow that notion—Iraq's very first female-fronted, black-metal band—to sink in for a moment. Her first recording, Burn the Pages of Quran, boasts five distorted, primitive tracks that altogether run just shy of an unlucky 13 minutes. She, along with a handful of other acts hailing from the Middle East, are repurposing black metal's historically anti-Christian ferocity to rail against Islam. In doing so, these bands are serving up another example of how art and dissent can intersect in a region where dissent can sometimes have deadly consequences.
For rather obvious reasons, Anahita keeps her full identity secret. In every photograph, she's smeared with layers of black and white corpse paint, rendering her anonymous and demonic-looking. It's difficult for a Westerner to find much information on Anahita, but she is becoming recognized within the international metal scene as one of Iraq's most blasphemous entities. She rarely grants interviews; the only other published Janaza interview to date comes courtesy of long-running dark music blog Heathen Harvest. It took well over a year for me to track her down, and even then, she refused to speak on the phone, instead insisting on communicating via Facebook. She answered questions about her life, her views, and her music, including the one that weighed heaviest on both of our minds: What would happen to her and her compatriots if religious authorities discovered their actions?
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/07/when-black-metals-anti-religious-message-gets-turned-on-islam/259680/
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