BLOG: METAL AS A WEAPON OF THE FUTURE

Guest contributor: Mark LeVine

Right around the time of the 2020 US presidential election, with the whiff of mass violence and even civil war in the air and metal the only music that seemed to fit the national mood, a documentary appeared on Amazon prime called Rumble. It showed the Indigenous American aesthetic, melodic and rhythmic roots of the blues and jazz (which shouldn't have been surprising, given how many early blues and jazz artists were at least part Native American).

The suffering of the two greatest victims of American history – Indigenous and African Americans, had, it quickly became clear, come together to shape the musics that most reflect the American experience built upon and out of that suffering. This took me back to the first time I heard Indigenous on the radio while driving in Arizona and made me see that their lead guitarist and singer Mato Naji's talent seemed a natural outgrowth of rather than incongruous to his Indigenous Native American heritage.

Rumble didn't just point out the Indigenous contribution to the blues, jazz and even rock. Indigenous musicians have always been part of the metal scene, some at the highest level. We must begin, of course, with that other Godfather of metal guitar, Jimi Hendrix, but alongside (and even influencing) him stands the unmistakable Link Wray (who everyone from Page to Hendrix credits as a major influence); more directly in the scene are musicians like guitarist Stevie Salas, Ozzy and then Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo, Testament frontman Chuck Billy, and the late, groundbreaking drummer for Ozzy and Motley Crüe Randy Castillo, to name just a few. All of these musicians brought various elements of their culture and music to metal. And they are just the tip of the Indigenous metal iceberg in the US. From the DIY “Rez Metal” groups such as those featured in the documentary Metal From the Dirt to bands such as I Don't Konform who've managed to work with some of the biggest producers in the business there's quite simply a major cadre of kick-ass bands that have underlined Indigenous contributions to metal as a powerful if still under-appreciated part of the US and global metal scenes.

As the US presidential election steamrolled towards November 3rd and the possibility of civil war seemed all too real I started thinking about our Indigenous brothers and sisters who were going to be on the front lines of an unprecedented assault on their treaty rights, traditional lands, and even their survival during a potential second Trump administration, and how the rez metal and just metal in general so powerfully reflected the pain and the violence their communities have endured (which is why from the start the Black Lives Matter movement made room for Indigenous Americans at the front of the social justice bus).

And I also couldn't stop thinking about how similar are the experiences, motivations and the music of Indigenous American metal artists to the dynamics of metal across the Middle East and North Africa, where it's been from the start inextricably tied to war, violence and oppressive regimes who've given young people little hope for anything but more of the same in the future.

As one of the founders of the Moroccan metal scene, Reda Zine, put it to me, “We play metal because our lives are metal.” An Iranian guitarist put it similarly, “You can't imagine how a music about death can affirm life... Metal [was] like a flower in the desert.” Today more than ever, with the violence of neoliberalism intensifying under an even more destructive necrocapitalist system, the sound of extreme metal has never been more relevant or suited to the “shit” we're all living in.

If there's an event that symbolizes the broader struggle for Indigenous rights and justice in the US today it's the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline that exploded with Trump's victory in 2016, at which point the Standing Rock protests took hold and became yet another example of a growing interracial, multi-class, truly rainbow movement against government violence, oppression and broken promises of which Native and African Americans were the most conspicuous but far from the only victims. This coalition, though ultimately dispersed by federal police and their baltigiyyeh (the Arabic term for “thugs” who work for the police to attack citizens) caused enough “good trouble” that a Federal Court suspended operation earlier this year. More important, it saw the first iteration of the progressive coalition that helped Biden defeat Trump this November.

I'm not sure if any Indigenous metal bands performed at Standing Rock during the protests, although the almost daily Native drumming was strikingly similar to the drumming of the Zar exorcisms I first heard in Egypt and Palestine that themselves were intensely similar to the spirit, feel and movements of metal. If Trump and his comrades across the globe have shown point blank how so much of the world – including much of the US – remains intensely colonized, then it's hard to know how better to “fight colonialism” than with metal's “crushing riffs,” not just in the US, but “worldwide.”

Non-Indigenous groups like Iron Maiden have written classic songs about Native Americans such as “Run to the Hills” that at least honoured the suffering they have for centuries endured. And more recently, artists like Lamb of God singer Randy Blythe specifically went to Standing Rock to stand with Indigenous protesters against the theft and destruction of their ancestral lands. And it turns out that the band Indigenous was in fact not Navajo but Nakota, from another South Dakota reservation, the Yankton Sioux Reservation, that was directly downstream from Standing Rock on the Missouri River.  

Even though Joe Biden's victory – helped in good measure in Arizona by an unprecedented turnout by Native Americans – likely means an end to the major assault on Indigenous communities, the struggle for rights, for dignity and for a future will continue, while no progress on issues ranging from environmental justice to addressing racism will be close to complete until Native Americans see significant improvements to their still marginalized position in the United States. If Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti predicted that “music is the weapon of the future,” that future has now arrived and there is little doubt that metal, including its Indigenous incarnations, will remain a core part of the the sound track and even a weapon in its own right, in this struggle.

About the author:

Mark LeVine is professor of Middle Eastern and African histories and cultures at UC Irvine and author, among other books, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Random House 2008). His new volume on music scenes across the Middle East and North Africa during the last decade is currently in production with UC Press.