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Death metal bands started to emerge after the US-led invasion in 2003. (IOL photo) |
BAGHDAD - Lateef Ahmed knew when he started his band that their music will never be the popular mainstream in conservative Iraq. "Metal has been always hated and misunderstood all over the world, but in Iraq it's something totally weird…especially if we are talking here about death metal," Ahmed, the drummer in the Dog Faced Corpse band, told IslamOnline.net.
Ahmed, 22, says he has been listening to metal music since he was 13.
Dog Faced Corpse, one of the few death heavy metal bands that surfaced in Iraq over the past few years, is the second one he participates in since 2006.
"Most of the metal fans in Iraq don't listen to death metal, they would listen to stuff like Metallica or Linkin park, although there is always the minority who appreciate true thrash and death metal."
In their jeans, long hair and goatee beards, Dog Faced Corpse members performed last month in a private dinner venue on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad.
The concert, Iraq's first heavy metal concert in five years, drew a crowd of fans who donned eye shadow, anarchist pendants and black T-shirts and screamed and banged heads to the loud music.
Similar, yet smaller, performances of the handful of death metal bands took place in Baghdad over the past months.
Experts affirm that while heavy metal isn't a new phenomenon in Iraq, death metal is.
Jamal Reihan, a music expert and professor at Baghdad's Mustansiriyah University, says that some heavy metal bands have been registered since 1991.
"But because of the traditional society of Iraq, most of the bands that appeared in the past 20 years ended very soon," he told IOL.
He noted that death metal bands, on the other hand, started to emerge after the US-led invasion in 2003.
"Instead of reviving heavy metal bands, fans have introduced something stronger which is death metal."
New Iraq
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| "I had to find a way to show my pain and angry," Ibrahim, whose father was murdered by militants, told IOL. |
During last month's two-hour concert, the Dog Faced Corpse band roared their songs at the crowds of writhing, screaming young Iraqis.
"I'll see you die at my feet! Eternally I smash your face! Facial bones collapse as I crack your skull in half!" said one of the songs.
In return, the wild crowd screamed obscenities and broke tables to the beats of the deafening chords.
Words like blood, slaughter and decapitation are the common refrains in Iraq's death metal, and musicians say that is just mirroring life in post-invasion Iraq.
"I've lived the war here and I've tasted all the bad and horrible events during the sectarian clashes and that inspired me a lot," says Ahmed, the drummer.
"I really have so much to talk about in this band."
He explained that the band's name, Dog Faced Corpse, was inspired by an infamous murder in which gangsters had stitched a dog's head onto a victim's decapitated body.
Raad Ibrahim, a guitarist in another band, says he started forming his group shortly after his father was murdered by militants.
"I had to find a way to show my pain and angry."
Reihan, the music professor, agrees that death metal bands are the natural outcome of the brutalities committed everyday in Iraq.
"They show what is most violent and grotesque in new Iraq."
Controversial
Sajida Ayub, Ibrahim's mother, has no problem with his kind of music.
"I don't blame my son for searching for a different music style because sometimes the society forces you to take such decision."
But apart from the musicians' families and the metal music maniacs, the death metal bands are met with rejection from the rest of the Iraqi society.
"My son showed me a video on the internet showing Iraqis playing and singing these songs," recalls Hala Mustafa, a mother of three and a teacher at a Baghdad primary school.
"It is ugly, violent and deadly," she told IOL.
"It is the devil's music. I would never accept my son to follow such people."
Ahmed, the death metal drummer, says he abandoned his engineering studies at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University after receiving a stream of death threats.
"I seriously don't know why they consider us as blasphemers or atheists or whatever," he says.
"I'm not hurting anyone. It's just music!"
For Ibrahim, his music demonstrate anger at the kind of life in today's Iraq.
"No one likes to hear the truth, and metal music shows exactly what is happening in Iraq today, from bad to worse," he insists.
"Sometimes I hear from people that it is devil's music, but I think that killing innocent people is much more hellish than singing in protest at the chaotic and infernal situation in which we are living."
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