JO Magazine

Heavy metal is certainly not everyone's bag. But you don't have to like it to appreciate its value to the music industry.

Words by Nicholas Seeley.

ON OUR WEBSITE THIS month, we’ve paid a lot of attention to a hard rock and heavy metal-themed battle of the bands called Crash of the Titans. OK, in part that’s true because we still occasionally drag out those Megadeth and Iron Maiden tapes we got back in the ‘80s. But it’s also because heavy metal has an important role to play in a musical ecosystem.

Metal is a loud, typically energetic genre; often (though not always) its songs express anger, rebellion and a dissatisfaction with the status quo. That makes it a genre with tremendous appeal for young people. It’s what you’d call an entry point. People become fans of music when it expresses something they identify with, and heavy metal has a lot to say about the restless energy and frustrated ambitions of today’s youth.
Perhaps because of its intensity, its un-ironic emotionalism, or the powerful feelings it taps into, it’s a genre that seems to inspire particular passion.

But instead of going out in the street and throwing garbage cans through windows, young people who identify with music often put that energy into something productive: namely, making more music.

At Crash of the Titans we’ve seen a taste of what that passion can do. Musicians in the show have spent hours upon hours sitting in their basements teaching themselves to play the guitar or the keyboard or drums so they can make music like Metallica. They’ve clearly put more time and toil into learning the music than most of the oud players you hear strutting around at weddings. In fact, they’ve invested more in their music than most people do in anything. And they’ve done it with little hope that that investment’s going to pay off.

Many of them will remain in love with heavy metal, or doom, or prog, for their whole lives. Some will continue to be musicians, and will make more metal music. But metal doesn’t exist in a vacuum. One truth that cuts across many contexts is that mainstream innovations often, if not always, grow out of marginalized movements.

Kurt Cobain grew up loving Black Sabbath and Black Flag, and went on to found an entire new genre of popular music, at least partially on their influences. And without Cobain, say goodbye to all of today’s rock and pop. Or take the US band Savatage, which has gone on from playing gothic-themed thrash metal music to create a hugely popular mass phenomenon, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

On a local note, some of us remember the days when Yacoub Abu Ghosh and Yazan Rousan, now famous for their very local and listenable projects, spent their evenings in the basement of the Dove hotel playing covers of Guns n’ Roses and the Scorpions.Subcultures are the incubators that feed culture: they draw people in with their intensity and their sense of community, but then those people develop their talents and go on to make wide-reaching and unpredictable cultural contributions.

The most foolish thing a culture, or a country, can do is to marginalize its subcultures so much that inspired young people become totally disheartened and either give up creative enterprise altogether, or else decide to leave the country. But this is exactly what Jordan has done—letting others, usually the West, reap the benefits of Middle Eastern talent and creativity.

There are plenty of people who don’t like metal. Some say it’s satanic, and they’re just off base. Though there is satanic music in the world, just like there’s white supremacist music or revolutionary music, it doesn’t come close to defining a genre.

Others associate metal’s loud and aggressive aesthetic with actual violence, a link that, in real life, is hard to make—metal fans are consistently more peaceable than, say, football fans. Some dislike the sound; others object to the fact that it’s an “imported” genre. But local innovation starts with developing talent, and that’s what music fandom does.

Crash of the Titans proves there’s still energy left in Jordan’s metal scene, despite years and years of marginalization. More than that, it means that the government may finally be accepting that music is just music. And that opens up a whole new road for young people to become involved in the arts, to build their skills, grow and develop.