Black Scorpions: Iraqi Metal
there’s an emerging group of young Iraqis who’re expressing their pain, hatred, and sorrow by playing in an underground Baghdad metal scene that nobody thought existed until now.
Bands like A.Crassicauda (scientifico for black scorpion), pictured here, are one of a small number of hate-fueled groups influenced by Western devil-worshippers like Slayer, Dimmu Borgir, and Mayhem (three of the most popular groups in the Iraqi metal world).
Before Saddam was toppled courtesy of The Red, White, and Blue, most young people had their music brutally censored by the murderous pedophile Uday Hussein, who banned just about all genres of punk and metal (death, gore, speed, black metal, and power electronics were particularly frowned upon).
The airwaves were filled with traditional Islamic wailing songs as well as Dannii Minogue and Shania Twain. That sort of shit sounds great if you’re getting fellated by five teenage girls at your father’s palace in a bathtub full of calf’s milk, but if you’re poor and young and scared of wearing a Metallica shirt for fear of being beaten by the military police, it just sounds scary.
If you want to hear A.Crassicauda or any of their ilk, don’t bother going on the internet or pestering the guy at your local record store. You have to slip down Kerada Street in eastern Baghdad at sunset to their shabby practice room that smells like if a kebab shop owner shat in your face.
The double-bass-drumming, cymbal crashes, and chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-waaahing of four Iraqi kids raised on bootleg cassette tapes and glitchy MP3s of the last 30 years of heavy metal sound so different from the everyday Baghdad musical diet of prayer calls and Arab techno that, mixed together, they’re like your worst-ever ketamine overdose at a fetish party you shouldn’t have been at anyway.
Made up of four intelligent kids who work as journalists and translators, A.Crassicauda sing about pain, death, and destruction—occasionally getting political, but never enough to have risked intrusion from Ba’athist political police. To define their sound, they plugged traditional Iraqi instruments into distortion pedals and used broken-down TVs as pre-amps for some songs. You guessed it. It sounds like hell. Just like proper metal should, right?
I heard a quick couple of bars of this band last night on NPR’s news and Notes, and I really want to hear more. They were profoundly heavy.
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