Morocco’s metalheads make return

John Thorne, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: May 06. 2009 3:07AM UAE / May 5. 2009 11:07PM GMT

SETTAT, MOROCCO // With four brothers, his mother and himself living on his father’s meagre salary as a medical assistant, sometimes the gloom at home is more than Mohammed Makroum can take.

“I see only sad faces, so I go out again, pick up my guitar and chg-chg-chg-chg!” said Makroum, 20, miming the urgent downstrokes of his chosen music, heavy metal.

But things are starting to look up for Makroum. With victories at two music competitions last year and a first album in the works, his band, Sakadoya, is at the vanguard of a heavy metal scene that is slowly recovering from charges of Satanism that seemed to have stopped it in its tracks.

Trouble began in 2003, when a court in Casablanca, Morocco’s commercial capital and the heart of its music industry, jailed 14 heavy metal musicians and fans on charges of undermining Islam following newspaper stories that dubbed the young men “Satanists”. Nine of them were in leading heavy metal bands.

“That silenced the voice of metal in Morocco,” said Samir Alorchi, the founder of Zero Tolerance, a heavy metal online magazine that serves as a hub for Moroccan “metalheads”, as fans of the music call themselves. “There were some powerful bands, but they all stopped playing because they didn’t want to risk their futures.”

Now a new generation of Moroccan youth is turning to metal, Alorchi said. For many, it gives voice to common frustrations – clashes with parents, a conservative society and recent economic growth that has brought wealth to Morocco but failed to create enough new jobs.

“Where you find problems, you find people who want to reflect their feelings,” said Alorchi. “And that means metal music.”

Some of those problems are easing as the government gingerly welcomes heavy metal into the national fold.

Last year Sakadoya won Mawazine, an annual state-funded music festival and competition considered a premier showcase of young Moroccan talent. Their prize was funding to record an album, and a headline spot at this year’s festival.

“But most venue owners are still wary of bringing in metal bands,” said Mohamed Merhari, who founded Casablanca’s yearly L’Boulevard festival in 1998 as a platform for what he terms “marginalised music”.

“Rap, fusion and electronica have found a place in Morocco,” he said. “Only metal remains outside the mainstream.”

For the metal enthusiast in Morocco there are few music shops, fewer recording studios and no record labels. Bands post home-made videos on MySpace and Facebook of themselves performing with knock-off guitars and beat-up amplifiers.

“In the beginning we didn’t even have amps,” said Sakadoya’s singer, Khalid el Hasbi, 25, who founded the band in 2005 with its drummer, Hicham Hamzi, 22.

Today the group practises in a cramped room beneath Hamzi’s house in Settat, a farming town south of Casablanca. Their music is fast and driving, with Hamzi’s machine-gun drumming giving shape to the thundering guitars. Hasbi’s shrieked lyrics cover everything like a sheet of white noise.

The group’s forthcoming album, Back to the Age of Slaves, is a classic assault on free trade and capitalism. But like many metalheads, they have embraced the technology of globalisation.

Last weekend, more than 100 metalheads from around Casablanca trekked to the down-at-heel suburb of Sidi Bernoussi for Rock in K-ZA, a two-day festival at a municipal theatre whose cash-strapped organisers relied for publicity on Facebook, MySpace and word of mouth.

“We’re trying to encourage young artists and help give this kind of music a better image,” said Ouahib Lyassem, one of the organisers. “Everything that comes to Morocco from abroad takes a while to be accepted.”

“Metal expresses the rage I feel sometimes against our society,” said Abdelhadi Sankaoui, 18, a lanky student in a flaming skull T-shirt who attended in open defiance of his parents’ wishes. “When I listen to metal, I feel a fire in my heart.”

The show began with a squeal of feedback. To guttural vocals and the relentless jackhammer of the drums, dozens of boys and young men danced beneath the stage, delightedly crashing into one another while their girlfriends watched from the seats.

Neighbourhood children too young to attend gathered on the theatre steps, fascinated by the roar inside.

Up on the stage, a metal band called Paranoia whose members come mostly from Sidi Bernoussi gave it their all. The songs were short, fast and furious. Formed in 2002, the group is a veteran of Morocco’s metal scene.

When their set was finished, Paranoia retreated backstage to cool off and reflect on the evening’s performance.

“The sound system could have been better, and I wish more people had turned up,” said Samir Ahchouch, 26, one of the band’s two guitarists.

“But it’s always good to get in front of an audience, and to see people react to the music.”

“It’s what keeps us going,” said Youssef Louafi, 28, the drummer. “Despite it all.”

jthorne@thenational.ae