Global Underground
Austin Convention Center, Friday, March 20
“I think we need to redefine world music,” declared Mark LeVine, author of Heavy Metal Islam. “It’s always Africans playing some kind of traditional music maybe with Peter Gabriel. Metal is global music. Hip-hop is as much world music as an Irish fiddle band.” That was evident on a panel spotlighting African hip-hop and Middle Eastern metal, genres that have been embraced in conflict regions around the world. “One of the first metal musicians in Iran said, ‘When metal arrived in Iran it was like a flower appearing in the desert of the revolution,'” Levine recalled. “To discover metal as a teenager in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war was something that literally saved people’s lives.” Members of Poetic Pilgrimage detailed the obstacles they face as a British female Muslim hip-hop crew, and filmmaker Magee McIlvaine touted the role of hip-hop in community building. “In Africa, these MCs are using the skills that they developed through hip-hop to build movements within their own communities, often the most afflicted communities you could imagine,” he said. “The next Tupac is not from the U.S.,” Levine concluded. “One of the things I realized traveling around the world looking at rock groups is that the next Zeppelin is not going to come from England. It’s going to come from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or somewhere.”
This article appears in March 20 • 2009.
