I’m admittedly not much of a Metal fan. I was born in the ‘80s during the Reagan-era “Satanic panic” so-called, so was lectured endlessly by parents and youth leaders growing go on evils of “Rock” music in general (this was the same era when seminary teachers would solemnly recount to us Grunge and Gangsta-Rap listening teens about the time Elder Gene R. Cook of the Seventy sat next to that Dad-Rocker Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones), so Heavy Metal was naturally beyond the pale. Consequently I never got a youthful taste for it.

Yet even after I got old enough for me to get into certain music because my elders disapproved of it, Metal never really clicked with me, simply because it seemed to me that no genre popular with cops, football players, bullies, and Army recruiters could possibly be as rebellious as it presents. Furthermore, Metal’s tendency towards showing off technical mastery of their instruments—all those running arpeggios and double-bass drum trills and what not—frankly felt like a tendency towards mastery and authoritarianism in general, complicit with the very regimes they pretended to resist.

Don’t get me wrong, Punk and Hip-Hop have long been co-opted by capitalist institutions as well, but I still felt that in their intentional amateurism they retained at least traces of their anarchic and anti-authoritarian roots, emerging as they both did from decaying inner-cities and ghettos, with the defiant conviction that music itself needed to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up just as much all institutions in general. Punk and Hip-Hop were party music for when the bombs dropped; Metal by contrast is what you played when you were the one dropping the bombs.

Or so I thought.

I had a student this last summer, you see, born in New York, but whose father is a refugee from Iraq. He wanted to write his final paper in defense of Heavy Metal, and well remembering how defensive I was about my favorite music when I was a college student, I of course let him and kept my reservations about the genre to myself. Over the course of our conversations about his final, however, I learned that he picked this topic not only cause he’s a big fan, but because his father is the bassist for Acrassicauda—named for the extremely dangerous and venomous scorpion of the same name from the Middle-east and North Africa—a Thrash Metal band first formed in Baghdad in the early-2000s during the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, rose to local prominence during the U.S. invasion, then were forced to flee to the U.S. itself as political refugees amidst the utter quagmire that invasion became, as they started getting serious death threats from al-Queda and local militants.

I had to here check my longstanding assumptions: this was indeed Metal for when the bombs dropped, not for when you were the one dropping them.

They initially had a warm welcome to the States; James Hatfield of Metallica met with them backstage after a concert and gave them a signed guitar; they’re got a Vice profile written up about them, and even a feature length documentary called Heavy Metal in Baghdad. They tried to capitalize on all this positive publicity by recording their debut EP Only The Dead See The End of the War (named for the old George Santayana quote, the same man who gave us “Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it”) in 2010.

Alas, they’ve only recorded one other album since then, 2015’s Gilgamesh, released independently and only tepidly reviewed. I’ve met other Muslim students who are fans of the band, yet they simply have never taken off with the predominantly white Metal-heads. The critical consensus online (such as it is) appears to be that reviewers wanted to like it more than they did, but felt the band wasn’t breaking any new sonic ground here.

Which baffled me, and revived my annoyance with Metal as a genre in general! Granted that even my untrained ears could hear the standard Metal tropes in their music—the aforementioned running arpeggios and double-bass drum trills—but unlike all those aspiring cops and soldiers and comfortably American Metal-heads I knew in high school who merely cosplayed like they lived in a war-zone, Acraussicauda actually did!

For me, this was like the difference between someone bearing their testimony in Church about overcoming adversity like, I don’t know, not winning the Utah state championship in basketball, verses someone bearing their testimony in Church about overcoming adversity like working four jobs to raise your children after a messy divorce, or losing a loved one to cancer right after your mission, or you know, scarcely escaping with your life from a war-zone under a dictatorship while your homeland gets bombed to hell. You might use the exact same words in the exact same order in both types of testimonies about adversity, but somehow one is immensely more meaningful than the other!

(And as a side-bar, this was always the chiefest objection against chatbots and AI so-called: that even if it can statistically model words indistinguishable from a human being, there was nevertheless no one actually suffering behind those words. It is impossible to “mourn with those that mourn” with an algorithm.)

I wonder too if Acraussicauda was simply a victim of bad timing; that if they’d been allowed to record their first album in 2005, in the same era as System of a Down’s “BYOB” or Green Day’s “American Idiot” (the latter of which didn’t break any new sonic ground either) at the height of the disastrous Iraqi invasion, that maybe this Iraqi band might’ve made a bigger splash. Alas, by 2010 and 2015, we were well into the Obama era, George W. Bush an already fading memory, and everyone was actively pretending the Iraq War never happened—preferring to forget our sins rather than repent of them—just as we much more recently did with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indeed, just this last presidential election, the Republican nominee (the same one who botched the COVID response so catastrophically) brazenly ran as the “anti-war candidate,” which plainly-false line was loudly parroted by tens of millions of conservatives who had all cheered on the bombing of Iraq only twenty years earlier.

But it was with a touch of prophecy that Acraussicauda named their first album for a Santayana quote; and as the equally disastrous bombing of Iran just earlier this year by that same disastrous president has yet again reminded us, those who forget history have already been doomed to repeat it (Bush always wanted to invade Iran next, recall), and only the dead have seen the end of the war indeed. Gas prices double, just as they did during Iraq, and that is frankly the least of the consequences we deserve for failing to repent of our sins.

It is now a full quarter century since 9/11, and we have still collectively learned nothing.