Metal Out Of Africa

Ray Huling profiles Amir Jalal, the Algerian metal composer who learned Delta blues from a Frenchman and AC/DC by ear.

From French Blues to Algerian Metal
In 1988, in a small music shop somewhere near the Place Denfert-Rochereau in Paris, Amir Jalal, a 19-year-old Algerian, learned how to fingerpick the Delta blues from Alain Giroux, a 40-something Frenchman famed for his mastery of this quintessentially American music. Over the course of a few weeks, Jalal, a tall, handsome kid with curly dark hair, an aquiline nose and blue-gray-brown eyes, also learned Piedmont and Texas Blues from Giroux. He even bought his first acoustic guitar from the French bluesman, a Guild D-25. Jalal had long wanted to learn the blues. His father had a great collection of blues records, and Jalal knew the music had heavily influenced one of his favorite bands. Playing the blues, he says, helped him "learn the three chords of AC/DC."

As strange as all of this sounds to American sensibilities, it actually makes perfect sense that a young man journeyed from the northern tip of Africa to the Îsle de France to study the music of the Mississippi delta so he could learn to play heavy metal. Place Denfert-Rochereau is a crossroads, after all. The French used to call it Place d'Enfer, Hell Square. The catacombs of Paris, extensive subterranean cemeteries stuffed with the bones of rioters, lie beneath its pavements. When Jalal met Giroux  he had already seen Motorhead in London. After experiencing the "big shock" of AC/DC's Highway to Hell when he was 12, he'd joined the burgeoning metal scene in Algiers. "It was something that I lived on the spot," he says. "I was right in the action."

Now 40, his hair flecked with gray, he still wears denim and smiles broadly when he talks of the Algerian metal scene of the late '80s. He played in a few bands back then and also worked in radio while studying American Civilization at the University of Algiers. Unfortunately, this period of high musical productivity ended in 1991 with Algeria's civil war, during which Islamist guerrillas assassinated intellectuals, artists and especially musicians. "They were systematically killing us," Jalal says of the guerrillas. In Algeria, "if you plug a guitar into an amp, you're already subversive."

In the early 2000s, he moved to the U.S., settling in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Last year, he released his first solo album, Meskoon, which means "possessed." He's now recording another record with his wife, who is also Algerian, singing lead. Meskoon consists mainly of straightforward blues metal. Much of the record would not seem out of place in an episode of Miami Vice, a sort of bluesier Joe Satriani. Only with lyrics. In Arabic. And in a dialect of Arabic, Algerian Darja, incomprehensible to most of the Arab world.

"'80s Western sound with indigenous elements" is a fair description of global pop. Yet, Jalal's success as a songwriter and performer comes from the way he makes a strength out of this generalization. He doesn't merely infuse a borrowed sound with new life. He also makes the borrowing itself significant. He confronts his Algerian and his American audiences with the very idea of his music - as well as with the songs themselves. That's where the notion of being possessed comes in.

A Special Brand of Crazy
Meskoon means "possessed" and also "haunted." The root of the word is sakana, meaning "to inhabit, to dwell in." Thus, a guy who is crazy or possessed has a body inhabited by more than one being. The beings that inhabit Jalal's work are numerous and of many varieties.

In part, this arises out of the open secret of Algeria: It's not an Arab state. Though habitually included in the Arab World, Algeria comprises many ethnicities and languages, among the most important of which are the Berber peoples - tribes living in North Africa since before the Islamic conquest. In the 1970s, Algeria took on a place of prestige in the Arab World for liberating itself from French colonial rule. Playing this role meant playing Arab. The government made an effort to Arabicize Algeria, especially by enforcing instruction in Standard Arabic, which few people in country spoke.

Algeria imported teachers of Arabic from Egypt, Syria and Jordan and exported freedom fighters to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Many of these "Arab-Afghans" returned to Algeria as extremists. In the ‘80s, says Jalal, "these strange-looking guys appeared, with strange clothes and those scary beards."
At the same moment, of course, another movement was afoot, says Jalal: the metal movement. Metal certainly has a rebellious aspect, and, for Jalal, it continues to distinguish him from the mainstream, even in the U.S. "An Arab immigrant who came here and sees Motley Crue - it must be a shock," he says. "But for me it was the opposite."

Yet the Algerian resistance to conformity also had a local character, one that shapes Jalal's music as much as metal does. As a crossroads for the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Africa, Algeria has a thoroughly miscegenated musical tradition. Three of its genres - raï, gnawa and châabi - weigh especially heavily on Meskoon.

Gnawa music doesn't belong to Algeria, but then it doesn't belong to any state. Gnawi are itinerant musicians and mystics descended from West African slaves. In the city of Oran, where Jalal spent his childhood, gnawi would walk through the neighborhood in the morning, playing music "to give the Baraka" - to give luck. This kind of thing is a heresy under Middle Eastern Islam, but acceptable to most North African Muslims. For Jalal, legitimizing the African perspective and emphasizing Algeria's Africanness is crucial. He pursues this goal in his own manner, however. The iconic gnawa instrument is the guembri, a three-string bass lute. Jalal has an electric one. "If I have to play an AC/DC cover," he laughs.

Raï is Algeria's most celebrated and internationally-recognized pop music. It developed out of folk music in Oran as a way of singing in direct terms about sex, drinking and politics. Naturally, raï was wildly popular, censored by the government and condemned by religious groups. You can see how raï's sentiments - if not its synth keyboards and disco beats - would appeal to a teenaged Jalal.

Châabi is considered the urban folk music of Algiers, where Jalal passed his adolescence. But châabi also came to represent the most forceful Algerian protest music, especially in the hands of the great Kabylie Berber musician Lounes Matoub. Matoub showed that music could be a force for genuine social change in Algeria. He was assassinated for his efforts in 1998.

The centrality of Africa, the blending of genres and lyrical provocation. All of these aspects of raï, gnawa and châabi come through in Jalal's work, unified in the sounds of Western metal. But is Meskoon any good?

Saladin's Horse and Patton's Tank
"The Ballad of Saladin's horse" is the best song on Meskoon; it has the most going on, both musically and lyrically. Gnawi-esque trance themes dominate the rhythm section, relieved by skirls of synth keyboards and super-slick metal guitar scales and riffs, reminiscent of Iron Maiden of the Somewhere in Time era. The vocals weave in and out of Darja and English, rap and harmony, solo and duet (with Jalal's wife, Rym). The music exemplifies the power of nostalgia. We long for prior times because of the strength we knew in those days. Jalal's song takes a bittersweet tone by giving us a taste of that old metal greatness, by showing us how this music has both lived and died by changing.

The lyrics articulate this tone with a political force worthy of Lounes Matoub. Saladin is Salah al-Din, a Kurdish Muslim who repelled the Crusaders from Jerusalem in the late 12th century. It has become commonplace among Muslims to refer to the current conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine as a revival of the Crusades. This rhetoric has led to what Jalal calls a painful longing for a glorious past, a time when men like Saladin defended Islam. "I know and understand their feelings of helplessness, he says, "towards what they perceive as a terribly unfair outcome to their history."

Yet, Jalal wasn't about to reflect these feelings in a simple way. He took inspiration from "The Death of Saladin," a poem by the great Persian poet Rumi, and adapted some of its verses into his own lyrical vision. Jalal's song does speak of military triumph: "Your sword flaring glorious ages," he says of Saladin. And he sings of a more promising future for Muslims:

But the Wheel of Destiny will turn around

And we choose to hold on to that.

Here, Jalal's ballad seems to salve the wounds recently suffered by Muslims, but the song is also a spur. He doesn't actually celebrate Saladin. "I have always been reluctant on principle to glorify an individual," he says, "particularly politicians and military men." Thus, the song pays tribute to Saladin's horse.

This is a bold move. Jalal is pointing out that whatever glory Saladin achieved, he achieved on the back of a horse. A superior horse comes from the breeding practices of a society. "The Ballad of Saladin's Horse" is a paean to the victories won by the community of Muslims, not just by its individual heroes. An American parallel would be  "The Ballad of Patton's Tank," which would remind us that U.S. industrial power, not merely the genius of General Patton, won back Western Europe in World War II. Jalal is saying that everyday work advances a people. The horse comes before the hero. Better to focus on communal flourishing than to place hopes in a savior.

But Jalal has a message for the West, too. He's asking for understanding. He and his wife sing the line, "If you know how to weep for a human being, weep for Saladin!" in English. He wants an effort at mutual comprehension, which is an effort he has long made himself. Consider his explanation of why he studied American Civ: "There was this guy, this musician" he says, "I had the sense he was saying very interesting things, but I didn't have the background to understand him." Jalal learned American culture to understand what Frank Zappa was talking about. Zappa is a paragon of cosmopolitanism, but you still need specific knowledge about the United States to catch his vibe. The same holds true for Jalal and Algeria.

Ray Huling is a freelance contributor to Giant Realm.

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