In this auto-ethnographic investigation, we document a set of subcultural practices and urban rituals held by underground metal and punk music bands and skating groups in Beirut between 2005 and 2019, as a means of resistance against conformity and coercion.
The investigation involves short narrative texts (vignettes) and soundbites of geolocated situations lived by the community members during that period. This evocative auto-ethnography provides a unique perspective on a decade of changes from the lens of young, urban nomads who did not feel they belonged to the city nor its social fabric, yet were shaped by it along the way.
From Beirut's urban fabric, layered and divided with sects, politics, and socio-economic classes, emerges a group of musicians and music enthusiasts to lead an autonomous act of rebellion inside a time-space capsule. An unspoken but common goal brings them together inside the capsule: Escaping and disrupting preexisting social boundaries and patterns.
Between 2000 and 2010, The sphere of Metal, Thrash and Punk rock in Beirut interwove into a self-differentiated music and DIY underground culture. This genesis of yet another music cult unfolded into a unique urban experience that peaked around 2008. This was part of an alternative economy in cultural and knowledge production that is separate from civil society and state narratives.
Beirut was (and still is) a contested area. For over a decade, the community inhabited remnants of unused public spaces and occupy them gradually. The “community” included skaters and band members of punk and thrash metal bands (The Gamblers, Nightchains, Damar, Detox, Thrashstorm, and later on Angry Farmers and Aggressor).
Along the way, the city, with its political, security and economic layers, shaped the group and its own practices. While the scene was still thriving up until the July 2006 war, the Pavillon venue that held the scene closed down, and the community was consequently separated. At this point, the Pavillon center in Hamra street suddenly became a hub for a civil society initiative for emergency relief during the July 2006 war with Israel. This was another example of the continuously shifting functions of abandoned urban spaces.
Economic instability and the never-ending reconstruction projects in Beirut (Solidere 90’s, Waad 2006, Gentrification of Hamra starting 2007) forced the underground music scene to pursue a nomadic lifestyle. For the group, their first “exodus” meant that they had to evict vacant lots and alleys they occupied to make way for luxury apartment buildings. It also meant renting unused spaces for short periods of time to organize gigs and “keep the scene alive”.
Car explosions, security incidents and streets clashes between political factions forced them to relocate from one neighborhood to another. At different stages, different venues and spaces emerged. There were the street “Alley”, Cherry’s pub and American Dream in Hamra where concerts were held. The subculture had a wandering existence in different spaces, where attempts for revival and renewal were always present, whether in music or skateboarding.
Simultaneously, that period was marked by a wave of “return to Islam” among some band members, as multiple band members shifted their lifestyle away from the underground music scene and into Islam. Other band members migrated to other countries, a few went to rehab after becoming part of the drug craze that hit Beirut around 2008.
Looking at these intertwining elements from above, one could notice how the hybrid underground music soundscape draws a sonic map. It recalls the war ghosts, or calls for a symbolic destruction, claims the territory, and summons the imaginary, setting new laws, Metal laws, or displacing the raw Punk energy into a non-place, liminal and charged with identity. It reflects the rooted urban experience of the sphere, bearing also the violence of the city, being driven by it, or destroying it through a counter-energy.
As most sonic ethnographies orbit around racial minorities and other subcultural groups where sounding and music are effective registers that pierce the shielded oppressive superstructures, metal music and its cultural norms as an imported western tradition is sometimes bypassed in this context. And rightly so, since most of the constituents of the Lebanese metal scene over the years have emerged from predominantly middle class youth whose privilege granted them access to music prior to the internet exchange revolution.
Around these years, from 2003 to 2006, like many dysfunctional adolescents growing in the post-war fiction of urban regeneration in Beirut, we were submerged in an emergent scene whose alienated nature had minimized the distance with other excluded groups. Adopting metal in extreme forms, this tight scene - formed of a few music groups and a small surrounding of social pariahs - was aligned with counter-cultural milieus. Maybe unintentionally, this was cemented through a direct relationship with contested geographies amid its brutal transformations. Sonic intensities, loudness and an overall stochastic approach to composition were evolving in parallel with our nomadic reality. Espousing this musical fashion was gradually crafted while shuffling between a sad, yet evolving suburban Beirut, seeking rehearsal spaces that were predominantly underequipped, crippled, and sometimes in the process of decay. Our ears were attuned to these spaces’ defected acoustics. A fascination with depleted industrial sounds had burgeoned out of these spatial conditions. But also, it perhaps justified why many were drawn to global metal scenes where substandard sonic qualities are cherished. With ears strictly eager for low-grade music emerging out of what is known as the second wave of black metal, we swiftly determined our analogs in the global south that had transposed this music from its privileged condition into more contextual and culture-specific affairs. No-one was aware of any literature linking musical cultures to geographies and their political entanglements, besides a misreading of Nietzsche and a fascination with mediocre western occult writings. Instead, our strong stances against statecraft and its violent infrastructure were ensuing the periodic persecution of metal listeners. With multiple recurring campaigns and witch-hunts between 2000 and 2005, few venues would take the risk of welcoming this culture. A quest for a safe space was a constant preoccupation, as we migrated from a deserted lot to abandoned buildings, to even graveyards. This drifting routine was accelerated following the assassination of Rafik Hariri in early 2005, where public life was withdrawn following a week-long curfew and its subsequent turmoil. This series of events had summoned us to occupy a city, in all its segregated geographies, its fortified internal premises, and its vanishing public squares. Possibly the earliest and most impactful moments of this desolate urbanity on a set of forthcoming groups, was sung in Nightchains’ first album, with whom Damaar shared two members. This “old school” heavy metal album juxtaposed an exaltation of street culture with a craving for a war that never stopped brewing. “Fifteen years of war and we’re ready for more” they imprudently chanted. Though not so frivolously when these fantasies resonated with the rest of the groups and particularly with Damaar. Morphing it into its extreme forms, Damaar’s uncompromising calls for an eradication of the whole urban fabric were not just lyrical but also stylistic and sonorous. War metal we called it, a synthesis of death and black metal music. It seemed as if our longing for composing aggressive rhythms covered with cacophonies, summoned an otherworldly power to avenge us against a hostile city. Chants about final battles and an apocalyptic sublime are celebrated synchronously with cyclical exclusions from our congregational locales. A forced migration between empty lots, alleyways, cul-de-sacs and other spaces was periodic when each of these lands was lustfully exploited by scavengers of the real-estate abyss that was being plotted in Beirut.
After a sequence of coasting and anchoring, we embarked in hotel Pavillion. A seemingly inexorable heterotopia, this hotel, mostly inhabited by sex workers, catered on its ground floor for tireless gamblers in an agglomeration of slot-machine venues. Its underground, where we were placed, sheltered an assemblage of working-class billiard players, alcoholics, illegal money lenders and a mishmash of alienated individuals from the district. There, we secured a rehearsal locale and space, a pub like we were told. Being all underage, this place operated illegally, which aligned with our rebellious aspirations that increasingly insisted on maximizing our distance from the authorities. Possibly the biggest impact that Pavillion had on crafting music was it being a space of sonic exchange, whereby anyone with a voice or instrument would join and contribute to the noisescape. For some of us, a dream-like state in Pavillion was momentous. Not just as a safe space or an escape from their personal hells, but as an underpinning of a flourishing collective, a metal scene that the city had never witnessed before. Of course, everyone was aware of Pavillion’s ephemeral nature. But no one expected that prophecies and invocations of more urban violence would come in summer. No matter how anticipated a war was, the impacts of its devastation could not be masked. We left Pavillion, dismantling the collective, emigrated, and eventually split Damaar after recording its lost second release - perhaps on purpose, as our music did not matter anymore.
Mhamad Safa was a member of Damaar, a war metal band founded sometime between 2003 and 2004. Their first album EP "Triumph through spears of sacrilege" was released by Canadian label Nuclear War Now in 2007. Damaar recorded a second EP around that year but was never released. The band had split up also at the end of 2007.
Mhamad is currently a PhD candidate in International Law, at the University of Westminster. He is investigating the hearing of explosive sound as collateral damage during armed conflicts.
