Who doesn’t want to read Heavy Metal Islam, a new book by UC Irvine scholar Mark LeVine on rock and revolution in the Middle East? If you don’t, you shouldn’t be reading this blog. Is the book good? Hell if I know. LeVine had me at the title. But Howard Hampton’s review in theNew York Times Book Review, intended as a rave, dampens our anticipation just a bit. Writing on LeVine’s explorations of metal scenes in Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iran, Hampton declares,

In lands where playing “satanic” music or even attending semi-clandestine concerts can get you thrown in jail (actually charged with things like “shaking the foundations of Islam”), there’s something truly heartening about the Moroccan thrash girls Mystik Moods striving to break through centuries-old sexist taboos, or Hate Suffocation trying to carve out a niche to play music and “be left alone by both the government and society.”

Given that the metalheads I grew up with thought they, too, were shaking foundations — starting with those of the high school and moving on up to the “War Pigs” in Washington, Hampton’s Cold War-style vision of totalitarianism in the Middle East comes across as more adolescent than the distinctions between “death, doom, and black” metal that matter so much to Cairene headbanger “Marz.” (Marz insists that LeVine make clear that his band, a hybrid of death and black metal, is most definitely NOT “blackened death metal.”) Would that Hampton, or at least one editor at the Book Review, take as subtle a view of the Middle East, where subversive and bohemian subcultures predate even Lemmy’s pre-Motorhead days as a Rockin’ Vicker. This is to take nothing away from the courage or artistry of Hate Suffocation. But Hampton is overstating the level of state persecution they face — they’re not the Plastic People — and in so doing he reinforces the orientalist cliche of all-seeing, authoritarian Islamic regimes Heavy Metal Islamis evidently meant to subvert.

Hampton closes with a rebuke to LeVine’s optimistic view of metal in Islamic lands: Metal, he says, is dystopian, not revolutionary. This is an inadvertent echo of the “culture of death” cliche with which conservatives condemn all of Islam as a monolithic “civilization” incapable of even imagining democracy. “Don’t confuse [metal] with ‘If I Had a Hammer,'” Hampton warns. “Unless it’s a hammer of the nihilistic gods aimed at your forehead.”

That’s unfair to metal — and to the brilliantly fierce “Hammer Song,” as it was originally known. (Disclosure: I’m writing a book about it.) No, “If I Had a Hammer” wasn’t dystopian, though it implicitly acknowledged the darkness its authors, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, saw in the coming Cold War. But it wasn’t about mild mannered civil society, either: “If I had a hammer,” sang Seeger, “I’d hammer out a warning.” Sounds like metal to me.

–Jeff Sharlet