Who Plays Metal in Morocco?
An inside view of how one music scene fought to exist—and came to flourish.
The first metal show I went to, I had to take an hourlong train from Fes to Meknes. It was a tribute show to Death, pioneers of death metal and where the subgenre gets its name. My music taste was softer at the time; I liked Dio and Savatage, and the melodic death metal band Amon Amarth was as far as I’d venture in the screamier realm. I just wanted to hear “Voice of the Soul” live, really. It was a 2017 afternoon, and my friends and I sat outside the venue waiting for the show to start. Delays of two hours or more were the standard at the time. And when the musicians finally played, the drums towered over every other instrument. The mic broke down every few minutes while a frantic sound guy fought to fix it. None of that mattered. We all loved it; we loved that we could enjoy this music with what really felt like a community. We were moshing to death metal in Morocco with no fear.
What really started it all was MTV. The popular music channel hit Morocco in the early 1990s, and young viewers got to watch the weekly show Headbangers Ball, a three-hour compilation of metal performances and new releases. The rich kids watched it on satellite TV, while those who couldn’t afford it got it on black-market VHS tapes. A few years of weekly exposure was all it took for the first bands to form in Morocco. Immortal Spirit, a death metal band that started out covering their favorite bands, paved the way in 1996.
By that point, metal had reached dark depths—its last attempt at mainstream popularity, glam metal, had been left behind in the 1980s, and the heavier sounds of Death, Morbid Angel, and Cannibal Corpse were emerging from obscurity. These were the sounds that influenced metal in Morocco: It was heavy from the start, and that never really went away. A couple of bands experimented with tamer inspirations, but an audience that gets to experience two or three shows a year doesn’t want progressive metal intricacies; it wants the fuel of mosh pits and walls of death.
Thirteen years prior, 14 metal fans not so different from me ended up in jail over the same joys we experienced that day. In 2003, a judge handed out jail sentences to members of early bands Nekros, Infected Brain, and Reborn—and a few fans as well, just for good measure—after the judge decided the musicians, their CDs, T-shirts, and English lyrics were “satanic.” The government at the time was influenced by an Islamist party, but that 2003 witch hunt ultimately failed. A series of protests and benefit concerts ensued, the King himself intervened, and the kids kept playing their guitars. By the time I started going to metal shows as a conspicuous teenager with long hair and Megadeth T-shirts, it was totally OK to rock out, if you didn’t mind a few mean comments as you walked in the street.
