Rocking Out

I find it a curious fact that I only get drunk, go clubbing, and “party” in the conventional sense when in foreign countries. I’ve been to clubs in Kenya, Mali, and Turkmenistan, but none in America, despite living my life outside Washington DC and attending school outside New York City. And here in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan I attended my first “death metal” concert. According to my fellow American concert-goers, this doesn’t count. They’ve been to massive Slipknot and Mattalica concerts (just to name the bands I recognized, collectively they’ve been to dozens) and have survival stories of mosh-pits full of thousands of people and the scars along their arms to prove it. One girl told with pride the story of how she was really trashed in a mosh-pit and got a cut so bad it needed stitches, and yet she didn’t notice until the concert was over. They complained that if the concert isn’t loud enough to make you slightly dizzy, it’s not loud enough.

I think I liked our little death metal concert better: loud enough to be heard over the screaming of Russian teenagers, soft enough we could have a conversation by yelling. It was in the basement of an apartment building, a white room about the size of a garage with red plastic wrapped around a few bare light bulbs to add ambiance and a raised stage on one side about 4 feet deep and an empty space on the other for the audience to stand, scream, and try to not slip on the gray linoleum. It was originally the storeroom for the café and bar you need to walk through to get to the concert and the acoustics reflected its original purpose rather than its newest incarnation: from ten feet away the band was completely garbled, but that might have been intentional. As I said, I don’t know much about how death metal is supposed to sound.

I’d like to say that we showed up and were great cultural examples for how death metal concerts are in America and the world (some of my cohorts have been to death metal concerts in Europe as well), but I’m afraid to say we looked and acted like tools. We were dressed completely wrong: in whatever clothes we’d shown up to the Peace Corps office in that day. The rest of the audience (Russian high schoolers, for the most part) were decked out in black, leather, chains, eye-shadow, piercings, gelled colored hair, and whatever American rock punk paraphernalia they could find. I caught a few with “Nightmare Before Christmas” backpacks, although I can’t imagine where they found them. We looked like a trio of old squares in comparison in sweater vests, dress shirts, Chaco pants, running shoes, and surfing T-shirts.

We hung to the back and I listened to the others’ running commentary on how cute everything was: their “little mosh pit,” their American-imitation outfits, their Red Hot Chili Peppers punk covers (it helped that they just screamed the tunes instead of trying to make the lyrics sound hard core), and how everything was not quite as good as the concerts they’d gone to in America. After awhile they realized just how patronizing and condescending they were sounding, and then decided to out-compete each other for who could sound the MOST patronizing and condescending. I drank my beer and tried to enjoy the music (the second band wasn’t bad, they had a decent lead guitarist and drummer). But standing and staring is not the way to experience a death metal concert, you need to get in there and risk personal injury banging into as many people as possible, scream so loud you can’t hear the music over your own voice, and paint yourself up so spectacularly you’re unrecognizable.

I don’t have the experience to make an educated comparison, but I think I liked the Russian “imitation” better than my American cohorts’ infamous metal concerts where the audience outnumbers most Turkmen towns. Although they couldn’t get over how little and poser everything was, my impression is that huge rock concerts are the posers, they’re trying to create (on a large, lucrative scale) what used to be an expression of raw teenage angst. Kids used to rock out in their garage, invite their friends, and just scream their heads off in apartment lofts and back yards because no one could understand their pain except for themselves and the music. These Russian kids live in Turkmenistan, they watch Russian and American music videos and movies and these are their guides for how to live a Western lifestyle different than their Turkmen neighbors, neighbors who mostly judge them as shameless animals. These kids responded to that Turkmen stereotype, accepted it, and made it their own. With only the barebones necessary – a band, an audience, and a bar with cheap drinks (the only concert I’ve ever attended where they didn’t scalp you on the drinks), they stood in the basement and screamed F-you to the establishment and the world. It’s easy for my American compatriots to be condescending about how “little” everything is, but it has to be because it is noncommercial and pure, the way death metal began (in my nostalgic idealistic world history). I doubt I will ever have the opportunity again to say I went to a death metal concert that was innocent in its purity.

I don’t think I’ll go again.