The previous chapter shows how Hardcore Christians and Taqwacores use punk tools to generate religious beliefs and practices that they can call their own. This chapter scrutinizes albums, images, and live performances to show how Christian Hardcore and Taqwacore producers (e.g. musicians, Taqwacore filmmakers, and Christian ministry groups) use punk ideas, symbols, and rituals to present themselves as religious/punk to others in subcultural environments. I show that both deploy the aggressive posture of hardcore to bridge the seemingly incongruent worlds of religion and punk.
Consider two vignettes from live performances: “If someone next to you isn’t moving, shove them!” ordered the burly singer of War of Ages, a longstanding Christian
Hardcore/metalcore band. At his direction, a swarm of young men moved toward the stage with their chests bowed, slinging their arms full circle. War of Ages was playing at the Altar Bar in Pittsburgh – a church turned into a music venue – for a crowd of about 500 mostly white male youth banging their heads to deafening, ferocious music. The show bill included two other bands: one renowned “anti-Christian” band and another that made no reference to religion. Secular hardcore punks have a history of detesting Christian bands but at this show, War of Ages won their respect. The group was applauded by everyone – Christian and non-Christian youth alike – as they used the violent symbols, rituals, and sonic qualities of hardcore and metal to
express a masculinized Christianity, a Christian worldview grounded in hegemonic masculine ideals about physical power and war (see Putney 2001).
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Muslim punks The Kominas (meaning “scoundrel” or “person of low birth” in Urdu and Punjabi) headlined a show of about 100 people at the Middle East Restaurant and Night Club. Taking the stage after a fast-paced punk rock band of white male youth, The Kominas singer, dressed in a turban and a kurta (traditional South East Asian clothing) leaned into the microphone to scream, “This is for the brown kids!” To this declaration, the white audience members who had danced all night suddenly paused and stared for a moment, realizing this song was not for them. A shoe flew from the back of the room and hit the stage, landing next to The Kominas guitarist. In recognition and gratitude for this seemingly anti- George W. Bush sentiment,26 he picked up the shoe, shouted “Woo-Hoo!,” then proceeded to play the band’s daring “Suicide Bomb the Gap,” which is audacious because it parodies news media coverage about brown-skinned suicide bombers to poke fun at American consumerism and the idea that all Muslim men are terrorists. Near the stage, a group of young women and men gathered, shouting to call attention to themselves as the “brown kids.” Within minutes, dancing resumed all around the room to the provocative sound of “Muslim punk.”
26 In December 2008, former U.S. President George W. Bush appeared in a news conference with the Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki in Baghdad, Iraq. By this point it had been five years since the U.S. invaded Iraq and Bush was visiting Baghdad to make security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq public. At the event, one Iraqi reporter, Muntader al-Zaidi, hurled a pair of shoes at Bush but failed to hit him. When Mr. Zaidi threw the first shoe at Bush, he shouted in Arabic, “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” When he threw the second one, he shouted, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” Iraqi security agents swiftly wrestled Mr. Zaidi to the ground and beat him. For the full story, see the New York Times “Iraqi Journalist Hurls Shoes at Bush and Denounces Him on TV as a ‘Dog’” (Meyers and Rubin 2008). The story made international headlines as flinging a shoe at someone is considered a supreme insult in many parts of the world. It signals that the recipient of the attack is lower than the dirty ground we walk on. It inspired activists in the U.S., Canada, and Iran (among others) to throw shoes at effigies of Bush both in support of Mr. Zaidi and in protest against the ongoing occupation of Iraq.
The War of Ages and The Kominas live music shows are evidence of how Christian Hardcore and Taqwacore youth draw on a punk rock motif of antagonism ─ oppositional symbols, rituals and attitudes ─ to bond religion and punk. Their specific relationships to religious institutions and larger American society impact how they express themselves as religious/punk.
Christian Hardcore groups know that secular punk and metal youth are generally
unreceptive to Christianity, which they associate with passivity and social conformity. Therefore, although The War of Ages puts out albums on Facedown Records, a Christian record label, they usually tour with secular bands and play for a mix of secular and Christian audiences. Most audiences realize that the group is Christian because they look it up online, read the band’s lyrics, or are acquainted with the religious orientation of Facedown. To attain hardcore credibility from both Christian and non-Christian audiences, the members of War of Ages use violent rituals – they encourage their audience to push one another – and in effect, present Christians as fighters who stand up for what they believe. Even the band’s bellicose name, War of Ages, unites the adversarial nature of hardcore with evangelical beliefs about spiritual war in the End Times. As a result, the band forges a space where secular and Christian youth slam dance and sing together.
Taqwacore youth, like their Christian Hardcore counterparts, receive hostility from both punks and traditional Muslims, but they also face rejection from mainstream American society for being Muslim (Peek 2011). They rebel against both Islamophobic American society and Islamic orthodoxy to generate Taqwacore, a scene made by diverse youth who personify “the dialectics between national and transnational locations” (Aparicio 1999: 234; also Kun 2005). To introduce the dilemmas of being “American and Muslim and punk,” groups like The Kominas
play on America’s fear of terrorism to protest unjust wars in Middle-Eastern countries, the commercialization of religion, and global capitalism. They sing about “suicide bombing” the Gap clothing store, an American-based retail chain that has a reputation for hiring children for minimal pay in developing locations like New Delhi, India. If Taqwacores appear vicious, as white Christian Hardcore groups sometimes do, their ferocity maintains a satirical component to avoid ending up on an FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) watch list or even in prison, a concern that stems from their racial and religious marginalization in U.S. society. Like Christian Hardcore groups, Taqwacores deploy antagonism to integrate religion and punk; but they do it with a twinge of sarcasm, to desacralize dominant ideas of America, Islam, and punk rock.