Staging contrapuntal double-features usually makes for a fun movie night. You know, follow up a viewing of E.T. with Predator to get both ends of the alien-visitor spectrum. Or wash down Pretty Woman with Frankenhooker for the sweetest and most sour of prostitute myths. To give yourself a populism-and-patriotism documentary bitchslap, chase Disney's pixie-dusted America's Heart and Soul with Andreas Horvath's worrisome This Ain't No Heartland. Et cetera.
Two sort-of-lately-to-DVD documentaries struck me as the ultimate in counterprogramming: I pitted Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp against Heavy Metal in Baghdad. I mean, that's American Christians insisting on musical traditionalism versus Iraqi Muslims craving Western rock contemporaneity! Palefaces in pastels with crosses versus dark complexions in black tees boasting pentagrams! Peaceful, preserved locales versus chaotic, decimated bombscapes! Age versus youth! Plenitude versus paucity! And the films' provenances could hardly be more opposite: the stately, tasteful-bordering-on-blandness of PBS versus the guerilla daredevilry of Vice's VBS! One is executive produced by members of the fairly heinous Christian act Third Day (whose Revelation was #6 on the Billboard 200 just three weeks ago), and one is directed by and stars the head of the record label bringing the world Black Lips and Dark Meat! One opens with a righteous quote from Jeremiah about sticking to old ways, while the other begins with a demon laughing along with a victim he just beheaded!
Yet: This pair of films denied me my evening of ironic juxtaposition for ironic juxtaposition's sake, as the joys and anxieties of the people being filmed maintain a disarming amount of fundamental similarities. The documentees' passion for their art and the complexities of their communities made these people too real for my jaded, spectacle-hungry hipster bullshit.
Both the Southern shape-note singers of Awake and the metal troupe Acrassicauda of Heavy are culturally marginalized/isolated by their taste in, love for, and performance of their respective musics. Huge time commitments are required by the dabbler-artisans in both films. Each group discovers and documents their medium through bootlegs, rare albums, and ramshackle recording processes. Granted, the churchgoers aren't risking persecution/harm/execution, but the Sacred Harpers often drive a hundred miles for all-day singings in rustic, air-conditionless cabin-temples, while Acrassicauda face the extremes of Middle Eastern weather, powering their gear with gas and hotel generators, and carrying guns to practice. Both factions are such relative holdouts in their attempts to reenact, popularize, and preserve their minority modes of songcraft that they almost seem like pioneers, if that makes any sense—their regional onliness as practitioners of genres with long histories comes across as a kind of originality, which I know, is an odd way to consider folks roaring through 160 year-old hymns, and, um, Metallica covers.
Both parties offer sincere testimonials about how their music offers them various types of salvation: from despair, bad habits, criminality, or worse. Both subjects are also products of, and respondents to, their environments. The Sacred Harpers are making joyful noise to fill huge rural spaces in a realm almost as pastoral as the Bible-based metaphors in their songs. Acrassicauda actually inhabit a world that resembles the destruction-fantasy cover art of so many metal albums. The Sacred Harpers repeatedly refer to the stability of their families and infrastructure; thus they've a benevolent, in-control attitude toward their mortality. Acrassicauda's initial stance as tough guys is a coping mechanism steeped in their rage at all of the disorder and instability around them; later they develop a morbidly peaceful acceptance of their impossible circumstances. The Sacred Harpers, whose numbers thin due to old age, rhapsodize about how, no matter the moment of their individual passings, they'll all be singing together in eternity. Acrassicauda, after a mortar impact near a gig, laugh about dying together mid-rockout: "Metalheads forever."
The Sacred Harpers privilege volume in a way that is kindred with the metalmakers: One singer explains, "Loud is the way you get the good out of it. Give it all you've got." Another says that their music shakes the ground. The choristers' yelling style can be as hard on the vocal cords as metal singing, and many of the most intense performers look like rock stars as they belt up a sweat. Also like the metalheads, the Sacred Harpers feel, and have a legacy of being treated like, rebels or outcasts because their work is considered a clamorous breakaway from provincial norms. One singer says that the music is "looked down upon" as unsophisticated. Another acknowledges that Sacred Harp involves "breaking the rules," to the point that it sounds like a church version of the punk spirit: "We were doing all the things that choral directors tell you not to do, and it felt really, really good." (Iraq was practically banning music, so Acrassicauda were definitely on the edge.) A shape-note teacher says, sounding very metal, "Give the devil his due," regarding his desire to achieve "a tone quality through volume that burns out the chaff." Indeed, he is talking about distortion, and the Sacred Harp singers achieve it-- even the slow jams pummel the listener in droning waves, and like much metal, the lyrics can't be made out.
Then again, Awake does show us what the lyrics involve, to contrast them with the romance and chipperness of gospel's more dominant approach. Turns out the subject matter's not that different from Acrassicauda's: They're hollering about being fettered in chains, about fountains of blood, pessimism, dread, powerlessness, drowning, viscera, existential crises, and megadeath. As the affable Firas of Acrassicauda says about being forced to write a pro-Saddam song by the previous regime, "To stay away from the devil, sing for him."
And the guys in Acrassicauda are not cliché hellions. Their priorities aren't that different from those of the Sacred Harpers: they want peace for their families. Fellowship is immensely important to both tribes as well: the socializing, release, and communal connection occasioned by the music and its buoyantly participatory audiences create scenarios that are, to quote one Sacred Harper, "all feedback, all the time." (The mate-hunty gender-mingling that the Sacred Harpers enjoy is not shared by Acrassicauda. As drummer Marwan says, their strikingly womanless gigs are the result of "tradition and culture.") Both microcosms also practice mild headbanging-- Acrassicauda must be careful to not have their body language be interpreted as too similar to that of praying Jews. Other similarities shared by both camps: Stage nerves, music that is joyously militant, members saying that they are surprised to still be alive, and conservative haircuts-- Acrassicauda's prevented by culturewide intimidation from growing long hair.
Both films powerfully document amateurs who've achieved a kind of virtuosity. Awake, My Soul even offers indie geeks insight into the manic harmonizing employed by bands such as Bodies of Water, and features an amazing version of the hymn that Current 93 included eight times on its last album. But Awake is ultimately a quaint portrait of a fascinating American idiom, while Heavy Metal in Baghdad engrosses and enlightens on a few more levels. It almost represents a new type of alternative journalism via "anchor" Suroosh Alvi, who is equally cool, curious, macho, compassionate, and resigned/realistic. The viewer is permitted to witness the guys in Acrassicauda learning that for all their early mimicry of Western pop-ridden behavior, not giving "a fuck" about politics or "the news" (as do an insane amount of American youths) is a luxury they can't afford.
When one listens to Acrassicauda describe their hardships on the road to Damascus, the birthplace (via Paul's conversion) of the majority of the New Testament, one wonders how informed the Sacred Harpers' views of Syria are, whether they consider it (as do an insane amount of Southern Christians) to be some obscure place of Arab mischief with no relevance to their lives. Christian language/iconography further haunts aspects of Heavy. Syria is called a "purgatory" for the Iraqi refugees. Alvi reads a Time magazine piece calling Baghdad "hell." In one stirring Syria moment, Acrassicauda-- they're Muslims, remember-- get tipsy on alcohol and long for their Baghdad home. So they're saying that they miss, and want to return to, hell. That's pretty fucking metal.