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"If you haven't found something strange during the
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
day, it hasn't been much of a day." -- John A. Wheeler
PROVIDING SUBSTANTIVE COMMENTARY ON THE
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
PEOPLE, POLITICS, EVENTS AND ABSURDITIES OF
OUR TIME. SERVED UP WITH ACERBIC WIT, YOU
SHOULD FIND IT QUITE SATISFYING.
Boys In The Band: Unknown To No One
"We lived under dictatorship for 35 years. I'm not prepared
to go through that again . . . If people attack us for being in a
band, that's terrorism." --- Nadeem Hamed, 20-year-old Iraqi
and lead singer of his country's first boy band.
I know that Iraq is still a mess, a seething cauldron of
contentious ethnicities and religious sects. I understand that
not everyone there is particularly appreciative of our having
"liberated" them. There are even rumors that Saddam is alive
and orchestrating the murder of American soldiers.
But given all that, there could still be cause, crazily, for
optimism, albeit guarded. Somehow, amidst all the terror,
chaos and rubble, Iraq has produced what is perhaps a first in
that entire region of the world, an entity that we in the West
fondly know as a "boy band." The sociological and political
ramifications of this are enormous.
But wait a minute. For those of you whose "hip" quotients
don't even register on the scale, you're wondering exactly what
a boy band is. Not to be a wise guy, but a boy band is just that, a
band made up of boys. Obviously, though, there's more to it
than that or else Pearl Jam, Metallica and Rage Against The
Machine are boy bands just like the Backstreet Boys and
*NSYNC, who are actually real boy bands.
The characteristics of boy bands are as follows: They must
be boys somewhere in their teens through about their
mid-twenties, at least when starting out; they must be
manifestly cute based on contemporary standards and adored
by legions of prepubescent and adolescent girls; they must
never play musical instruments on stage, but only sing and
dance; their songs have to be sugary pop confections with no
more substantiality than cotton candy, but they must be able to
harmonize beautifully in those songs; they may hip-hop, but
must never rock.
Okay, but what's so significant about the rise of a boy band
in Iraq? It's significant because if the Iraqi masses, and all of
the Middle Eastern masses as well, can get themselves caught
up in the nonsensical trivialities of vapid pop music and
culture, then they just might forget about jihad and intifadas
and fatwahs and keeping women in veils and driving the Jews
into the sea and pan-Arabism and hating America and all the
rest that keeps their civilization at the bottom of the heap and
a large portion of the world stirred up by their troublemaking.
So this band, this boy band, which calls itself Unknown To
No One--which sounds like a double negative, which, I guess,
has the clever meaning that they are actually known to
everyone--is a model of diversity in a region usually regarded
as a backwater of intolerance and strife. The five members of
the band include Armenian Christians, Sunni Muslims and
Shi'ite Arabs. Normally, in that part of the world, those groups
would have about as much chance of palling around with each
other as Janeane Garofalo and Ann Coulter, but apparently
there's something about Western pop culture that makes them
want to transcend all the old nonsense.
"We are all brothers here," said Art Haroutunian, who
writes the band's songs. "There is no racism. No civil war." It's
the sort of utterance seldom heard anywhere in the vast sandy
wastes of the Middle East and is utterly pregnant with
possibility.
Of course, it may strain credulity with most to believe that,
of all things, boy bandness could turn out to be the
breakthrough the world has been hoping for in terms of
calming down the ceaseless hatreds and conflicts in the Middle
East, but who knows? If a place like Iraq can produce a
peace-loving, ethnically and religiously diverse group of young
men who are able to coalesce themselves into a harmonizing,
happy-headed group of singers that are recognizable to the
civilized world as a boy band, then there may be more cause for
hope for this region than even the most fanciful adherents of
the Bush doctrine ever dreamed.
It can't be forgotten that certain nefarious forces in Iraq
would love to get these guys out of their matching boy band
outfits and into a more acceptable line of work, like killing
infidels. Only time will tell if Unknown To No One can make a
go of it in their country.
But as a certain American pop icon once sang: "If I can
make it there, I'll make it anywhere, Baghdad, Baghdad." Or
something like that.
"We lived under dictatorship for 35 years. I'm not prepared
to go through that again . . . If people attack us for being in a
band, that's terrorism." --- Nadeem Hamed, 20-year-old Iraqi
and lead singer of his country's first boy band.
I know that Iraq is still a mess, a seething cauldron of
contentious ethnicities and religious sects. I understand that
not everyone there is particularly appreciative of our having
"liberated" them. There are even rumors that Saddam is alive
and orchestrating the murder of American soldiers.
But given all that, there could still be cause, crazily, for
optimism, albeit guarded. Somehow, amidst all the terror,
chaos and rubble, Iraq has produced what is perhaps a first in
that entire region of the world, an entity that we in the West
fondly know as a "boy band." The sociological and political
ramifications of this are enormous.
But wait a minute. For those of you whose "hip" quotients
don't even register on the scale, you're wondering exactly what
a boy band is. Not to be a wise guy, but a boy band is just that, a
band made up of boys. Obviously, though, there's more to it
than that or else Pearl Jam, Metallica and Rage Against The
Machine are boy bands just like the Backstreet Boys and
*NSYNC, who are actually real boy bands.
The characteristics of boy bands are as follows: They must
be boys somewhere in their teens through about their
mid-twenties, at least when starting out; they must be
manifestly cute based on contemporary standards and adored
by legions of prepubescent and adolescent girls; they must
never play musical instruments on stage, but only sing and
dance; their songs have to be sugary pop confections with no
more substantiality than cotton candy, but they must be able to
harmonize beautifully in those songs; they may hip-hop, but
must never rock.
Okay, but what's so significant about the rise of a boy band
in Iraq? It's significant because if the Iraqi masses, and all of
the Middle Eastern masses as well, can get themselves caught
up in the nonsensical trivialities of vapid pop music and
culture, then they just might forget about jihad and intifadas
and fatwahs and keeping women in veils and driving the Jews
into the sea and pan-Arabism and hating America and all the
rest that keeps their civilization at the bottom of the heap and
a large portion of the world stirred up by their troublemaking.
So this band, this boy band, which calls itself Unknown To
No One--which sounds like a double negative, which, I guess,
has the clever meaning that they are actually known to
everyone--is a model of diversity in a region usually regarded
as a backwater of intolerance and strife. The five members of
the band include Armenian Christians, Sunni Muslims and
Shi'ite Arabs. Normally, in that part of the world, those groups
would have about as much chance of palling around with each
other as Janeane Garofalo and Ann Coulter, but apparently
there's something about Western pop culture that makes them
want to transcend all the old nonsense.
"We are all brothers here," said Art Haroutunian, who
writes the band's songs. "There is no racism. No civil war." It's
the sort of utterance seldom heard anywhere in the vast sandy
wastes of the Middle East and is utterly pregnant with
possibility.
Of course, it may strain credulity with most to believe that,
of all things, boy bandness could turn out to be the
breakthrough the world has been hoping for in terms of
calming down the ceaseless hatreds and conflicts in the Middle
East, but who knows? If a place like Iraq can produce a
peace-loving, ethnically and religiously diverse group of young
men who are able to coalesce themselves into a harmonizing,
happy-headed group of singers that are recognizable to the
civilized world as a boy band, then there may be more cause for
hope for this region than even the most fanciful adherents of
the Bush doctrine ever dreamed.
It can't be forgotten that certain nefarious forces in Iraq
would love to get these guys out of their matching boy band
outfits and into a more acceptable line of work, like killing
infidels. Only time will tell if Unknown To No One can make a
go of it in their country.
But as a certain American pop icon once sang: "If I can
make it there, I'll make it anywhere, Baghdad, Baghdad." Or
something like that.