[E.O.M.S.]

It was early morning on Friday 11 February and the streets of central Cairo were throbbing with adrenaline and fear. Long-haired American professor Mark LeVine and Shung, founder of the Egyptian extreme metal band Beyond East, were caught in the flow of a million Egyptians who seethed towards Tahrir Square, past tanks, burnt-out buildings and soldiers with taut faces, through the rubble and detritus of two weeks of revolution.
Mubarak's surprise announcement that he was holding on to his rotten throne had sent a collective groan of frustration through the nation. The crowd feared that the time had come for desperate measures. Marvelling at the mood of coiled rage all around, LeVine and Shung looked at each other, wavelengths firmly locked, and said: "This is really metal!"
Before the revolution, Egypt's metal heads lived in fear of arrest. Bullet belts, Iron Maiden T-shirts, horn gestures and headbanging were closet pastimes for foolhardy freaks. Bands such as Bliss, Wyvern, Hate Suffocation, Scarab, Brutus and Massive Scar Era rocked their fans like the priests of a persecuted sect who lived in constant wariness of the ghastly Mukhabarat, Mubarak's secret police.
Since 1997, when newspapers had "exposed" the metal scene as a sordid sewer of satanism and western decadence, metal was never a faith for the faint-hearted. "Here in Egypt, everything is satanic if it's unknown," muses Slacker,  drummer with Beyond East and veteran of Egypt's metal wars.
"The consequences of speaking out could be pretty dire," explains LeVine, author of the recently published Heavy Metal Islam, a startling look at metal heads, hip-hop kids and other musical marginals throughout the Arab world. "And for what? What would it get you?" Jail? Sodomy? The lash? Any musician contemplating open revolt against one of the Arab world, old-school, authoritarian dictators faced some stark choices. Zip up or die, in career terms at least.
"We were like in a cocoon," explains Skander Besbes, aka Skndr, a luminary of Tunisia's electro and dance scene, "Closed in on ourselves, ignoring the regime and the authorities. You're angry, but you move on, because you don't know what to do. I decided to compromise because I wanted to be involved in the music scene in Tunisia."
Skndr organised parties and raves with his friends under the moniker Hextradecimal at a bar/restaurant called Boeuf sur le Toit in the town of Soukra. It was a mecca for Tunisia's rave scene, regularly hosting dubstep, electro and rave nights. There, Tunisian party people rubbed shoulders with musicians, artists and hacktivists, such as the newly anointed king of the Tunisian protest bloggers, Slim Amamou, aka Slim404, who has been made minister of youth and sport in the post-revolutionary government. Mutual rants about the regime were firewalled from government eavesdroppers by the venue's pumping sound system. "They were rare occasions when people could meet without feeling oppressed by the police or without the usual social barriers," Skndr says.
However, electro music was a relatively safe option because it was instrumental. Metal and rock were partially protected by English lyrics which the police didn't understand. But if you sang in Arabic, you either cloistered yourself away in anodyne "high art" music or embraced the banal glitz of the local pop production line, prostituting yourself to conglomerates such as Rotana, the huge, Gulf-owned media and entertainment concern that more or less controls the music industry in the Middle East.
Alternatively, you could choose to cup your hands around a flickering flame of integrity and fight a lonely battle out in the cold. Some popular Tunisian singers such as Ba'adia Bouhrizi had the guts to speak out. She denounced the brutal suppression of Tunisia's first anti-corruption protests in the town of Redeyef in 2008, before eventually fleeing Tunisia for the UK, where she was spotted singing alone in front of the Tunisian consulate during the recent revolution. Others, such as Emel Mathlouthi and Bendir Man, also deserve honourable mentions.
But it took a rapper to galvanise Tunisia's youth, whose frustration had been fuelled by years of government corruption, nepotism, ineptitude and general state-imposed joylessness. Until a few months ago, Hamada Ben Amor, aka El Général, was just a 21-year-old wannabe MC in a Stussy hoodie, leather jacket and baseball cap. He lived with his parents and elder brother in a modest flat in a drab seaside town south of Tunis called Sfax, where his mother runs a bookshop and his father works in the local hospital. El Général didn't even register on the radar of Tunisian rap's premier league which was dominated by artists such as Balti, Lak3y, Armada Bizera or Psyco M. It was a community riven by the usual jealous spats and dwarfed by the more prolific rap scenes of Morocco and France.
El Général had been quietly honing his very own brand of politically combustible rhyming since 2008 with tracks such as "Malesh" (Why?) or "Sidi Rais" (Mr President). Maybe it was the influence of the books his mother brought home from the shop. Maybe it was his beloved Tupac Shakur. Whatever the reason, El Général was game for confronting le pouvoir, aka the corrupt regime of dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. "Before the revolution, it was forbidden to do gigs," he tells me over the phone from Sfax. "We just played our music over the internet, on Facebook, because there was no other way. The media never talked to me and I didn't have a label."
On 7 November, El Général uploaded a piece of raw fury called "Rais Le Bled" (President, Your Country) on to Facebook. "My president, your country is dead/ People eat garbage/ Look at what is happening/ Misery everywhere/ Nowhere to sleep/ I'm speaking for the people who suffer/ Ground under feet." Within hours, the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb. Before being banned, it was picked up by local TV station Tunivision and al-Jazeera. El Général's MySpace was closed down, his mobile cut off. But it was too late. The shock waves were felt across the country and then throughout the Arab world. That was the power of protesting in Arabic, albeit a locally spiced dialect of Arabic. El Général's bold invective broke frontiers and went viral from Casablanca to Cairo and beyond.
A few weeks later, El Général recorded another stick of political dynamite called "Tounes Bladna" (Tunisia Our Country), just as the revolution was gathering momentum. The authorities had had enough. On 6 January, at 5am, 30 cops and state security goons turned up at El Général's family flat in Sfax to arrest him, "on the orders of President Ben Ali himself". When his brother asked why, they answered: "He knows." He was taken to the dreaded interior ministry building in Tunis, where he was handcuffed to a chair and interrogated for three days. "They kept asking me which political party I worked for," he remembers. "'Don't you know it's forbidden to sing songs like that?' they said. But I just answered, 'Why? I'm only telling the truth.' I was in there for three days, but it felt like three years."
Eventually, thanks to a storm of public protest, El Général was released and returned to Sfax in triumph. Even the cops were now treating him as a celebrity. "People were proud of me," he says cheerfully. "I took a risk, with life, with my family. But I was never scared, because I was talking about reality."
El Général's rap broke the spell of fear and showed his peers that it was possible to rebel and survive. Rap's power is its simplicity. "People can just record songs in their living room," says the Narcicyst, an Iraqi-born rapper living in Toronto, who got together with other MCs from the Arabic rap diaspora, such as Omar Offendum, and released a tribute track called "#Jan25 Egypt", which has become a huge viral hit. "It's something that can be easily done in the middle of a revolution."