‘My family has been threatened several times’: Arab-American rockers Slut talk about US anti-Islam confrontation | music

‘I“I’m the bastard who brought down the towers,” screams Mo Kazra of the hooker band All Hail, opening her nightmarish, theatrical debut album, “Atempted Martyr.” Through an overwhelming fusion of industrial punk with elements of Middle Eastern, African and East Asian music, the band explores the denigration of Arabs in the post-9/11 United States through sinister characterizations – those directed at their Arab-majority community in Dearborn, Michigan. “A lot of Arabs in the region come up to us and say, ‘That was so powerful,’ or ‘That was beautiful.’” “I wasn’t really expecting that,” says Kazra, a Lebanese-American. The music is evil.”

The album’s lyric sheet, written by Kazra and drummer Andrew Caster who joined me on a call, is a flurry of violent fantasies, paranoid ramblings and literary references ranging from One Thousand and One Nights to Cormac McCarthy’s “Bloodline.” Written when formed in 2020 but only self-released in late 2024, they have been a hit with punk fans. Now signed to Mute, which will reissue the record this week, it is among the most exciting and unconventional achievements in modern American rock.

Dearborn is the first Arab-majority city in the United States and home to its largest mosque, making it a target of anti-Islamic and xenophobic agitation. “When I was growing up, you’d hear things like, ‘They have Sharia law over there, and they’re stoning people in the streets,’ and I’d say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?'” Custer says. Complete with guitarists Ross Babinski and Brett Wall, and bassist Dylan Zaransky, the members all grew up in this misunderstood city – declared the “Jihad Capital of America” by the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a really quiet and diverse place,” Custer says. “You see kids running around, families on balconies.”

The September 11 attacks rocked local race relations when the band was in elementary school. “Most of my friends were Arabs, and most of my classmates were Arabs,” Caster says. “After 9/11, during the school system in Dearborn, there was always a degree of separation there. There were the Arab kids, and here were the white kids. We played separately from each other.” The day after the attacks, he remembers Arab classmates talking as if they had to defend themselves from being blamed for what happened. “Looking back, it’s crazy that an elementary school kid would have to worry about that.”

Kazra has experienced those concerns firsthand. “My family was threatened several times,” he says. “Because I am Arab from Dearborn, I rejected this type of ethnicity while growing up.” “It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I got tired of hiding and being rejected by my culture and the people I knew. At that point it was like: I deserve reparations!” He says while smiling. “I want a $3 million mansion for what I’ve been through. I want some fucking money, America. You owe me!”

These experiences influenced Al-Shahid’s provocative attack on intolerance, in music that Kazra describes as “taking inspiration from Islam and Arab culture and making it as extreme as possible.” Custer has previously spoken of taking stereotypes about Muslims that have spread in the United States “and embracing them, amplifying them into a grotesque caricature, and putting them back in people’s faces.” Sometimes, “Bitch” appears as fictionalized versions of real-life figures on “All Hail,” including Hamas Abdel Khales (who led the 1977 Hanafi siege of Washington) and the perpetrators of 9/11 — a decision that Kazra highlights as influenced by “feeling ostracized in America as an Arab growing up.”

Although the glamor of violence is eventually removed, with Custer noting that every song “ends in some sort of failure,” it is everywhere on this album. “Crazy, over-the-top characters exist a lot in literature, but not so much in music,” Kazra says. Custer suggests that other singers may worry about being taken seriously, or alienating fans looking for an artist to connect with: “It’s hard to have a parasocial relationship with a murderous terrorist.”

But it’s not all serious sarcastic comments. Set to the beat of a descending scream, Joumana Kayrouz’s song oddly pays tribute to a Lebanese personal injury lawyer regularly seen on billboards in Michigan. “She has this forlorn, domineering presence,” Custer says of her ads, describing the speaker as “this dog who lusts after this powerful goddess—and she’s also a lawyer.”

The sound of “Attempted Martyr” is as brutal and disorienting as the lyrics. Inspired by the horror soundtrack, Kazra wanted to create “mystery and confusion as to what’s going on musically” through hard-to-place samples: Japanese rock band Ground Zero and financial group Takamba Talawet Timbuktu, twisted in galloping industrial noise and dizzying grooves.

Not everyone is a fan of this extreme. “No one in my family messes with this music,” Kazra laughs. “For them, it is very stupid and offensive.” However, with an international tour and the release of a second album planned, Prostitute is finding fans elsewhere. “If we give voice or at least emotion to the frustrations that people feel, that’s amazing,” Custer says.