It’s been approximately a month since I saw the Big 4 live in Turkey and it was a hell of a show. It still seems as if it didn’t happen, as if I didn’t see Tom Araya on stage screaming his lungs out, Lars playing the drums like a maniac and Rammstein setting the stage on fire with their performance. There aren’t enough words to describe the magnificence of the festival, it was a dream come true and what really caught my attention while I was in Turkey isn’t the festival only, it’s the local metal scene.
From the moment we arrived to Istanbul to the moment we left, the amazement seized to regress! The Metal scene there is just splendid, there is a lot of acceptance there, the people don’t look at the metal heads in disgust, and they don’t even look at them! The Metal shops are numerous there and are relatively cheap, in one center there are more than 4 metal shops! Nothing is banned over there, although most of the country is inhabited by Muslims (alcohol, etc), I even saw more than one veiled woman on the festival grounds.
In addition to all of that, the metal pubs there are great! There is an event every single day, and all the events are free of charge! You can go in and not pay a single penny not even band charge! I couldn’t help but think of our metal scene and what it needs to be a real one. This is attainable but it needs a lot of work and it needs a lot of perseverance. We need to try our best to make the people accept us, and to make the government see us as “normal” people and not as outcasts. We can do that by uniting as one metal scene, not by dividing it. We need to show the world that the Lebanese metal scene is just the same as any other one from around the world.
Anything is attainable if we just put our minds together and if we all act as one. We need to get people here to watch concerts and to check out the metal scene. We are progressing, thanks to a lot of metal bands who are really showing the world that Lebanon knows how to “Rock”, but this progress is going really slow, we need to speed it up because sooner or later all the bands that we grew to love and even worship might disband or simply die. We have to do our best to achieve this goal the best and fastest way possible in order to take the Lebanese metal scene to a higher level.
