It’s now 57 years since The Stooges unleashed their self-titled debut album, and the MC5 spat out Kick Out The Jams, but the possibilities of punk rock are far from exhausted, as fellow Michigan iconoclasts Prostitute are proving. Comprised of forward-thinking, creatively unfettered musicians of Lebanese, Roma, Maltese, and Polish descent, the quintet hail from Dearborn – a city with a population roughly 55% Arab American, once labeled “America’s Jihad Capital” in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece – and are every bit as combative and challenging as their spiritual Ann Arbor and Lincoln Park forefathers, existing to confront the prejudice, suspicion, bigotry and hatred directed towards Arabs in post 9/11 America.
“I’m the motherfucker who took down the towers,” frontman Moe Kazra screams on All Hail, the ferocious opening to the noise-rock quintet’s thrillingly intense debut album Attempted Martyr, a conceptual compendium of anger, tension, resistance and retribution, with lyrics that place angry words and violent intentions in the heart, mind and mouth of a fictionalised messianic character provocatively drawing from racially-charged stereotypes and xenophobic caricatures.
“A lot of the anger,” Kazra told The Quietus last year “especially on the album, is inspired by what happened in this area after 9/11 – the vilification of Arabs. My family was threatened. After that, I guess I just didn’t feel comfortable being who I was. So, what we’re doing now is an attempt to shove it in their faces and say, You know what? I am what you think I am.”
(Image credit: Jamie MacMillan)
Tonight, Prostitute are in our faces in the most literal way. Having promised to play ‘in the round’, the group’s equipment is set up not on The Dome’s stage, but on the venue floor, without any barriers, allowing fans to completely encircle them. And while at close quarters and high volume the subtleties and subversive messaging of the stand-out tracks from Attempted Martyr aren’t always discernible, Prostitute are never less than utterly absorbing.
Melding influences from Middle Eastern, east Asian and African music with screaming synths and pounding riffs, Prostitute possess some of the same wired, explosive energy that made At The Drive-In such a thrilling live proposition in their earliest years, with Kazra a compelling presence in the eye of their sonic storm, whether sitting on the venue floor or lurching to and fro hugging his keyboard to his chest.
“I’ve come to dance,” he announces early on. “Let’s dance.”
Truthfully, it’s almost impossible not to, as songs such as M. Dada and Body Meat grab you by the throat, and refuse to let go, shaking you to your core with their stuttering, mutated funk rhythms. There’s a manic fury to the brilliant Judge, as Kazra repeatedly intones the mantra “I don’t sleep, I don’t eat“, later screaming “I decide who lives and who dies… I slaughter your flock.” All Hail, meanwhile, is all claustrophobia, alarm and panic, like Suicide soundtracking forever wars with mounting intensity. It’s a lot.
This is Prostitute’s third visit to the capital in the past nine months, stepping up from two sold-out nights in south London at the 150-capacity Brixton’s Windmill, to two sold out nights in east London at the 300-capacity Moth Club, to their debut in north London tonight. There’s talk of new music to be recorded after they come off the road in America with Loathe, and if they can bottle this sort of energy in the studio, their return promises to be truly unmissable.
