actually afghan

Biding time in this circus of a city. Out this evening with an edge-of-the-world crowd – unshaven 'capacity advisors' straight out of Harvard Law, Dutch war correspondents back from the front, a well-coiffed Scottish PR man burnishing the ministerial marble, and a thin British boy specializing in civilian casualties. "It's the hot topic of the day," he admits. After an expensive dinner of bratwurst and beer at the city's only german restaurant, a few of us headed out to hear what was billed as 'the first afghan-american punk band,' but what turned out to be a couple of harmless kids from los angeles who'd hired Afghan musicians to play on their new electric folk album. The lead singer is a gorgeous 22-year old who sings songs titled "Be Gone, Taliban" and calls her band "Lion of Panjshir." Her father, a successful Kabul businessman, sat in the front row of plastic chairs with some other successful Kabul businessmen. I talked with her young guitarist who explained that 'rock and roll was about taking risks' and how the point was that being willing 'to make the journey,' all the way to Kabul, in this case. "It's a gimmick, see," he said, but, because their lead singer was actually afghan, it was more of an 'organic gimmick.'



An orgimmick.



Well, he was a sweet enough boy and I wish him luck but I couldn't help thinking about the raggedy Wakhani musician I'd met just days before; a 52-year-old man who imitated birds with his throat and sung the saddest songs I've ever heard. Mohammad Joshan had a voice like Johnny Cash and hadn't played his instrument in 15 years. He did not want to play at first but I begged and pointed to my microphone, & at long last he brought out a dusty old dumbra with a broken string that wouldn't be worth 50 cents in a pawn shop. Then he requested a knife and a piece of wood. Those things magically appeared out of the dark night. MJ then proceeded to carve himself a new fretboard, saying "I'm doing this because you are a guest in my country," I mean he literally rebuilt the guitar before my eyes, fixed the peg, rewound the broken string, then played a twenty minute medley in two mountain languages that less than 25,000 people speak anymore.



OK so in one sense I'm making an obvious point about authenticity, the Afghan Johnny Cash had it, and these west coast kids whose version of Afghanistan was five days in a heavily armed compound, with a hired band and platters of watermelon, did not.



But it would be wrong of me to stop there; authenticity is only one of the virtues, and i guess you could say that Afghanistan is as much about the circus and the well-coiffed schnitzel as it is about the poverty and darkness. (At least you'd say that if you want to be around pretty girls and watermelon.) Still, I'm going on the assumption that you can write about both, so long as you know what you're looking at: is it the merry-go-round, or the darkness beyond the benches.