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Based on Electronic Arts’ game of the same name, Fatima Al-Qadiri’s Desert Strike EP is a “soundtrack to a virtual war”, based on her experience playing the game in her childhood home in Kuwait. But while she and her sister retreated to the virtual war, the effects of a very real war were being felt right outside her door. The Gulf War had concluded just a year earlier, and the effects of the occupation still reverberated through the country.
Based on the conflict in the Gulf, Desert Strike saw you piloting a helicopter taking down various targets under the control of a caricature of Saddam Hussein. Operation Desert Shield began shortly after development of Desert Strike began, with its development concluding shortly after the end of Gulf War. Its proximity to real war brought it a morbid sense of reality.
For Al-Qadiri, playing Desert Strike with her sister was a way to wrestle back control of a situation that a child couldn't comprehend. A way to apply rules and order to a daily life whose routine was dissolved.
That distant, unreal atmosphere pervades her EP. The synth backed melodies sound far away, hard to focus on through the violence of the percussion. Kick drums reverberate as if through a deserted theater, while snares mix amongst sounds of gunshots, exchanged magazines and clattering bullet casings. Mournful choirs gently fill the space, speaking for the ghosts left behind.
Desert Strike conjures images of sub-bassments, rumbling with the sonic debris, digitally crushed gunshots mixed with real ones. It's a march through sunlight that no longer seems to brighten the day. The sound of a ticking clock that no longer tells time, not because it's malfunctioned, but because time has lost meaning to all its observers.
At some point during the album, I always find myself drifting off, the melodies fading to the background, tracks bleeding into each other. The percussion becomes indistinguishable from the gunfire. Was that a snare drum, or a gunshot? Each cracks through my mind the same way.
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In an interview with The New Inquiry, Al-Qadiri mentioned she can no longer play videogames. “Every time I attempt it, I am overcome with depression. Immediate depression. Whenever I try, my skin starts to crawl, I just put it down immediately.”
It made me think about my own relationship with games. I was born at the end of the Gulf War, in Saudi Arabia, and shortly after moved to Chicago, where I'd spend most of my life. I grew up watching the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq from a distance, and hearing about the Egyptian revolution through phone calls from my father's family. I grew up experiencing war through a screen.
The Gulf War is said to be “the first war fought through television”, with channels like CNN making their money and reputation through its coverage. It only became more true for future conflicts, as I watched the media write and rewrite events in the Middle East, twisting them into propaganda. I watched videogames tell bigger lies in higher fidelity. I spent my teenage years pointing a digital gun at people who looked like me.
I never played Desert Strike. But I did play one of its sequels, Jungle Strike. I have vivid memories of its first level, a siege on a Washington DC that's been overrun by terrorists. Another terrifying image that was fed into the imaginations of Americans in the coming decade.
Maybe that's why Al-Qadiri's second album, Brute, resonated so much stronger with me. It's of a piece with Desert Strike--urban chaos, gunshots and distant, rumbling synths--but made of snapshots of police violence and protests. Images familiar to me here in Chicago. The heart of the "enhanced interrogation" techniques exported worldwide. A city I've seen trap protestors by raising the bridges to cut them off, shutting down train lines and raising walls of armored cops to close ranks on them. I've seen the rhetoric that justified US wars return to assure us this is the only way to keep us safe.
That distance--the gap of a few years that kept me from experiencing the Gulf War firsthand, those miles that kept me out of a Middle East toyed with by US intervention--it feels a lot smaller these days.
I keep playing war. I keep picking up the gun. But sometimes the toy looks too much like the weapon, and I find myself hesitating.
Desert Strike EP and Brute can be listened to and purchased on Bandcamp:
