{"id":484577,"date":"2019-04-11T13:16:24","date_gmt":"2019-04-11T19:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=820221"},"modified":"2019-04-11T13:16:24","modified_gmt":"2019-04-11T19:16:24","slug":"teaching-megadeth-in-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/teaching-megadeth-in-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Megadeth in Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/jerry-joseph-guitar-iraq-refugees.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"><\/div>\n<p>Guitar lessons aren\u2019t exactly a top priority in places like Northern Iraq, where thousands of Kurds and Arabs have been displaced by the war in Syria. But it\u2019s what Portland musician Jerry Joseph can offer. Joseph, who has written for Widespread Panic and his own band, the Jackmormons, goes to refugee camps and gives guitar lessons to teenagers there. The results have been inspiring. \u201cI think we\u2019re connecting with these kids on a level where at least right now nobody\u2019s actively trying to connect with them,\u201d Joseph tells <em>Rolling Stone<\/em>, speaking from an Iraqi refugee camp in March, just weeks after his <a href=\"https:\/\/nomadmusicfoundation.org\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Nomad Music Foundation<\/a> became an official nonprofit. It\u2019s mission? To bring instruments and teach music to people in conflict zones.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/c262QOkIyU0?version=3&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com&amp;rel=1&amp;fs=1&amp;autohide=2&amp;showsearch=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\">[embedded content]<\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>It started out with Megadeth riffs in an underground rock school in Kabul in 2014, Joseph says. One boy he taught there still posts pictures on Facebook of himself holding the guitar Joseph gave him, which gives him hope that these lessons are worthwhile. Two years ago, Joseph accepted an invitation from the American University in Iraq to teach 25 kids at the Arbat refugee camp in the Sulaymaniyah region. In March, he returned to Iraq, this time as Nomad Music, partnering with Kurdistan\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seedkurdistan.org\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">SEED (Social, Educational, and Economic Development) Foundation<\/a>. He divided 60 acoustic Recording King guitars between two camps, and led three hour-long beginner classes over the course of three days at each. With the help of both a kurdish and an arabic translator, he skipped lessons on technicalities and gave the kids three chords as quickly as he could\u2014enough for a punk band, even if they don\u2019t know what a punk band is.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI could sit here and spend an hour teaching them how to tune a guitar or I could teach them to play this E chord right,\u201d he says. Then Joseph leads call-and-response melodies, singing \u201chey, hey, hey\u201d or \u201cyo, yo, yo,\u201d (\u201clike a bad Bob Marley record,\u201d he says) until everyone is playing and singing along. \u201cWhen they get it, it\u2019s everything.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At one camp, Joseph was asked to teach boys and girls separately. He finds it easy to relate to teen boys\u2014he\u2019s found young men\u2019s infatuation with guitar to be nearly universal. \u201cBoys to me around the world are all the same,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019ve got pimples, they\u2019re trying to make their hair look cool, and they want to learn some rock guitar moves and impress girls.\u201d It\u2019s taken more finesse for him to teach the girls, whose Islamic upbringing requires certain behavior in public and around men. It was harder to get the class of girls singing and playing on their own, and when they did, they stopped when older men from the camp came in to watch.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI can\u2019t tell a bunch of guys to get the fuck out of my tent because you\u2019re killing the vibe, dude,\u201d Joseph says. Instead, he encouraged all his students to channel their emotions through music, to strum and slap the guitar. His goal is to teach kids that art is something that can\u2019t be taken away from them. \u201cI\u2019m like, look, take all your joy, anger, fear, sadness and love, and beat the shit out of that guitar, and scream it as loud as you can,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re so quiet [at first], and by the end i\u2019ve got them all screaming and yelling and stomping.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Joseph hopes to expand the foundation to include other arts and movement teachers and to return yearly for a week at each camp, if possible. \u201cI want them to know there are actually Americans that give a shit,\u201d he says, \u201cAnd I\u2019m one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/music\/music-news\/jerry-joseph-nomad-music-foundation-iraq-820221\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Guitar lessons aren\u2019t exactly a top priority in places like Northern Iraq, where thousands of Kurds and Arabs have been displaced by the war in Syria. But it\u2019s what Portland musician Jerry Joseph can offer. Joseph, who has written for Widespread Panic and his own band, the Jackmormons, goes to refugee camps and gives guitar [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-484577","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 04:29:16","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484577\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}