[Gelf]
A few months ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Accolade, a Saudi Arabian rock band composed of female college students. Most of the reaction to this story focused on the band—their MySpace friend count went from 17 to more than 1,000 in 24 hours—even as no one seemed willing to admit that they sound like a watered-down Evanescence (a thought that didn’t even seem possible five minutes ago).
Anyway, a few of the story’s quotes come from a young Saudi reporter named Hasan Hatrash. Hatrash is a musician too, but he also writes about the Middle-East music scene from the inside. He’s a fascinating and thoughtful person, and, in a new interview at Gelf, I talked to him about rock and roll, at home and abroad.
(Thanks to my editor, Michael Gluckstadt, for the original story idea.)
Craig Fehrman 