Is Islamic Punk Dead? How Taqwacore Came, Went, and Left A Bittersweet Trail

May 28, 2012 By

MTV Iggy, May 28, 2012

EXCERPT: The first problem you face when trying to catch up with the Taqwacore movement—sometimes, if erroneously, summarized as “Muslim punk”—is that the man most closely identified with it really, really doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“I’m tired of talking about Taqwacore,” says author Michael Muhammad Knight. “I go to academic conferences and people are surprised that I’m not wearing a spiked leather jacket or flipping tables over.”

Knight, currently a Ph.D. student in Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina and the wildly prolific author of seven books—novels, memoirs, scholarship—still can’t escape the resonance of his début cult novel “The Taqwacores,” originally self-published in 2003. (…)

But these days, talk to members of the original Taqwacore scene and you’ll hear ambivalence toward the term—if not outright repudiation.

“For the most part, it’s probably better for it to just go away,” says Omar Waqar, the Washington, D.C. area-based leader of bands Diacritical, Sarmust, and Evil Art Form.

Or as Arjun Ray, one of the Kominas’ original members (he left the band a couple of years ago) put it recently on the busy Facebook page Desi Punksss: “Taqwacore is dead. Long live Taqwacore.”

So soon after it crested, is it time to write Taqwacore’s epitaph? And if Taqwacore is dead, what happened to the milieu it was claimed to reflect, Muslim punk?

Read the whole story at MTV Iggy

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Soul is heavy, wisdom is sweet: Unraveling the mysteries of Nneka

March 1, 2012 By

MTV Iggy, March 1, 2012

It’s been three years since Nneka Egbuna moved back home.

At 19, she had moved away from Nigeria to Germany, her mother’s country, where she studied anthropology and began her music career. But after releasing two albums and getting a little shine on the European circuit, she knew it was time to return.

Now 31, Nneka makes her permanent home in Lagos, Nigeria’s turbulent metropolis.

Lagos is where she gets her energy, where she engages in politics, where she composes songs that weave in and out of the rich Pidgin patois. It’s a place where the power goes out and the police are corrupt and vast amounts of money are made, legally and otherwise, while migrants pour in from the hinterland to scoop up the crumbs.

It’s a raw place, and it’s very Nneka—blunt, vibrant, uncompromising.

The city lends itself to metaphor, and so, given all this, it’s no surprise that Nneka finds a life lesson for humanity in the epic traffic jams that infamously snarl circulation in Lagos, turning the simplest errand into a multi-hour ordeal, breeding frustration and aggressive behaviors of all sorts. As she sees it, the futility of those maneuvers in gridlock tells us something about our souls.

“It could move,” Nneka says. “But we are all rushing, rushing—and then we get to the bottleneck. And then we are all standing still and asking ourselves questions. And that’s our biggest problem. We don’t listen to one another, we don’t complement one another. Because we are stubborn, we are egocentric.”

Is she speaking of Lagosians? Nigerians? All human beings? Or about herself? The best answer is “Yes.”

Because Nneka’s songs toggle back and forth between the personal and the political, the local and the universal, in a way that only the rawest, most self-searingly lyrical artists can pull off. Everything is in play—God, government, love, sexuality, aspiration, self-doubt. It’s all in the title of her new album: Soul is Heavy.

Read the full story at MTVIggy.com

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The world wants Zaz

February 21, 2012 By

MTV Iggy, February 21, 2012

“Je veux.” I want. In this song, which became a huge summer hit in France in 2010, Zaz shares a wishlist that’s anything but materialistic. All she wants is “some love, some joy, some good cheer/It’s not your money that will make me happy,” she sings in French, after turning down jewels, mansions and limousines. “What would I do with all that stuff?” she asks, sauntering in the video through a flea market. That image only underscores the cute-retro Parisian feel that can’t help but attach to the 31-year-old singer. It’s inevitable: Zaz covers Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg along with singing originals, and she even used to busk in the Metro and Montmartre, plus she’s kind of bubbly, so the whole gamine thing comes pretty much built in.

But there’s plenty more to Zaz, born Isabelle Geffroy, than that cliché’d image. She’s a thoughtful and energetic woman from a Paris scene where traditional chanson is just one in a brew of influences that includes African, Gypsy, electronica and jazz elements, among others, swirling around in the clubs and taverns of the Latin Quarter or the Halles district. In her own pathway to an entirely unexpected stardom she picked up a lot of those strands, layered them atop a provincial upbringing and came out with this sassy but lucid artistic persona, a little wide-eyed maybe, but far from naïve.

Recently Zaz came through New York City for a few shows, including one at the Globalfest international music showcase, attended by an industry crowd of concert promoters, managers, media and the like. The next day, in her hotel’s lobby lounge, Zaz chatted in French with MTV Iggy’s Siddhartha Mitter about her sudden burst to fame, her troubled early years, and making classic-sounding French songs in 2012.

READ THE INTERVIEW AT MTVIGGY.COM

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Cut it up & eat it: the bloody soul of Le Butcherettes

January 10, 2012 By

MTV Iggy, January 10, 2012

If you came for the severed pig’s head, you’re too late.

Ditto, possibly, for the blood-stained butcher’s apron — though Teri Gender Bender, the leader and frontwoman of the punk-inspired band Le Butcherettes, has not yet removed that trademark prop from her performance wardrobe. She may still, when she feels so moved, urinate onstage. Certainly, her rants and random pronouncements in Spanish and English and her daredevil dives into the crowd seem destined to carry on.

But by her own reckoning, a transformation is afoot for Teri Gender Bender, née Teresa Suarez. At 22, her music has (dare we say) matured and her creative personality fleshed out, having absorbed more than a little upheaval in the five hectic years since 2007, when she launched Le Butcherettes as a pissed-off teenager who was reading Simone de Beauvoir and feeling trapped by the stereotypical expectations placed on a young woman in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Along the way she’s overseen four total overhauls of the band’s line-up; released a brash, angry 2009 EP, Kiss & Kill; made the big move from Guadalajara to Los Angeles; and put out a stunning 2011 album, the still-raw but more melodic Sin Sin Sin, produced by the protean Omar Rodríguez-López, of The Mars Volta, At The Drive In, and countless other ventures.

EXCERPTED. READ THE WHOLE STORY AT MTVIGGY.COM

 

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Anders Trentemøller, Danish Electro Ringmaster

December 7, 2011 By

MTV Iggy, December 7, 2011

His American breakout moment came earlier this year when he tore up the 2011 Coachella festival, in a high-intensity electronic set backed by a full live rock band and a visual show that had breathless bloggers and reviewers proclaiming it the festival’s high point. But in Europe Anders Trentemøller has been a figure to contend with on the club scene for quite some time.

Some know him for deep, hard house remixes of the likes of Royksopp’s What Else Is There or his takes on Franz Ferdinand, Moby, Modeselektor and more—sometimes spare and fidgety, sometimes opulent and intense—that have made him one of the continent’s prime remixers. Some know him for his own moody, sparse 2006 album The Last Resort.

Many had their minds blown—whether the 50,000 people in the crowd or many more who’ve watched the video online—by the ultra-high energy and lavish staging, complete with ghostly choreographed armies, wild curtains and glowing parasols, of his “Silver Surfer Ghost Rider Go!” at the 2009 Roskilde festival in his native Denmark.

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Just A Kenyan Band of Superheroes

November 15, 2011 By

MTV Iggy, November 15, 2011

It took a superhero to bring Just A Band back from the future.

His name: Makmende. His look: Blaxploitation chic—sharp tan jacket, flared trousers, broad-rimmed shades, Afro pick. His modus operandi: Appears in the streets of Nairobi to beat down miscreants, send robbers fleeing, fight off masked kidnappers, rescue a lady in distress and leave her swooning as he coolly walks away.

These heroics—complete with fabulous comedic touches, like when Makmende swipes his opponent’s necktie and refashions it into a bandanna—unfold to the beat of “Ha He,” a catchy electro-pop delight off 82, the second album by Just A Band. The Nairobi trio are filmmakers, animators and comic-book buffs as well as musicians, and when they gathered some friends to perform in a video for the song, they looked for a fun storyline and came up with Makmende. The name was inspired by an old street-slang term, of obscure origin, to describe foolhardy or adventurous behavior.

What they didn’t expect was that Makmende the superhero would become a cult figure days after the video’s March 2010 YouTube posting. And in so doing, turn Just A Band from an ironically-named, arty purveyor of avant-garde sounds to Nairobi hipsters into something like a national pop sensation.

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Better than Jay-Z, Bigger than Osama: Enter the future of Humble the Poet

October 3, 2011 By

MTV Iggy, October 3, 2011

It feels like one of those guaranteed party songs—the fat beat, the epic loop, the perfect wave-your-hands-in-the-air tempo. And it is a party song, no doubt. But pay attention to the lyrics and see the video, or better yet, watch the Humble the Poet perform it onstage, and you’ll know that “Baagi Music,” his 2010 anthem, is a lot more than that.

With its “Go Baagi Baagi! Go Baagi Baagi!” chants, it’s the Toronto MC’s biggest song, whether measured by YouTube clicks or the sheer energy rise in the club when he plays it. And it’s also a statement of defiance and regional pride, and a provocation—sharply crafted and aggressively delivered.

To wit: “Toronto’s my heart, Punjabi n my blood.” And: “I’m not Indian—four knuckles to your eyes, if you call me that again.” And: “F*@k Bollywood—we Punjabi!”

Around this core theme, some ornamentation: The flyness of Punjabi girls. The realness of Punjabi guys. How Punjabis the “home of bhangra and Jay Sean’s mom.” All spit by Humble, a tall, rangy Sikh brother with full beard and turban, hyped and accompanied onstage by his friend—and “Baagi Music” producer—Sikh Knowledge.

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Reggae legend Tiken Jah Fakoly: “The future is in Africa”

September 15, 2011 By

MTV Iggy, September 15, 2011

“It used to be that when people saw you with hair like this, you were considered a lunatic,” says Tiken Jah Fakoly, the reggae artist from Ivory Coast.

Fakoly’s dreads are short and orderly, the kind of look that would pass unnoticed on a Brooklyn street. But he is right: for many years in much of Africa, the figure of the Rastaman—dreadlocked, likely unkempt, possibly high—was assimilated, at least by middle-class society, to that of the sad deranged men you’d see pacing the roadside or darting in traffic in the bustling business districts of cities like Abidjan, Lagos or Accra.

But like his predecessors Alpha Blondy, also from Ivory Coast, or the late Lucky Dube, from South Africa, Fakoly, now 43 and perhaps the leading figure in African reggae today, stuck to his guns. He followed the path inspired by the Rasta revelation he had as a teenager in dusty Odienné, his home town, and made a career, now 10 albums deep, telling truths about corrupt politicians, pointless civil wars, Western economic manipulation, the false promises of immigration and the sadness of exile.

It’s in the vocation of the Rastaman, after all, to shrug off contempt or ignorance by polite society in favor of telling the truth.

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Sweet predators: the cannibal courtship of Dengue Fever

September 9, 2011 By

MTV Iggy, September 9, 2011

There’s a poignant moment on Cannibal Courtship, the fifth album from the Cambodia-inspired, Los Angeles-based Dengue Fever, that encapsulates what is tragic and urgent in the message of this idiosyncratic band who just as often come off light-hearted.

It comes on a track called “Sister In the Radio.” Singing in Khmer against a slow-paced backdrop that sounds a bit like a surf-rock dirge, frontwoman Chhom Nimol tells a story from her childhood—when she was about 9 years old and living, like many Cambodians scattered by the Khmer Rouge genocide and later political conflict, in refugee camps.

“This is my personal song,” Chhom says, in a conversation before the band took the stage recently at Lincoln Center in New York. “When I was a kid I lived in camps in Thailand. My family had fled. I had no idea if my older sister…”

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Hanni El Khatib’s got a hot hot thing

August 4, 2011 By

MTV Iggy, August 4, 2011

Somewhere on a side street in the vestigial industrial precincts of Manhattan’s Far West side, the rocker Hanni El Khatib interrupts a photo shoot—he was getting portrayed roaming these blocks and checking out the High Line elevated park—and pulls out his camera phone to take a few snaps of his own.

The sight that attracts his interest is a nondescript heap of old car tires, piled up at the edge of an auto repair shop lot. “I just like stuff,” El Khatib explains. “I like piles of s**t, old TVs or electronics. A pile of tires is really cool to me. I don’t know why.”

Clad in black jeans, a blue work shirt with a white undershirt, and a bunch of tattoos visible, El Khatib almost looks the part of a warehouse or parking lot greaser, but not quite. A bit too clean. The beard moderate and trimmed. Most of all, the fresh face with the open, curious look and wide eyes. A 30-year-old manchild checking out random urban materials while rocking a cultivated but sincerely worn style.

[Read more...]

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