This week the new Fun-Da-Mental album should have been available in record shops. Instead, the release of the incendiary All is War has been delayed by a storm of controversy, including resignation threats from two directors at the group’s own record label, Nation. Tabloid newspapers have attacked the album’s main creator, Aki Nawaz, while the Labour MP Andrew Dinsmore even called for him to be arrested under Britain’s new anti-terrorism laws.
Consequently, Nawaz is struggling to find pressing plants and distributors willing to handle such a hot property. It remains to be seen whether all this notoriety will make All is War a bestseller, like many contentious albums in rock history, from the Sex Pistols to Niggaz With Attitude. But as with previous moral panics, the album is already much more discussed than heard.
Its infamy is not difficult to understand. Subtitled The Benefits of G-had, the album contains sustained attacks on what Nawaz sees as Western racism and double standards towards the Islamic world, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but among white liberals in Britain and America too. Controversially, it also likens Osama bin Laden to Che Guevara, peers inside the mind of a suicide bomber and rails against everything from “miniskirt liberation” to moderate “ Muslims for hire”.
And yet Nawaz is no rigid Islamist but a product of the very multiculturalism that many Islamic hardliners despise. Raised in Bradford by liberal Muslim parents from Pakistan, he spent much of his youth involved in punk rock and left-wing political activism. The first live band he ever saw was the Sex Pistols, whose Anarchy in the UK is quoted on All is War.
“Punk rock was my religion,” Nawaz says. “To some people it’s quite blasphemous, but to me there was a connection between the rebellious philosophy of punk and Islam.”
In the more than 15 years that I have been writing about music, no album has divided my peers as fiercely as All is War. Some see Nawaz as a bold and topical chronicler of Muslim rage, others as a misguided apologist for theocratic fascism. Either way, this intelligent and adventurous record is emphatically not some hate-fuelled terrorist recruitment manual.
But the question of intent is crucial. If All is War was designed to stimulate debate, as Nawaz has consistently claimed, then it has already been a runaway success. This week alone the Fun-Da-Mental front man has appeared on Radio 4’s Front Row and BBC Two’s Newsnight. Then again, some tracks are clearly designed to provoke as much disgust as discussion.
“It’s definitely a mixture of the two, because we’ve been provoked for years and years,” Nawaz argues, referring to the wider Muslim community. “I’ve been here 40 years of my life, I’ve been influenced by the culture here, I see myself as nothing but equal. So to be constantly told that you’re not, I just find that repulsive and it’s not something I’m willing to entertain any more. Whether I’m provoking or not, to me they are valuable debates. It might be done in a simplistic way, but it’s not some naive attempt at hype.”
Provocation is certainly to the forefront in the key track 786 All is War, a futuristic science-fiction fantasy about Islamic armies conquering New York and building a mosque on Ground Zero. The music is a rousing racket but the lyric could clearly cause offence. All the same, the song appeals on the same primal adolescent thrill level as apocalyptic punk rock and nihilistic gangsta rap.
“I’m using punk rock as my template for rebelliousness,” Nawaz says. “It was just putting the middle finger up at Hollywood. It’s science fiction. All I’m saying is, if Hollywood is allowed to display its own agenda, then surely we have the right to speak from an opposing perspective?” Another track, Che Bin, quotes speeches by Che Guevara and Osama bin Laden to highlight their similar attitudes to violent resistance. The left-wing radical is a revered cultural icon, Nawaz implies, while the al-Qaeda figurehead is vilified as a monster. This has led some to conclude that he is endorsing bin Laden’s poisonous world view.
“Is it really about endorsing or is it about understanding the context?” he asks. “Look at Che Guevara, he killed people. This is the hypocrisy of it. I’ll sit down with people who are considered to be extremists in the Muslim world, and to me they’re almost like a mirror to all the Marxist and Socialist Worker Party people. I don’t agree with everything they say, but ironically a lot of what they are angry about is exactly equal to what moderates and secular people are angry about.”
The track on All is War that has aroused the most outrage is Cookbook DIY, a chemically detailed trawl through the minds of three would-be killers: a suicide bomber, a desperate mercenary and a White House weapons scientist. Several musicians have written from the viewpoint of suicide bombers before, most notably Bruce Springsteen’s Paradise, from The Rising, and aroused only minor controversy. Once again, Nawaz suspects double standards at work.
“It isn’t glorifying suicide bombers, it is talking about the psychology of different kinds of bombers, and the absurdity of all of them,” he insists. “I refuse to accept that one is more moral than the other.”
Ironically, Nawaz left one track off the record that featured an afterlife dialogue between a suicide bomber and his victim. The reason, he says, is that it simply did not fit with the rest of the album. Or maybe that would have been a provocation too far.
But at the very least, All is War disproves the common complaint that we live in a post-political pop climate in which rock musicians will endorse only safe consensual causes such as Live 8.
Available to download this week, the album should finally reach record shops later this month. It deserves a fair hearing.
www.fun-da-mental.co.uk
More filth and more fury
The Beatles — Yesterday and Today, 1966 This US-released album was recalled because its sleeve showed the band wearing butcher smocks, covered with meat and decapitated baby dolls.
Sex Pistols — Never Mind the Bollocks, 1977 The album was taken to court for its “obscene” title, but the charges were overturned by expert academic witnesses.
2 Live Crew — As Nasty as They Wanna Be, 1989 Ruled obscene by a Florida judge, the second album by these X-rated rappers resulted in a three-year court battle — and sales of two million.
Body Count — Body Count, 1992 In the wake of the LA riots, the previously obscure track Cop Killer by rapper Ice-T’s hard-rock side project suddenly attracted huge political controversy.
Nirvana — In Utero, 1993 Outraged feminists with the song Rape Me, which Kurt Cobain argued was “anti-rape”. Wal-Mart and Kmart refused to stock the album as the cover featured a foetus.
