Muslim-Hindu punk rock bands in America

AP/Yahoo

Muslim-Hindu punk rock bands part of new movement
By RUSSELL CONTRERAS, Associated Press Writer Russell Contreras, Associated Press Writer 1 min ago

WAYLAND, Mass. – Artwork from the Punjab state of India decorates the Ray family home. A Johann Sebastian Bach statue sits on a piano. But in the basement — cluttered with wires, old concert fliers and drawings — 25-year-old Arjun Ray is fighting distortion from his electric guitar.

For this son of Indian immigrants, trained in classical violin and raised on traditional Punjab music, getting his three Pakistani-American bandmates in sync is the goal on this cold New England evening. Their band, The Kominas, is trying to record a punk rock version of the classic Bollywood song, "Choli Ke Peeche" (Behind the Blouse).

"Yeah," said Shahjehan Khan, 26, one of the band's guitarists, "there are a lot of contradictions going on here."

Deep in the woods of this colonial town boils a kind of revolutionary movement. From the basement of this middle-class home tucked in the woods west of Boston, The Kominas have helped launched a small, but growing, South Asian and Middle Eastern punk rock movement that is attracting children of Muslim and Hindu immigrants and drawing scorn from some traditional Muslims who say their political, hard-edged music is "haraam," or forbidden.

The movement, an anti-establishment subculture borne of religiously conservative communities, is the subject of two new films and a hot topic on social-networking sites.

The artists say they are just trying to reconcile issues such as life in America, women's rights and homosexuality with Islam and old East vs. West cultural clashes.

"This is one way to deal with my identity as an Arab-American," said Marwan Kamel, the 24-year-old lead guitarist in Chicago-based Al-Thawra. "With this music, I can express this confusion."

The movement's birth is often credited to the novel "The Taqwacore," by Michael Muhammad Knight, a Rochester, N.Y.-raised writer who converted to Islam.

Knight coined the book's title from the Arabic word "Taqwa," which means piety or God-fearing, and the word hardcore. The 2003 book portrayed an imagined world of living-on-the-edge Muslim punk rockers and influenced real-life South Asians to form their own bands.

South Asian and Middle Eastern punk bands soon were popping up across America and communicating with each other via MySpace.

At the time of book's release, Basim Usmani and Khan already were experimenting with punk and building the foundation for The Kominas, which loosely means "scoundrels" in various South Asian languages. When Usmani, now 26, came across the book, he was writing songs and sporting a mohawk — just like the punk rocker on the novel's cover.

Usmani contacted Knight, who agreed to buy a bus on eBay for $2,000 to help launch the nation's first "Muslim punk rock tour" in 2007. Kamel, the son of a Syrian father and Polish mother, bought a one-way ticket to Boston to join the tour, and Canadian drag-queen singer Sena Hussain met up with them along the way.

The musicians performed at various venues but were notably kicked off stage during an open mic performance at the Islamic Society of North America convention in Chicago. Traditional Muslims at the convention decried the electric guitar-based music as un-Islamic while others were upset a woman dared sing on stage. The episode was documented by Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker Omar Majeed in his new documentary "Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam."

"These guys are not prophetizing or preaching anything specific about Islam," said Majeed, whose film is set for release in the United States in 2010. "They just happen to be young and Muslim, and they write songs and do art that expresses that idea."

Imam Talal Eid, executive director of the Islamic Institute of Boston, said some traditional Muslims may object to such music because they focus on its sexual attraction rather than its use for spiritual enjoyment. "But I think we can come up with a moderate opinion that distinguished what is forbidden from what is not," said Eid. "It's a new issue among Muslims."

The musical style of each group varies. Some songs on The Kominas' album "Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay" lean toward the humorous and ironic, including "Suicide Bomb the Gap." In their song "Sharia Law in the USA," the lyrics mock the portrayal of Islamists: "I am an Islamist/I am the anti-Christ/most squares can't make a most-wanted list/but my-my how I stay in style." Their sound mixes hard-edged punk, ska and funk.

Meanwhile, Al-Thawra sings about political events in the Middle East with songs like "Gaza: Choking on the Smoke of Dreams." Their music is closer to heavy metal.

Other bands include the Washington, D.C.-based Sarmust and the Texas group Vote Hezbollah.

Like most punk groups, bands produce their own albums and sell them at shows and online.

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The groups have toured since that first Taqwacore trip, playing in small clubs, in basements at parties and in Hispanic cultural centers. Typically, The Kominas and Al-Thawra say they play in front of 50 to 80 people.

The bands have noticed Latino punks getting into their music. Al-Thawra recently picked up a guitarist from Mexico City named Mario Salazar. The cover of Al-Thawra's next album will feature the image of the U.S.-Mexico border fused with the Palestinian-Israeli wall.

Alan Waters, an anthropology professor at University of Massachusetts-Boston, said it should come as no surprise that young Muslim and Hindu immigrants are expressing themselves through rock or that their music would strike a chord with other "disenfranchised" populations in the U.S., such as Latinos and other children of recent immigrants.

"If they're touching or singing about identity, it's going to make a connection," said Waters. "Punk rock is very American, and this is assimilation through a back door."

He called the bands "a good opportunity for stereotype-smashing."

The Kominas, who sing mostly in English, now are trying to break the image they are just a "Muslim punk band," especially since one of their founders, Ray, is Hindu. On their next album, Ray said the band will have songs in Hindi.

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Usmani said he grew up as a "nonreligious" Muslim-American so his journey into punk caused few problems, although he admits his family doesn't like the drinking and smoking that pervade the music scene. Khan and Kominas drummer Imran Malik, 25, also said they aren't as observant as their families might like.

"I mean, if you put a sword to us," said Usmani, "one of us might pray."

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Read the full story and related links HERE.

Punk, and Jewish: Rockers Explore Identity

NYT [see original for additional media]
June 13, 2009
Punk, and Jewish: Rockers Explore Identity
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Who knew?

Punk is Jewish.

Or, anyway, these fellows are: Tommy Ramone, Chris Stein, Lenny Kaye and Handsome Dick Manitoba, four New York godfathers of punk who packed an auditorium Thursday night at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to excavate the unlikely roots of the rebellious and stripped-down 1970s rock genre, replete with fascist trappings.

“People don’t associate punk rock and Jews,” acknowledged Mr. Ramone, born Tamás Erdélyi in Budapest. He is the sole survivor of the Ramones, whose other members — Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee — he joined in taking the same stage name.

Yet connection there indisputably is, Steven Lee Beeber argued in his 2006 book “Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s,” subtitled “A Secret History of Jewish Punk.”

“The shpilkes, the nervous energy of punk, is Jewish,” Mr. Beeber wrote. “Punk reflects the whole Jewish history of oppression and uncertainty, flight and wandering, belonging and not belonging, always being divided, being in and out, good and bad, part and apart.”

Punk’s New York origins as a do-it-yourself, three-chorded return to music basics — and a fashion style and attitude — were no accident, said Richard Bienstock, a senior editor at Guitar World magazine who curated the forum. “It’s New York,” he said, “and anything that starts here, there’s a good chance Jews are involved.”

So there they were, onstage at 15 West 16th Street — “Loud Fast Jews,” as YIVO billed them — Mr. Ramone, 60; Mr. Stein, 59, of Blondie; Mr. Kaye, 62, of the Patti Smith Group; and Mr. Manitoba, 55, né Richard Blum, bar owner, radio host and lead singer of the Dictators.

The program raised some eyebrows at the Jewish institute, said YIVO’s cultural director, Harold Steinblatt, a former Guitar World editor.

But Mr. Manitoba dismissed concerns. “You can do what you want with your own people,” he said. “It’s the law of the playground.”

And if at times the byplay seemed to take on the zaniness of “Spinal Tap” — one questioner misheard Mr. Kaye’s reference to “the germination of punk” as “the German nation of punk” — there was also a serious issue in contention: how did Jewish punk rockers defend their use of Nazi symbols and other shock imagery?

It was a complex matter, allowed Mr. Ramone, who had family members who were killed in the Holocaust. “To bring forbidden things, horrible things, and make art of it was basically an artistic thing,” he said. “There’s an aesthetic effect when you take your deepest fears and try to get a grasp on it and try to make humor out of it.”

Mr. Manitoba conceded doubts. “I cried at ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” he said. “I don’t like to think I caused pain with ‘Master Race Rock.’ ”

“The sensitivity thing is a difficult subject,” he added. But the Dictators’ stage persona “has nothing to do with Nazis or people’s pain.” Instead, he said, it had everything to do with snotty young New Yorkers “doing it to get attention.”

Mr. Kaye said, “Sometimes, using forbidden imagery makes it your own.”

He added, “Punk rock really took a lot of symbols and turned them on their back.”

Either way, the uglier trappings were not to be taken seriously, Mr. Kaye said. “The Dictators were humorous in some ways.”

Mr. Manitoba rose up in mock protest. “What do you mean ‘in some ways’?” he said.

Like Jews elsewhere, the four represented varying degrees of Jewishness. Mr. Manitoba recalled losing his place reading his portion of the Torah at his bar mitzvah. “After the bar mitzvah?” he said. “I bought a pound of pot.”

Mr. Ramone said he attended a yeshiva of the Lubavitch Hasidim in Brooklyn, “but I really didn’t fit in — there were no girls in the class.”

Mr. Stein, who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, said: “Religious affiliation didn’t mean anything to me and my friends. I’d be hard pressed to think ethnicity has something to do with my music.”

Mr. Kaye said he was “raised traditional,” but later went to synagogue only on the holidays.

“Actually,” interjected Mr. Manitoba in a burst of clarity, “several pounds of pot.”

Many of the 250 in the audience thronged the foursome afterward, soliciting autographs. “This was fantastic,” said Fritz Freidenberg, 49, a musician from Los Angeles wearing the T-shirt of his band, the Bloody Brains. Before the show Mr. Freidenberg had not known of the group’s collective heritage.

“I knew that Tommy was Jewish, that’s all,” he said.

Shari Saffioti, 52, a graphic designer who worked at Max’s Kansas City in the early days of punk, said she was thrilled to learn of the Jewish roots of punk. “Nobody really knew other of us were around,” she said. “We felt like oddballs. It turns out there are so many.”