THE past couple of weeks have been a great journey for me, digging deeper into the social history of music making in the region.

Aside from my own contributions – I recently published an academic book chapter on the Chinese-language underground music scene (that I co-wrote with my fellow musician-academic partner-in-crime Adil Johan) and presented a performance lecture at a recent popular music studies conference in Penang – the informal interactions that orbit these events are just as equally important.

Just before Ramadan, I bought an excellent book about rock music in Malaysia: “65 Tahun Muzik Rock Di Malaysia – Dari Rock Proto ke Glam Rock Melayu (1955-1986)” from Assoc Prof Takiyudin Ismail, a political scientist from Universiti Kebangsaan of Malaysia in my hometown and a lifelong rocker.

I first heard of him when I reviewed a book he co-wrote and edited with two other scholars a couple of years ago, but had never met in person.

Adil brought him to my attention again, highlighting his Facebook posts about local rock musicians and history during the pandemic.

They were very detailed and mined from interviews and conversations he had with musicians and people in the scene.

I caught wind of his new book recently, added him on Facebook, and dropped him a message about my interest in buying it.

He responded immediately and we set up a meet over teh tarik in Kajang.

Meeting him for the first time was like meeting an old friend. Such is the bond of fellow music lovers, especially of a genre that has repeatedly received a lot of conservative flak in our beloved Boleh-land.

The Malay-language book – published by Penerbit Universiti Malaya – covers the mid-1980s rock music era in which I grew up.

He said the pandemic gave him the time to focus on writing the book, which is full of anecdotes and rare colour photos of musicians and shows from that era, and he completed it in two and a half years.

While he confessed it was far removed from his other writings as a political scientist, I told him what he did paralleled what I do too as a musician. It’s an act of burning passion.

Coincidentally, April 1, the music documentary “Pekik” premiered on Astro. I couldn’t attend the media screening at Finas a week earlier because I was on Daddy duty.

The director Fareeq Alias contacted me back in October 2021 to set up an interview and live solo performance (my band mates couldn’t cross borders) at his studio called Stereo Pixel in Bandar Menjalara.

Little did I know that he was actually producing a feature length documentary on the 1990s and early 2000s underground music scene.

This was a first in this country about the era and a great companion piece to “Surviving Beijing” (2005).

It is the only other feature length documentary about the Malaysian Chinese underground scene directed by Lam Li, which documented the disastrous tour of China by seminal bands Moxuan and Chong Yang.

He told me that since the lockdown brought his business (video and audio production) to a halt, he and his team-mates (who are also underground musicians) decided to work on this, which he started way back in 2013 as a passion project.

The documentary explores the transition of the Kuala Lumpur underground music scene into what would later evolve into the “indie” scene in the mid-to-late 1990s and reach its zenith in the early 2000s.

Indie has lost a lot of its original meaning, and you see it misappropriated to all things hip and fashionable nowadays.

The documentary includes interviews with scene stalwarts and also a CD compilation album (yes, the format is far from dead, folks!) of the songs recorded live at Fareeq’s company’s own studio.

I often lament the fact that a lot of institutions and even academics have little interest in charting contemporary history, especially when it comes to rock music, as if the people who enjoy and/or make rock music are not worthy of a place in our nation’s history.

In fact, the best place for me to understand Malaysian society is to look closer into the social history of music – not the musical or instrumental elements – because music is intrinsic to our sense-making of the world around us.

So, go grab this book and watch the documentary folks. Let’s raise a toast to making sense of Malaysia through rock music. – April 7, 2023.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.