I FIND it amusing – OK, annoying sometimes – when the average Joe or Jane, knowing that I’m a musician or singer (not an “artis”), expects me to break into song and entertain everyone at a snap of the finger by saying, “Hey Azmyl, why don’t you sing us a song?”.

I often endearingly retort, “Come to my gig, man”. The conversation tends to end there, and we return to the preceding routine or meeting. Sometimes, I spam them with my YouTube or Spotify links and tell them to “check out my stuff”, but judging by my rather static number of subscribers or followers, I oftentimes fail to make converts out of them, and these links remain untouched, like some long-lost pre-Islamic “candi” preserved under tonnes of laterite soil in the peninsula heartland.

I digress. What I often wonder is, do people in other professions or vocations get the same responses and requests? Does an accountant (any accountant readers out there?) get asked, “Hey, can you do my balance sheet?”, or for an insurance agent, “Can you insure me?” (it’s probably vice versa in this case). I find it curious that we, as a society, as a community, often associate a person solely with their trade, and I wonder how much of our trend of stereotyping or typecasting people can be attributed to the habit of simplifying their professions with their social class, race, nationality, or even faith.

The fact of the matter is, stereotyping is our way, as social creatures, of making sense of the world, but if left unpondered, it may have long-term negative consequences, which more often than not rear their ugly heads when crises occur, whether on a national or global scale.

One definition of “stereotype” is “the social classification of particular groups and people as often highly simplified and generalised signs, which implicitly or explicitly represent a set of values, judgments and assumptions concerning their behaviour, characteristics or history” (O’Sullivan et al, 1994).

How did this conversation escalate from a harmless comment about being a singer to the larger issue of stereotyping? Well, big problems often snowball from unchecked smaller ones. While such remarks often directed at persons like myself may seem trifling in the grand scheme of things, they are symptomatic of our larger habit as a community of oversimplifying and generalising people or groups based on how they look, or what they do, or both (I, too, have caught myself subconsciously doing this).

While live musicians in general are impacted by the movement-control order (MCO), one particular segment of the community that is gravely affected are buskers, the street musicians who earn a living solely from performing and are often from the B40 group. And, once shunned by the public because of stereotyping (among the most typical assumptions was that they were vagrants or drug addicts). Many buskers, my friends included, have taken to the internet to put on live shows via Facebook or Instagram, sharing their bank account numbers for viewers who wish to tip. Three weeks into the MCO, life has found a way for most buskers.

Busking is a valid profession; it is not begging. It took a long while for busking to be considered “mainstream” in Malaysia (only about a decade plus ago), and now, it is replete with its own organisations. However, we must brace for a paradigm shift.

Capitalism creates the need to categorise products and services in order to quantify supply and demand with cost and profit. Since it is a global system that we’ve inherited and subsequently perpetuated (it’s not like we have much choice), and cannot escape just yet (but it’s unravelling before our very eyes and under our feet as we speak), we need to use this time of self-isolation to reflect on ourselves, our tendency to reduce our fellow human beings into cardboard characters in our judgmental crosshairs.

Nothing unites people like tragedy does, and that in itself is tragic. But we’re learning creatures; this is what differentiates us from “dumb beasts”, to borrow a quote from Hunter S. Thompson. Tragedy also brings our empathy to the fore, which has been evident though it seldom grabs the headlines (conforming to the “bad news is good news” maxim). But if you look close enough in the right places, hope does appear.

At the end of it all, whatever our profession or vocation is, we are first and foremost human. Stereotypes be damned, no one sings/does accounts/sells insurance for free. While we are a product of a capitalist system, and our interactions with each other are often dictated by its values, systems don’t have a spirit. We humans do.

Maybe it’s high time we go back to our bartering days. – April 10, 2020.

* 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.