UNLIKE musicians, when a banker walks in a room, nobody requests of them in jest, “Hey, can you balance my sheets?” or “Hey, can you give me some money?”. But musicians are often jokingly asked, “Hey, can you sing us a song?’ or ‘Hey, can you play us a tune?”

Well, you could ask a banker for his service but it will come with a fee and form you would need to fill up in black ink. For us musicians, it’s charity. It’s an occasional annoyance that I’ve learnt to live with.

Banks are a peculiar institution. They seem a natural part of the social fabric that we accept.

Yet it exists in a bubble of its own subculture of sorts – people who work in banks look and think a certain way. Think about it – have you ever applied for a loan or a credit card and you’ve been prudent in your spending and have no debt to your name?

Chances are you will be rejected outright because you have no “record”. I’m going out on a limb ranting about a field I have little knowledge about but hey, that’s ok in Malaysia Boleh, isn’t it?

We have politicians who run ministries and agencies that they are not qualified for, after all. They’ve set a precedent, so rant on I shall.

I have nothing against banks or bankers per se. There are many good people who work in banks and some of them are my friends, while my interaction with banks is mostly reduced to the ATM and online banking.

Sometimes when something goes wrong, I make it a point to wait at my end of the hotline for a human voice, but other than that I believe I share with many of you the same limited correspondence with banks or bankers.

My grouse against banks is their status as a social and cultural institution. When you think about it, banks are just a place to keep stuff and borrow stuff, with the caveat that the stuff is valuable currency.

I say currency because how many of us really see the hard cash in our hands, the fruits of our hard-earned labour?

Think about it. It’s just numbers on a screen, an imaginary value placed upon us, but dangerous because even though imaginary, this value has very real repercussions in real life.

It’s ironic that the richer you are, the less the need for cold, hard cash. We see it reported this so-and-so CEO is worth a billion or a gazillion. But it’s all imaginary – there’s no physical bank account that he or she has that runneth over with hard currency.

Imagine if human civilisation didn’t invent hard currency and instead carried on with the barter system, storage companies and spaces would be the go-to institutions instead.

In fact, we’d probably be less inclined to spend since it would take a lot of effort and muscle to bring our livestock to the market to exchange for a smartphone or a vintage guitar. Every street corner would be occupied by huge storage space company shop lots, maybe hangars. Our ideas of cities, suburbs and architecture would be vastly different. 

Back to banks. Another grouse I have is the media representation of the powerful people who run banks. Banks are run by managers. In my book, managers aren’t leaders – they “manage”.

Technically, I too am a manager since I have to manage gigging, work, parenting, being a spouse, being my parent’s child, being a friend, etc on a daily basis. You too are a manager.

But in popular culture, management as a profession and field has been sexed up as if managers will save the world and we all should all aspire to be one. I hold a belief that the world has changed and leadership has been corporatised.

In other words, one cannot be a leader now without adopting skills and values that exist in the corporate culture, while the political system too has changed and adapted to the capitalist system which has become the dominant way of running the world.

And the suit, tie, and expensive watch – who made this uniform compulsory? Who needs watches nowadays? Can’t your phone tell the time? Is it a coincidence that bankers dress the same?

Back to bartering. Instead of money politics, I suppose politics without currency would be livestock politics or whatever you could barter with. If they had to lug livestock around, a business suit would be ill-suited (pun intended) to the task.

Yet the global idea and image of “leaders” were deeply entrenched in the past. Gandhi, Churchill, Roosevelt, to name a few, were the leaders whose image connote the universal idea of leadership.

The key word here is “idea”. Leadership now is mostly negotiation and not even management.

If intelligent aliens arrive, they will ask to be taken to your dealer instead of leader since deals are negotiated, not managed.

So my hypothesis is, to put it simply: we need to change the archetype of a leader. It may be a cosmetic and shallow solution but at least they’ll be more comfortable and look a bit less of a schmuck.

After all, their business suits too are as superficial as the fake pockets they contain. all. In fact, most are stitched shut. – November 20, 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.