WHILE pursuing my postgraduate studies in Melbourne, Australia 20 years ago in 2001, something peculiar was brewing again on the Malaysian cultural landscape.

The year 2001 would be a peculiar year in itself when the old world I knew changed for good after the September 11 attacks in the United States happened halfway through my sojourn.

I remember vividly the cool spring night when I caught wind of it. My Master’s programme hosted a simple dinner for its students.

As my housemate (who was also a course mate) and I were walking to a tram stop back to our apartment, he received an SMS from a relative that there was a major accident in the United States and asked us to turn on the television when we got home.

To our horror, what we saw on live television seemed surreal – the image of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York billowing smoke and fire – we only made sense of what was going on from the reporter’s voice over that two planes had hit the towers.

You have to remember we were watching the events unfold and no one knew what was happening – and then one of the towers crumbled into a mound of dust, smoke and debris and the world would never be the same from then on.

Leading up to 2001, Hollywood wielded the trope of terrorism in its blockbusters and several films earned deserved criticism for its stereotypical depictions of Arabs and Muslims – 1994’s True Lies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, and 1999’s Three Kings come into mind, among others (although the latter film actually consciously attempted to move away from the typical Hollywood and mainstream depictions but was nevertheless still ended up entangled in neo-colonialist discourses).

The remainder of my stay in Melbourne would be informed by repetition of the images of the Twin Towers being struck wherever you went: on television, on a big screen opposite a major tram stop in the CBD, and around the international student grapevine where we would hear stories of international students and migrant workers being harassed for looking or being Muslim – apparently some Sikhs were harassed out of cultural ignorance.

I personally never encountered any such experiences probably because I resembled a vagrant rather than a stereotypical Muslim in my long gangly hair and army surplus jacket and torn jeans.

Ironically, a couple of months before the 9-11 attacks, I was introduced to an American girl from New York and pestered her with questions about how life was there and the bands she had seen live as we hung out before a friend’s theatre show.

Back in Malaysia, the aforementioned peculiar event involved Malay-Muslim youths who might have looked the way I had then. Skimming through the news wire services in the university library after 9-11 had happened, I came across news reports of a series of raids and detention of youths in the northern state of Kedah who were reportedly members of “Black Metal groups”.

Youth were detained for, according to the news reports, wearing black T-shirts and having in their possessions Black Metal “paraphernalia”.

The witch hunts apparently had begun on July 16, 2001, right up to the last available press coverage on August 18.

By then I had already begun work on my thesis (about the use of popular songs in Hollywood films with drug themes) and was no way able to U-turn and make this more personal and timelier topic my thesis’ focus.

As I pored over the news reports further, a pattern was emerging – this series of witch hunts mirrored those vilifications of hip hop and punk music fans in the 1990s.

In other words, music subcultures and youths were again making headlines in Malaysia but for the wrong – and most probably false – reasons.

Naturally, this angered me as someone from the broader music subculture and a participant of the underground music circuit. Never had I felt the fire in the belly and also finally found an outlet for this fire to transmit itself onto – a research paper.

What might seem like just an academic exercise to the casual observer, to someone in the throes of a lonely thesis research march (I heard it’s even lonelier for PhD candidates) in the middle of a changing, unknown world ahead, this seemingly tepid trail of headlines and news reports was a blessing. I discovered the crossroads where personal identity, national politics, religion, and music met and what an intersection it was.

I was determined not to just let this one go, so I carried on with fishing for more articles at the state library in spite of it being costly to print articles from the news wires then. So I subsisted off instant Indomie, like most Asian students do, to save up on more “important things’‘.

As I dug deeper into the history of rock ‘n roll and how The Man has always had a bone to pick with youths who had opinions, the Malaysian cultural landscape began to emerge in a new light to me and to my horror (and amusement) there was very little literature on what I was looking for – and I found my niche.

In my final semester during the first half of 2002, I chose a subject called Introduction to Cultural Studies because I knew this beast of a research paper would find a home in it.

While my lecturer was a postmodernist and an ardent Jean Baudrillard fan (whom he went on and on about throughout the semester), he was intrigued by my topic and the witch hunts, and encouraged me to pursue it.

I eventually got a high distinction (A++) for the research paper and little did I know that in the following years when I unwittingly pursued a fledgling career in academia, it would come to define my place in it when another “black metal” raid happened on New Year’s Eve in 2005 in Kuala Lumpur and contributed a book chapter on the topic.

The lesson I learnt from this is that while staying committed and focused on a main task ahead (my main thesis in this case which I eventually lost interest in and only received a distinction), never stop being on the lookout for things closest to your heart that keeps the fire in your belly burning.

Sometimes in the middle of an uncertain and changing world, a dose of calculated angst (not anger) is needed to set things back into order and to put the gatekeepers of power and opinion in their rightful place. – February 26, 2021.

* 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.