I FIND it quite amusing, and not offended at all, that a lot of friends and acquaintances think that I don’t fast during Ramadan nor enjoy it even if I do – that I’m a “naughty” person for being a rock ‘n’ roller.

Fact of the matter is that I do fast and I actually do enjoy it – I am a spiritual person privately and I don’t find that contrary to what I do with my art, which so happens to be within the broader realm of rock ‘n’ roll culture, a field of work that is often associated (and actually do have historical roots) in sex and drugs.

But rock ‘n’ roll is also about standing up for yourself and calling out hypocrisy – positive values much needed in our noisy capitalistic and materialistic world.

Without context, which most people unfortunately are bereft of, it may seem from the distance that those who partake in rock n’ roll culture – be it playing music, recording music, being an audience or fan – are partaking in all things debauchery, wallowing in the bellies of sin and pleasure, worshipping false prophets and gods wrapped up in the false facade of “music”.

What tends to happen, at least in challenging such blatant misrepresentation with the status quo in public, is that a lot of rock ‘n’ rollers either don’t or aren’t bothered to retort such false and fictionalised accusations.

It also doesn’t help that oftentimes rock ‘n’ rollers are never even given the opportunity to challenge or even have a dialogue to explain ourselves since these “attacks” from any conservative wings of society are never meant to be an equal level playing field to begin with. 

As a rock n’ roller, I too feel that I don’t need to bother to try to engage with the largely ignorant and square masses since it’s actually better that they don’t know what’s actually good for them (more for us, haha) and we stay away, let them be, and giggle at them from the rafters.

However, as a media and cultural studies academic and writer, I can’t help but retort and challenge these accusations and misrepresentation in the media, not only because these attacks are baseless but also because I realise there’s very little writing and research into rock ‘n’ roll cultures in Malaysia.

This is also my job as a thinker. I need to stand up for the community where I forged friendships, camaraderie and meaning not found elsewhere, and make its voice heard outside of the music.

Ten years ago I was invited by the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) to attend a symposium titled “Articulating Modernity: The Making of Popular Music in Southeast Asia and the Rise of New Audiences” in Jakarta to share about Malaysian popular music culture.

I was riding on the wave of the visibility of my academic book chapter debut the year before titled “Facing the Music – Music and ‘Morality’ in Malaysia” (in which I researched and challenged the so-called “Black Metal” raids that happened in Peninsular Malaysia in the early to mid-2000s) in an academic book Media, Society and Culture in Malaysia which while read closely amongst academic circles and field researchers, oftentimes bypass public readership – such is the conundrum of publishing in academia.

I was also tagged as “the black metal guy”, not a bad tag for someone who is primarily known for his folky yet rollicking songs.

To cut a long story short, when I asked the two Dutch academics spearheading the project “why?”, they said that Malaysia was pretty much a “blackhole” when it came to research or writing on popular music culture.

Aside from a wealth of academic journals by more established Malaysian academics primarily from the fields of ethnomusicology and ethnography, not much had been published on contemporary music-making, which by 2011 was the “indie music” phenomenon era.

The go-to book that helped me find some direction home was Craig Lockard’s seminal work charting music and politics in the region up to the late 1990s titled, Dance of Life – Popular Music and Politics in Southeast Asia. 

Some Malaysian professors whom I had the pleasure to be with before, had been encouraging in me writing more about this – one of them was the editor of the book which published my chapter. He noted that what I had that most academics don’t is insider knowledge and access.

I hadn’t leveraged on that then and it was certainly a lightbulb moment – mind you, studies on rock ‘n’ roll culture is often not as “serious” a field as compared to traditional music in these parts, and it’s very rare to find encouraging voices and those who are encouraging are oftentimes not from the woodworks of music education and institutions. They tend to be sociologists, media studies scholars, political scientists, and other fields in the humanities.

The KITLV academics told me to “just share your journey” and that was what I did and a part of what I shared would eventually contribute to a section on Malaysia in a book on music and society in the region titled, Popular Music in Southeast Asia: Banal Beats, Muted Histories, which is available for free online, unlike most other academic books.

I also gained an all-expense paid trip to Jakarta and a coincidentally appear and perform live on a popular television show called Bukan Empat Mata on TransTV and met dangdut pioneer and legend Rhoma Irama backstage. I was introduced to a community of mostly Western and European scholars who had genuine interest in researching writing music about the region who insisted that it needed more local and insider voices.

What I’m getting at here is that sometimes in our life journeys, we are too focused on the moment to pause and reflect on the broader perspective of our predicaments.

It takes a longer pause to make that predicament into something you can leverage on and use it to counter falsities and baseless claims. I might not have changed the world – what a preposterous ambition! But I have at least changed myself and hopefully the minds of a handful of others who in turn may also carry that on.

We may not have control over our world and reality but we can control how the world and our realities affect us and what we decide to do with it productively.

This pause is what I cherish about this holy month as a Muslim. Selamat Ramadan, be patient, and keep the faith. – April 16, 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.