MALAYSIAN arts lacks grit because Malaysian artists lack grit. Now before you start pointing your fingers and thumbing your nose at me and condemn me with the “As if you’re that great!” accusation very popularly used in our Truly Asia society, let me state my case.

Making a decent living through the arts is difficult, if not impossible, in our contemporary social, cultural, and of course economic climate. I’m referring to “contemporary” not only in our present Covid-19 world and realities but also the preceding decades leading up to it.

The struggles and difficulties faced by a lot of artists and citizens alike – I’m using the arts just as a starting point – are not borne because of Covid-19 solely. What this pandemic world we live in now has done only revealed the rot and dysfunction already present just below the surface and one of the positives (and I use this word cautiously) is the unveiling of the façade and hypocrisy that many have not been (and unfortunately still probably not) aware of.

Socially speaking, while Malaysia celebrates its diverse ethnic groups and cultures, this diversity also comes with its own sets of challenges as a direct impact of the New Economic Policy (NEP) reality which still navigates our national policies.

It would be foolish and ignorant to swipe aside at how the NEP has led to the cultural conundrum we find ourselves collectively in and equally foolish to think that the NEP does not correspond nor react to the changing global economic system. The archaic National Culture Policy, introduced way back in 1970, has also silently governed all things “cultural” in this country.

With a diverse society, the most obvious thing to an outsider – aside from the physical attributes like facial, skin, food, and dresses or whatnot – is the polyglot nature of Malaysian society.

At the very least, the average Malaysian is bilingual – more than that if you are non-Malay, although that is slowly changing as more and more Malay parents lose their trust and confidence in the “sekolah kebangsaan” system and send their children to Chinese schools – a positive move in my opinion – while the more affluent ones chuck their kids in overpriced private and international schools.

Aside from the recent shocking revelations about the normalising of period checks and rape culture in the system, what we have now are increasingly atomised schooling communities divided and segmented by language, class, and wealth – along with the ideologies each community perpetuates.

Take a clear and unvarnished look at our schooling system – the recent controversies are just the scum rising to the surface and it took a brave student to stand up against the hypocrisy, not the adults who were supposed to be tending to them.

Culturally speaking, we are stunted as a society. The fact that an elitist public university academic can put a bounty on a food delivery rider is utterly, morally corrupt. That academic is the embodiment of “professor kangkong” that blossomed post-NEP and saw entitled “syok sendiri” Malay “academics” abuse their privilege at the expense of others and  dine like termites on the woodwork of academic institutions.

It’s no secret that most public university vice-chancellors are academically irrelevant careerist pencil pushers and seat warmers who brown-nose their way up the food chain.

This culture is also why Malaysian public universities are in the quagmire they are in. Have you ever wondered why our public universities and private universities are seldom in the same precious convoluted “global ranking” lists that we supposedly heed? This adherence to “ranking” is a society-wide culture in Malaysian society – it’s a reflection of our shallow, quantitative-based attitudes that are misinformed by consumerism and materialism.

This is also reflected on how the media valorises “Malaysians abroad” who “do us proud” without asking the most difficult question: why did they leave in the first place? Although isolated within public institutions, we are in danger of being a “kangkung society” since what our institutions are is also a reflection of our collective official attitudes and discourses.

A sad but realistic metaphor to our collective attitudes are the increasing number of empty shopping malls that litter our landscape – the promise of the billboards and buntings of greedy developers is a simulacra of some commodity fetishism that beckons to us ensconced in the middle class comfort of the past decades.

And finally, economically speaking, we don’t have reliable captains or stewards running this enterprise. Like the “professor kangkong”, most of our leaders are the perpetuators of this “kangkung-ness”.

While again it’s no secret that politics is a performance art, most members of the public are suckered into believing the passive-aggressive performances of our favourite still-shuttered Parliament performance artists. They are in reality cordial with each other in the tearoom and yet this shocks members of the public when photos or videos or even leaked recordings make its way into the Internet.

Politicians serve you, the people, and their irresponsibility is ours too, as much as we take credit for the successes. While we valorise MBAs and business degrees (still the lifeblood of most private higher education institutions), why aren’t they up there in the dusty old cabinet among the old, cracked bowls?

While in the creative arts, the valorisation of “industry players” in the teaching staff is considered “common sense”, how come academics who teach “business” to budding entrepreneurs aren’t themselves multi-millionaires?

Yet most parents see it sensible to send their kids to such programmes “for their future”. The sciences are left in the middle through the inevitability of being too academically qualified on paper and are automatically sent into programmes that promised well-paying jobs which, as we have witnessed, is often not the case.

The middle class has a duty to be interesting – that’s what an upward social and economic mobility should entail, not an endless array of mediocrity. Where do you think the phrase “rise up” comes from? Instead, we see the middle class mired in mortgages chasing that just out of reach “Malaysian dream” and sidelined politically by disproportionate gerrymandering.

Now, how does all this relate to my initial argument that Malaysian arts lack grit? Well, everything does – you have to see the forest for the trees.

You can’t talk about “the arts” without the broader social, cultural and economic context – it’s like a circulatory system in a constant state of cause and effect.

What are performers without an audience? What is an artwork without a perceiver? What is a song without a listener? If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Well, in good old consumerist pious Malaysia, the silence is deafening because whether we notice it or not, our collective attitudes, from puritan to liberal, from progressive to regressive, is exemplified in our current stasis.

This is the best that we’ve got, unfortunately. We need to study this stasis, not pine for “things to go back to normal”. We are not special as a nation – discard that thought for now, it’s pure ideology.

What if I told you there was no such thing as normal to begin with? If you won’t listen to a fellow small Malaysian fry like myself, well, I’ll let Datuk Shah Rukh Khan do the talking for me.

* 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.