I’M a country singer because all my songs are about my country. Simple.

An artist’s journey is not only personal and internal but also a social and external one, since we are all terrestrial and cultural beings.

There are many ways to conceptualise this journey – sometimes the journey mirrors that of external events that forcibly shape one’s journey. Sometimes one has to look around and scrutinise the categories, which one will inherently be lumped into, against ours most of the time. 

The most obvious category we are lumped into upon birth is our gender. Next would be our age. In Malaysia, the most contentious is our race.

However, the most common secular category we have been recently lumped into is by the economic group based on our income.

Categories seem clearly defined but in essence they aren’t – it’s just our species’ method of making sense of the world and ourselves. In this case, we all fall either in the B40, M40, and T20 categories. 

The M40 category are often left out of the popular political currency because, from what I gather, they are mostly urban, hence, lean more towards the opposition (Pakatan Harapan).

And like most countries, the electorates from rural constituencies are ripe for the picking for most ruling, conservative and right-leaning political parties because their needs are a lot less cosmopolitan – for example, most trade is still cash-based rather than digital like in urban areas.

Even so, I feel this is an unfair generalisation, even if so slightly, because actual metropolitan cities house swathes of B40 communities. The danger in making the simplistic urban-rural divide to an equally simplistic M40/B40 divide is misleading.

What we have in metropolitan major cities is a big class divide among T20s, B40s and the expatriate classes. The M40 tends to be the more mobile – both in social mobility and transportation – hence, the birth of the supposedly more affordable suburbia that surrounds major metropolitan areas like the Klang Valley. 

As someone firmly in the M40 category, I’ve always found those in this category a lot more diverse than the simplistic data surveys tend to reveal. 

Of particular interest to me is the encroaching of suburbia into former hinterlands, which in many cases are mobilised by real estate developers in tandem with state or nationally owned entities who lord over these vast territories. 

And it is this territory – both the physical and mental – that I have been obsessing over in my songwriting and album conceptualisation for the past five years or so, culminating in my 2020 album “John Bangi Blues”.

Now that the general election is in the works, the Bangi I was alluding to is not really the old original town or the township I have called home since I was 12 (Bandar Baru Bangi). I am referring to the parliamentary constituency of Bangi. 

I’ve seen this constituency grow and change into the largest constituencies with 300,000 voters in the polls – thanks to the gerrymandering leading to the 2018 general election and also a flurry of new young voters.

It’s nothing to be proud of really because the larger the constituency, the less political clout it has, since smaller rural constituencies – where Barisan Nasional (BN) and Perikatan Nasional flourish – make the one voter, one vote notion an unfair level playing field. This is the malaise that needs to be fixed if a new coalition takes over, hopefully. 

On the flip side, this gerrymandering has given my constituency a surface metropolitan sheen from a pseudo-urban PAS-controlled backwater into one that grapples with an overtly diverse M40 demography with pockets of B40s. What does it mean now to be someone in “Bangi”?

PH’s new candidate for Bangi – popular incumbent Ong Kian Ming has decided to not defend his seat – is Syahredzan Johan, an upstanding young lawyer whom I’ve known from a decade ago at UndiMalaysia and LoyarBurok events, which I performed and supported back in the early 2010s. 

In fact, I defeated him by 58 to 47 voted for a mock by-election UndiMalaysia organised for the fictional P223 Annexe Gallery in 2011 as part of their voter education drive. The fruits of which were the slow but gradual shift we experienced from the 2008 to the 2018 general election.

Maybe I should get into politics? Fat chance!

Anyway, the Bangi constituency in its mixed-bag present is a by-product of BN’s gerrymandering and whether we like it or not, we have to deal with it this polls. 

Here’s hoping that my Bangi will grow up fast with the influx of young professionals who call it home and change their MyKad address to call this constituency home. – November 11, 2022.

* 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.