ON Wednesday night, Petaling Jaya live music venue Merdekarya hosted a tribute show for late singer-songwriters Meor Yusof Aziddin, Dr Wan Zawawi Ibrahim, and Hassan Peter Brown, who have all left us in the past year.

If you didn’t already know, Merdekarya is a rare Malaysian live music venue that focuses on promoting grassroots artists who compose and perform their own songs – in other words, singer-songwriters and indie bands.

I say “rare” because it is still the norm for live music in major towns in Malaysia to be associated with cover bands that perform Top 40 or classic rock hits, which is fine, but does not really represent the broad and diverse live music community in the public consciousness.

I say “rare” also because Merdekarya doesn’t present itself as an underground live music venue or studio – which used to be and still are the go-to spaces for original but harder-edged music genres – but as more of a community venue and bistro.

I had already been booked to play my solo folk sets for Wednesdays in December. When Hassan Peter Brown passed away in November, his family and I initially spoke about doing a tribute gig in his memory, which then extended to a tribute to include Meor and Dr Wan who had left us earlier.

So, I decided to convert the last Wednesday I was booked (Merdekarya would be closed from Christmas onwards until January) and only got the word out to fellow performers about a week before the eventual event this past week, and it didn’t take much of an effort to get it together.

This, to me, is the key characteristic of a community – an arts community specifically – as compared with an industrial one.

When the discussion about music arises, it is often framed within the “industrial” context.

In other words, everything that is assumed to be related to music and music making is assumed to be all about “industry” as opposed to the root of why music is so central in human civilisation: community.

I don’t have anything against industries – the music industry in particular here – because it is puritanical to reject or deny how capitalism has and continues to both feed us and also drain us as a species in the past couple hundreds of years to emerge as the prevalent system of not only economic sustenance but also cultural ideology.

And it is this latter that I often rally against, not as an anti-capitalist, but to resist and challenge the values of what cultural and artistic practices mean to us, not only as a communal elixir, but also an ideological one.

The glaring fact in relation to our trailblazing troubadours that concerned me was the relative silence by the supposed music industry community of their passing.

Aside from my little column here, tributes in other major mediums were few and far between save for social media posts by individuals who knew them personally.

I’m not asking for a cover page or major news piece about their passing but at the very least some form of closure by those in the music industry – an industry that I have very little affinity towards, hence my choice of making music on my own terms outside of the values associated with the industry.

And I am not alone in this. In fact, the independent (or “indie”) and underground music scene is a lot larger in terms of numbers of artists, album and merchandise releases than the mainstream music industry, which has now been hijacked by social media.

Fair enough, I am getting puritanical here, but as someone who has practised what I preached as a singer-songwriter and underground musician for 20-odd years, I have made acquaintances with many disillusioned and heartbroken souls whose musical lives have been tarnished by contractual fine prints and industrial tactics.

This is where I champion the notion of “community” over “industry”. It is something borne from first-hand experience, not out of an academic exercise.

Everything wrong in this world can be traced back to industries. You name it – global warming, deforestation, displacement, pollution, corruption, among others.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out but I am realistic enough to realise that the rot is too embedded for it to change in my lifetime or even the next.

My heart was encouraged during and after the tribute night as the community came together and their generosity shone from the tips that I collected to be shared between the families of the three late troubadours.

I remembered again why I do this. Moments like this are a gift – moments when we turn grit into gold so we may soldier on. – December 23, 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.