[lbo-talk] Taqwacore

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 3 10:18:13 PDT 2007


Cool. I've mentioned that I know and have spoken several times with Basim, the singer of the Kominas, maybe the premier US, slightly-tongue-in-cheek, "Muslim punk band."

Basim (which, he'll remind you, rhymes with "awesome") needs to quit trying to sound like Glenn Danzig! :/ A lot of their song titles and slogans are silly: "Shar'iah Law in the USA Now!!" but for all the humor they did write one polemical song against a conservative imam in NYC (I think) who had come up with some really backwards-sounding declarations for women, or something a couple of years ago. I'd have to look back into that to see what the deal with that guy was, but it was something that was briefly in the nat'l news.

It is pretty clever that the Kominas' Basim altered the green Pakistani (and Islamic-looking) flag to resemble the 4 black bars of Black Flag's flag logo. Reportedly, at one point Jello Biafra was interested in releasing something of theirs on Alt Tentacles, but I dunno what, if anything, happened with that.

I have slowly been trying to collect Middle Eastern, Arabic, and Persian punk, metal, and post-punk, and I consider that a different beast than Taqwacore, which seems to be a "movement" of the children of immigrants in Western countries who are looking back to their Muslim or Mid-East heritage, usually with humor, through the lens of their Western upbringing.

-B.

John E. Norem wrote:

"29 minutes into the program there is a piece about Taqwacore. http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_4670000/newsid_4679900/4679986.stm?"



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