Band I saw: Expendable Youth
Bands I missed: Tzeboble, Secret Trial Five, The Kominas, Vote Hezbollah, Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate, Al-Thawra, La Armada, Sangre De Abajo
How could such a thing happen?: Motherfucker wanna eat, motherfucker gotta work
Location: La Casa Maldita
Cost: $5 suggested
Drinks: BYO
Things I missed to be there: Miss Pussycat Puppet Show at Reversible Eye; Fake Rich
Party at Das Butt with Koku-Ban, H1N1, Local Hero, and Grifty; Varietease Burlesque Show at Kitty Moon
Reason for going, as briefly as I did: As far as I know, nothing like this has ever happened in Chicago
The Taqwacores is a book by Michael Muhammad Knight, detailing the lives of the residents of a flophouse that doubles as a DIY mosque for punk rock Muslims in Buffalo, New York. The narrator is of the story is the new kid, Yusuf Ali, an American Pakastani who doesn't know where he fits in, but finds love, solace, and adventure in punk rock, and a hero and personal savior in Jehangir Tabari. Kind of ironically, Jehangir is a martyr straight out of the Jesus mold, a man too perfect to live. In punk rock pop culture he is Heroin Bob, or that girl from Suburbia In literature, he is Randle P. McMurphy, pushing the psyche ward inmates to free themselves.
Jehangir lived and died by taqwacore. The word is a portmanteau of the words hardcore and taqwa an Islamic term for a kind of simultaneous love and fear of Allah*. The book ends with Jehangir gathering all the taqwacore bands in America, all the ones he could find, for one show, a punk rock spectacle that ends in his death. On the pretensious tip, it is an end of innocense for the various people in the book, an end of the utopian views of taqwa, punk rock, and Islam.
Before the book was published, originally as a zine in 2002, there was no such thing as taqwacore, but since then it has become a real movement, not just for arab and Muslim punks, but for disaffected white kids who're looking to further piss off their folks and disassociate themselves from a fairly racist USA that's currently at odds with much of the Muslim world. It's cynical, but it's true. In the book, Taqwacore was as much an umbrella as punk rock, there were skinhead taqwa, straightedge taqwa, and ska taqwa (skaqwa?). Middle East Punk night wasn't that much different. Tzebeoble is a one-man riot folk band whose music sounds more like Tom Frampton, Kinky Friedman, and The Moldy Peaches than This Bike is a Pipe Bomb or Yusef Islam. From the one song on their myspace page, San Antonio's Vote Hezbollah (who take their name from a band in the The Taqwacores), I could say that they sound like the gritty/glitzy postglam of D Generation, in a way that almost borders on new wave the way the Brits did it, and a little bit like old Social Distortion, but that might just be the one song (which has pretty shitty lyrics). The Kominas are a punk group that seem to take their influences from all avenues of punk, with a little bit of regae and hip hop thrown in. Their song "9000 miles" could've been done by the Transplants, but it probably would have been done by someone a lot better. The Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate and Chicago's Al-Thawra are the most interesting to me though, because they both do more experimental music, from a punk background and aesthetic.
Al-Thawra's sound a lot like early industrial, from a time when groups like Laibach, Muslimgauze, Nurse with Wound, and Throbbing Gristle were all sharing bills. It's very low, and very crunchy. Sagg Taqwacore Syndicate come from a slightly dancier place, and sound a lot like the electrometallic dub that seems to come out of kinda weird bands who've had hits do when they want to try new things, but want to go further than their fans would allow. Think of the Deftones side-project Team Sleep, or the At the Drive-In/Mars Volta side project Defacto. Unfortunately, even though they were on the bill, they had to drop out of the show before yesterday.
Yesterday marked the first time that a lot of these bands got together to play a Taqwa show in Chicago. The scale wasn't as big as it was in the end of the book, but it didn't end up with any scene fatalities, so I'm pretty sure everybody was happy. Unfortunately, even moreso than TSS dropping out, was that I had to.
I only got to see one of the bands, before I left for work, and that was Expendable Youth. If you drew a straight line on a graph from Rancid to Aus Rotten, Expendable Youth would be a dot in the middle in a Witch Hunt t-shirt. They're political, but kinda indiscriminately political, like, "It doesn't matter that you're all a bunch of anarchists and punks at a political punk show in a basement, we're gonna still say things like 'this one is about political prisoners, because Mumia isn't the only one.'"
When I hear that kinda preachy bullshit, it puts me in that cynical place where I place them in a world where music only exists on a straight line between Rancid and Aus Rotten. Otherwise, they were good, melodic hardcore, you know like they exist in a world where Aus-Rotten is a goal to strive for, and Rancid is the poppiest, sell-outiest anti-punk band you can think of. I've seen them before and I'm sure I will again, but I was kinda disappointed that they're all I got outta my time at Casa Maldita last night.
No comments:
Post a Comment