Riz Ahmed Issue #35

The actor-MC raps sparks controversy over his post-9/11 blues

By Jeremy Ohmes
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 2:52pm

Riz Ahmed can’t escape irony. It follows him around like a bad haircut. It’s taped to his back like a grade-school prank. It’s stuck to his shoe like a piece of toilet paper. When the British-born actor-musician returned to England after promoting a film about the illegal detainment and abuse of three British Muslims (2006’s The Road to Guantanamo), he was illegally detained at London Luton Airport in February 2006 for several hours and verbally abused by the airport police. “They physically assaulted me, made racist remarks, and finished off by asking me to spy for them!” he says. “They kept asking me if I became an actor to further the Muslim struggle. It’s hard not to laugh — until it gets scary and humiliating.”

True, that doesn’t sound too funny, but Ahmed has a knack for recognizing the ridiculous in just about everything. When he released his first song, “Post 9/11 Blues,” on iTunes in August 2006, under the moniker Riz MC, he had no idea that the song would spark a storm of controversy. He just wanted to present a humorous indictment of the post-9/11 culture of fear, a culture in which language and symbols are hijacked and oversimplified and the entire discourse is dumbed-down. “We were being sold this package, this cartoon worldview [and] it had this insidious Pied Piper quality to it — like a deranged radio jingle everyone was humming,” he says. The tongue-in-cheek ditty adopts this empty-headedness as Riz sing-songs, “Everybody do the post-9/11 dance / Look scared, shake your arse, while the bombs go blast ... Shave your beard if you’re brown and you best salute the crown / Or they’ll do you like Brazilians and shoot your arse down.” The song and video became a hit on MySpace and YouTube, but as Riz’s old friend irony would have it, “Post 9/11 Blues” fell victim to the same climate of fear that the song was satirizing. It was banned from BBC and MTV and DJs were scared to play it because it was deemed “politically insensitive.” Eventually, the press got wind of it and blew the song up to the point where radio couldn’t deny it any longer.

BBC Radio1 and other mainstream outlets started playing “Post 9/11 Blues” and they’ve also latched onto Ahmed’s smart and catchy second single “People Like People.” But the radio and media gods usually aren’t content in simply describing Riz as a sharp-tongued, witty, versatile MC. Instead, he’s a “Muslim rapper.” For Riz, this misleading label presents two problems: First, he doesn’t see himself as a rapper. “The associations [with rap] have nothing to do with what my music is about. KRS-One said that the difference between a rapper and an MC is that an MC inspires people,” Ahmed says. “I think we have too many rappers and hardly any MCs.” Secondly, he does not want to be pigeonholed as a “Muslim rapper” or an “Asian actor” because those labels shove him into a marginalized place in people’s minds. “I’m just trying to speak to as many people as possible, outside of any boundaries of identity,” he says.

And with a self-released EP coming out in April, Ahmed’s ever-growing Internet buzz, more and more radio play, March dates in New York, L.A., and at SXSW, and his recent appointment as an “Emerging Artist in Residence” at London’s illustrious Royal Festival Hall, Ahmed is speaking and people are listening. If he keeps up like this, he might get stopped in the airport ... and asked for an autograph. Wouldn’t that be ironic?