The Night Of’s Riz Ahmed talks about his new rap album:
lifechangeing:
By Lucy Westcott On 8/13/16 at 6:10 PM
“Different kinds of surreal things” have happened to Riz Ahmed, the star of HBO’s The Night Of, who raps under the name Riz MC, at the airport. Every time he’s tried to fly to the U.S. for the past 16 years, he’s been stopped.
For a while, he was patted down by the same elderly Sikh man, whom he
started calling “uncle.” The man called Ahmed “beta,” or son. In
another incident, which went viral on Tumblr,
Ahmed was one of three men with that surname called for additional
searching at a U.S. airport. They took a selfie together and joked that
they should start a boy band, The Ahmeds.
“The first track would be ‘Randomly Searching For You’,” he joked. “I
find it really ironic that now we have a boy band and our first track
is about being randomly searched. I think it’s perfect and
tragic-comedy.”
Ahmed, who is British-Pakistani and based in the U.K., sat in an apartment in New York City’s East Village with his bandmates Himanshu Suri and producer Redinho on a humid August morning. Together they form Swet Shop Boys,
a combination rap group-boy band tackling transatlantic politics and
identity in the age of Donald Trump, Brexit and racial profiling, all
while trying to raise the visibility of South Asians in Western popular
culture.
“T5,” the first single from their new album Cashmere,
refers to Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport and draws on the experience of
flying with brown skin and the last name Ahmed. Lyrics include: “Oh no,
we’re in trouble / TSA always wanna burst my bubble / Always get a
random check when I rock the stubble.” The song has been listened to
more than 31,000 times on SoundCloud since it was released on August 2.
Ahmed and Himanshu—who is Indian-American and, as Heems, was half of
rap group Das Racist—previously released an EP as Swet Shop Boys. On Cashmere,
true to form, they’re “subverting and translating the textures that
you’d get on a mixtape, [where] you’d get bomb drops and sirens,” says
Ahmed. “Instead we’ve got tigers [and] airport bomb-sniffer dogs
snarling.”
So why was now the best time to release an album? “I know from the
outside the release of this album is coinciding with lots of world
events that resonate with the album’s themes, or coinciding with this TV
show that I did years ago that people are responding well to,” says
Ahmed. “Really, the reason why we’ve done it now is the vagaries of
getting all our schedules together.”
Cashmere was recorded over one week in May, when the idea of
the U.K. voting to leave the European Union and Donald Trump becoming
the Republican presidential nominee were possible, but still
distant, realities. They wanted to released the album on August 14,
which marks Pakistan Independence Day and its separation from India, but
needed the artwork to be right and missed the deadline.
Ahmed and Himanshu aren’t strangers to rapping about social issues
and have been including politically-charged themes in their music for a
long time. In “T5,” Ahmed raps: “Stopping refugees is just silly,
blood”—the U.S. and U.K. have taken a fraction of the nearly five
million Syrian refugees currently displaced around the world—while
Heems’ song “Flag Shopping” from his 2015 album Eat, Pray, Thug includes the lyrics: “The neighbors threw rocks at the house / They’re making it harder to live.
“Rap is inherently protest music, it just doesn’t usually come from
South Asians or Pakistanis or Indians. The tools are all within the
genre. It’s a genre that lends itself well to politics, whether it’s
first-hand accounts of the prison-industrial complex or whether it’s
observing and being more analytical about the situation,” says Suri.
“It’s all there and it’s always been there, it’s just voices like ours
haven’t really been given attention to speak like this before.”
Cashmere features a track called “Zayn,” referring to Zayn Malik,
who rose to fame as a member of the British boy band One Direction.
Malik is one of the most-recognized people of South Asian heritage in
Western popular culture, and is someone who “seems to be in touch and
wanting to be in touch with his background more,” says Suri. Malik has a
song in Urdu on his solo album.
It’s a tongue-in-cheek track and explores the idea that Malik is an
aspirational counter-narrative to the Islamic State militant group
(ISIS): “Zayn Malik’s got more than 80 versions of him, so there’s more
than one direction to get to paradise,” says Ahmed.
“Where’s our visibility? It is [London mayor] Sadiq Khan, it is Zayn Malik,
it is Dev Patel,” he says. “Visibility is an important part of setting
aspirations. Kids out there who see Zayn or hear ‘Terminal 5’ could go,
‘Oh shit, I can do this’.”
Ahmed, for one, is about to become even more visible, with roles in the new Jason Bourne film and the upcoming Star Wars anthology movie Rogue One.
Yet despite his rising-star status—airport workers who pat him down to
check for explosives are now starting to recognize him, he says—“you
still look like how you look.” Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan earlier
this week tweeted
about being detained by U.S. immigration officials “every damn time” he
visits the U.S. His experience prompted a reply from Rich Verma, the
U.S. ambassador to India, who said “We are working to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
“It’s easy to dehumanize a segment if they’re not visible. It’s a
conscious thing to make them invisible and create walls and barriers.
With visibility comes understanding and humanization, then change,” says
Suri. “It’s an important part, and for me, it’s why I like to make
music and why we make projects like this.”
Cashmere will be released on October 14 on Customs, the new Swet Shop Boys imprint.