Muslimgauze’s Legacy: Radical Politics, Post-Orientalism, and Electronic Music
If you were to hear a Muslimgauze track for the first time without context, the political message of the music would not likely to be clear to you. Muslimgauze, real name Bryn Jones, was a one-man instrumental electronic music project in the 1980s and 1990s. Jones, who passed away in 1999, released over 90 albums on various labels. His music is diverse, but generally stands at an intersection of hip-hop, dub, garage, house, and heavy influence from Southwest Asian and South Asian music. Yet perhaps most prolific about Muslimgauze was his political views and the ways they affected his art: his very moniker was chosen as a protest of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Muslimgauze’s releases were typically titled with references to conflicts, liberation struggles, and indeed the “Middle East” in general. Jones was known to obsessively research the histories of imperialism throughout the region. He named his releases titles like “Zulm,” “Hebron Massacre,” “Iran,” and “Vote Hezbollah.” In the 1990s, as today, in many circles the very mention of Southwest Asia let alone shows of solidarity with its oppressed peoples was particularly controversial. Even more so in the 1990s, the entire Muslimgauze project is fascinating to consider as the brainchild of someone who was not only British, but born and raised in the U.K.
In recent years, interest in his work has resurged, particularly as interest in the “Middle East” and perhaps any country with a vaguely Islamic history has reached an all-time high. A book was recently penned about him, and his music continues to be released, re-released, and compiled. However, evaluating his legacy and his work is complicated, maybe in a different way from the original controversy. How do we evaluate Jones’s corpus of work? In what ways was it important, and in what way was it misguided?
It is perhaps easy to consider Jones and the Muslimgauze project as visionary or ahead of its time in a certain realm. While he had academic and activist contemporaries who were engaged in a similar political project to Muslimgauze, in the realm of music Jones’s project was undoubtedly unique. While recent music history has had its share of half-baked overtures towards “peace in the Middle East,” Muslimgauze went beyond such simple politics espoused a complex and principled anti-imperialist ideology. While he generally noted in interviews that he was hoping to change people’s perspective on the region, the way he responded to criticisms that he never visited the countries he covers reveals a particularly revolutionary perspective:
“I would never go to an occupied land, others shouldn’t. Zionists living off Arab land and water is not a tourist attraction. To have been in a place is not important. So you can’t be against apartheid unless you have been in South Africa? You cannot be against the Serbs killing Muslims in Bosnia unless you have been there? I think not.”
In many ways, Muslimgauze had engaged in solidarity with oppressed peoples in a principled way that many are still struggling to do, decades later. While his support for oppressed people occasionally angered some people as he occasionally seemed to condone violence against civilians, it is almost astonishing that an electronic musician first and foremost could exhibit that kind of fearless and principled support for justice in the Middle East.
At the same time, Muslimgauze’s work is not without its problems. In particular the visual aesthetic has not necessarily aged well. While the idea of naming songs after regions or conflicts as a way to counter stigma or raise awareness is perhaps admirable in some sense, this practice is sometimes hard to distinguish from a boring post-orientalism at this point in time. Naming an album “Iran,” as Jones did, perhaps does more to reproduce notions that Iran as a concept is scary or edgy, rather than actually unpacking that issue or moving past it. Similarly, the artwork often utilized orientalist art without clearly presenting criticism or a sense of satire, and similarly falls back on the common misstep of meaninglessly mixing and matching symbols and ideologies from different cultures: an album with an Arab title is almost randomly adorned with Ottoman calligraphy. Even his live performances now seem comical and nearly disrespectful as macabre performance art: his shows often involved him performing live and seemingly amateurish percussion over his tracks.
Yet on a sonic level, the music holds up on its own as a spectacular moment in experimental electronic music. While generally quite avant garde, at times it even seems like a darker, deeper, and more honest precursor to acts like Thievery Corporation. While less glossy than electronic music that has tried to create similar mixes of music, Muslimgauze as a sonic project is still something to be treasured. Whereas some artistic projects seek to critique orientalist and essentializing views of Islamic and Southwest Asian cultures struggle to produce something new beyond critique, in many ways Muslimgauze created something new. Samples of darbukas and zurnas come together over bass music and experimental percussion in a sound that cannot fit into any one box. It is not simply recycled “exotic” samples with an electronic makeover, nor is the Middle Eastern influence simply a musical adornment.
In a recent conversation with artist Michael Tolmachev about Muslimgauze’s legacy, he advised me to understand the musical project by “evaluating Muslimgauze in his own time, in his own era.” In such an approach, it still remains that activists and artists (particularly who actually hail from the region in question) also created important works with political projects similar to Muslimgauze. He was not so unique as to deserve a free pass for his artistic missteps. Yet particularly for his era, Jones and his project are a fascinating miracle of international solidarity and consciousness, especially considering the limited means of technological connection in the 80s and 90s when this music was being produced This is not to say that it was impossible to meaningfully connect across borders at this time, but it was considerably more difficult to intimately acquaint yourself with the nuances of a region where outsiders’ perceptions are political capital. For his ability to do this and translate it into a new sound, Jones was quite special in his ability to avoid musical and political cliches.
Perhaps the best way to make sense of Muslimgauze is to approach his music and his legacy with the artist’s own dreams of global justice in mind. It would be a disservice to his memory to praise his music without continuing his project of radical political and anti-imperial change in the Middle East. When Jones was interviewed by Elephant Weekly in the mid 1990s, after a short discussion about future Muslimgauze various releases, he was asked about his “future ideas, ambitions” for the future. Rather than give a typical response about touring, gear, or even future collaborations, his first answers were political, not musical: “freedom to Afghanistan from Soviet oppression, and unity of the two German lands.” In that same spirit, if we could somehow ask him about the future of Muslimgauze’s legacy, what would he have answered today?
Article by: Kamyar Jarahzadeh
