Controversy continued to brew over the late July release of Aki Nawaz’s All Is War (The Benefits of G-Had) . Initially, All Is War was set to be released on July 17, 2006 on Nation Records, an independent label in England , but was put on hold as two executives Martin Mills and Andrew Heath threatened to resign if the label released the CD. Nawaz, refusing to be hindered by the threat, promised to distribute independently the CD “by hook or by crook” by the end of July.
Branded a radical Muslim, the hip hop/rapper artist Nawaz, along with his band Fun-Da-Mental, aren’t strangers to polemic lyrics, having released Erotic Terrorism in 1998 and Why America Will Go to Hell in 1999.
Born in Pakistan, but raised in Bradford England since the age of three, Aki Nawaz has vowed to fight for his right to express his opinions through his lyrics, despite their inflammatory nature.
>Fashioning songs likening Osama Bin Laden with Che Guevara and a track about a suicide bomber, Nawaz may have to face a harsher audience should authorities choose to enforce new legislation prohibiting the glorification of terrorism. While Nawaz claims to abhor violence against civilians, while lyrics in “I
Reject” say:
“Reject your thieving foreign policies
Reject your elitist congregation
Reject your mini skirt liberation
Reject your concept of integration …”
Or the track entitled “Parasites” where Nawaz sings:
“But revenge will be mine, with my last breath I will rise to curse you
Because you, you dogs and parasites have made us helpless…”
Finally there is the rage filled “Cookbook DIY” with lyrics that claims
“I’m strapped up cross my chest bomb belt attached
Deeply satisfies with the plan I hatched
Eletrodes connected to a gas cooker lighter…”
These might just be seen by public officials as promotion of a holy war rather than frank, open discussion of the oppressed Muslim communities around the world.
Citing fear after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and July 7, 2005 attacks in London as the cause of the decisions of Mr. Mills and Mr. Heath, Nawaz continued to insist that his mission though All is War is part of a “creative dissent” to “expose the hypocrisy and contradictions of democracy.” It
remains to be seen whether All Is War will be seen as a right of free speech or a call for terrorism in the eyes of British officials.
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
