245: Seize the Time, by Fun^da^Mental

Fun^da^Mental (United Kingdom/Pakistan)
Seize the Time (1994)
14 tracks, 84 minutes
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From the very beginning of the album, you know Seize the Time is not going to be a comfortable listen. To start the first track of your debut album with a truly disgusting and horrific 30-second-long answer-machine message from a cockney racist, full of P-words, N-words and C-words and ending in a chilling death threat. It’s a really affective opener, shocking, and it’s an inspired way to start the album. Because it shouldn’t be a comfortable listen; these are not comfortable topics.

And that’s the way the album continues. I usually find ‘unapologetic’ a weird word to be applied to artists going against the mainstream – why should they ever be ‘apologetic’ in the first place? – but I think it’s quite well-placed for Fun^da^Mental, and Aki Nawaz in particular. They are not here to make polite requests; they’re not here to give you pleasant, comfortably unfamiliar Asian music to boost your progressive cred. They’re not going to sit around and allow you to put them in the world music box, or the Asian underground box, or any box at all. They’re difficult, and fuck you for thinking your opinion matters.

The uncompromising lyrics talk about what it was like to live life while being young, Asian, British and Muslim in the early 1990s without pulling any of the punches, and they still – sadly, angrily – hold too much weight even 25 years later. They’re all held together by a supreme musical tapestry that similarly reflects the soundscape of Britain for young British-Asians: it’s very much in the old school hip-hop mould, but the instrumentals are full of quotes and inspirations from Bollywood, bhangra, South Asian classical music and other folk music, as well as jungle, dub, electronica and lots of punk in both sound and attitude. There’s also a liberal dousing of spoken samples, from the inspirational (Malcolm X) to the rage-inducing (predictably-Tory MP Alan Clark). The group’s place in the fledgling world dubtronica scene is felt with the inclusion of Transglobal Underground’s Tim Whelan, Neil Sparkes and Nick Page.

It’s always maddening when art made through injustice retains its meaning with very little change over such a long period of time. The great thing about music, though, is that it helps – awareness is heightened, people get angry and the groundswell continues. Seize the Time is just as important to listen to now as it was in 1994 – revisit it if you’ve not for a while, and listen and learn if you’ve never experienced. Get furious. We need that now.