A few months ago, I happened to be passing through Arizona and needed to fly out of the Phoenix airport. While going through security, I was selected to have my bag searched, and the TSA agent that had seen my American passport stated my birthplace as Pakistan came back to look through my possessions. I made a comment that my bag got through New York’s JFK airport when I flew into Phoenix just fine, and the TSA agent laughed at me. I walked away from the incident crying and feeling thrown out of the jovial mood of the trip with friends I was on, but this is a reality faced by many other South Asians when traveling.
Random checks as a result of racial profiling at airports are the main subject of “T5,” the lead single from "Cashmere" the debut album from Swet Shop Boys. The group is comprised of Heems (Himanshu Suri of Das Racist fame), Riz MC (Riz Ahmed known recently for his acting in HBO’s “The Night Of” and the upcoming “Star Wars Rogue One”), and producer Redinho. Heems and Riz MC are Indian-American and Pakistani-British respectively, and South Asian influences and experiences feature heavily throughout the album creating an 11 song essay on post-9/11 Desi life. There is a certain freshness to having music that combines South Asian sounds with Western beats and weaves them with soundbites in Hindi and Urdu. Lyrics depicting Desi life both seriously and humorously explore identity, Islamophobia and racism.
Going back to “T5,” the chorus has both Heems and Riz MC rapping “Oh, no, we’re in trouble / TSA always wanna burst my bubble / Always get a random check when I rock the stubble” regarding the extra scrutiny applied to men at the airport who happen to have a beard and are of any Middle Eastern or South Asian heritage. Riz MC also brings up the humor and irony in the situation of such random checks with “Trump want my exit / but if he press a red button to watch Netflix / bruv, I’m on.” In his piece written for the book "The Good Immigrant" that was published in The Guardian, Riz MC addressed the fact that even though he became an actor and fairly well known, he was still subject to profiling while flying. (Something that not even the most famous Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan can avoid, it seems.)
“No Fly List” features a clip of Malala Yousafzai’s Lecture when she received the Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi. The clip emphasizes the significance of an Indian and Pakistani, Satyarthi and Yousafzai, working together, but in the case of Cashmere, the clip represents Heems and Riz MC collaborating. “Phone Tap” as the name implies covers the fears and paranoia of the government listening in on not only the phone lines of people deemed suspicious but also places of worship, namely mosques. The song I find most striking on the album is “Half Moghul Half Mowgli,” where Riz goes back and forth about trying to find his own identity and battle the negativity he faces from both South Asians and non-South Asians. But in between songs that carry strong social messages, there are songs like “Swish Swish,” “Tiger Hologram,” and a song named after our most well-known South Asian, “Zayn Malik,” that show that Heems and Riz had a damn fun time making this album and Redhino was fantastic at putting the beats together.
For me, this is an album of South Asian excellence. This is an album for Desi Representation that we so badly needed. Even though Heems and Riz may not have set out to be the voice for the young South Asian population out there who can listen to Cashmere and relate to it, that is what they will become with this album. As soon as I heard “T5” when it was first released, I knew this was going to be my top album of 2016 because this was the music my life had been so deeply missing all these years of being a teenager and then now in my mid-20’s as a Pakistani living in the United States post-9/11. These were the songs that reached closest to how I felt and what I experienced, and I cannot thank Swet Shop Boys enough for creating this album.
Cashmere comes out on October 14 and can be pre-ordered on the Swet Shop Boys BandCamp. Until its release date, it is currently featured in on NPR’s First Listen.
