This was the second of three sessions which Fun-Da-Mental recorded for John Peel, so there’s time for me to revise my opinion, I’m sure, but listening to this three track session, all of which is included in the video above, I found myself having to confront an uncomfortable personal reaction to Fun-Da-Mental’s music. What they sing about is important, necessary and vital….but on the evidence of this session, they’re also very boring to listen to. It’s a tightrope that a lot of socially conscious groups have to walk. Music with a message that needs to be heard, but which can end up being an aural slog.
You hear the names mentioned: Fun-Da-Mental, Back to the Planet, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprasy, Senser, Chumbawamba and Consolidated are the examples which most readily come to mind; bands which you’re happy to see, but which can leave you asking, “Are you going to be staying long?”
Fun-Da-Mental don’t help themselves given the stature of some of those that they sample. And when they work in blasts of oratory from figures like Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi and Louis Farrakhan, they inevitably end up sounding weedy in comparison once they start rapping themselves. Even worse in tracks like Front Line and Tribal Revolution, which made my initial list of selections, they become so overwhelmed by the noise that they make, that the listener becomes passive; hit by a wall of samples and sloganeering, but utterly unengaged by either the content or form. You may feel differently, and for all my carping, I’m glad that the session is out there in full for you to listen and decide for yourself. But it begs the question, has anyone ever listened to a Fun-Da-Mental track for pleasure? Is such a thing possible or desirable with their music?
I don’t think it is, but one thing which links Fun-Da-Mental with the other bands listed above is that when they do come up with something which hits the mark, they really make it count, and Countryman - which is the opening track on the video, but was their session closer on the 7/5/93 show - is a magnificent piece of music, which has stayed with me ever since I heard it again for the first time in several years, when I was prepping this post.
Several things are striking about Countryman, but the thing that stands out to me is that regardless of the anger which features in the track either from the sampled Midlands bigot or the contemptuous laugh that Aki Nawaz gives after he reveals the ratio of Victoria Crosses awarded against the number of Indian born servicemen who served in the British Army during the Second World War (25:2,000,000), it’s all undercut by the mood of sadness that runs throughout the track. It’s there in the string sample that opens the track and recurs throughout (dilruba?, esraj?, Tar shehnai?, taus?); it’s in Bad-Sha Lallaman’s baffled vocal, wherein he wonders why Asian men would give up the comforts of family love and village peace to travel to a promised land that only offers them poor housing, jobs that are only fit for animals and an expectation that they turn their back on their cultural roots in order to follow…what exactly?
….they bring their ways, but they don’t want our ways. And yet nobody ever asks the bigots, what ways immigrants are expected to follow. Change religion? OK, but how many BNP members attend church every Sunday? Show deference to the British? In other words, transpose Empire mentality within our own streets and communities? How would that work? Must they work only as our inferiors? Bow to us in the street? What is it that you want? Can you explain it in any way that makes sense? And they can’t.
That undertone of sadness in Countryman even extends to the bigot, whose ignorance seems rooted in bewilderment as much as anything else.
Mind you, Fun-Da-Mental give him and his brethren cause for concern as they announce at 6:20 that they can build a new society alongside their countrymen, and given that this will be done to white man’s surprise, it implies that they are done with trying to meet the likes of the bigot halfway, they will do it themselves and try to make it work. The inference is clear: if you want separation, we’ll give it to you. And we will flourish.
Flash forward 33 years, and we find ourselves in a country where the political landscape currently sees the children of immigrants all chasing the vote of the bigot by emphasising just how much they’ve followed our ways and that they too see those that bring their ways as the problem that over-rides all others. Meanwhile those of us who would prefer it if we all just work together to make the greatest country on Earth, into a place where we can all prosper are patronised and told that we don’t understand the concerns of people in this country. If the direction of travel continues in the way that the lamp post flaggers and vast sections of the media are trying to move it, then maybe the time will have come for the ideas Fun-Da-Mental floated in Countryman to be put into practice. And it won’t be a moment too soon.
Fun-Da-Mental put out Countryman as a single, later in ‘93. The order of the verses is different from that in the Peel Session.
Videos courtesy of FruitierThanThou and NationRecordsLabel.
Lyrics are copyright of Amir Ali and Inder Matharu.
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