BobbyFriction

The Burning Man festival is quite simply the most beautiful and anarchic expression of love and music anywhere on this planet. It’s a social experiment & a musical hothouse, as well as an experience in extreme living. Going in September 2009 changed my life..

I was booked to play out there thanks to Matt Fusello AKA Radiohiro AKA Mini Monk, and Janaka Selekta, friends and brothers in the International Desi electronic scene. That entailed bringing out my music, an R.V. (Motorhome) and enough water to last 7 days in the driest desert that the US can offer. It also meant I would be camped with a musical/soundsystem owning commune called ‘Hookah Dome’, a bunch of interconnected diverse people from around the world who were all passionate about World Electronica & Desi Beats, as well as being seasoned ‘burners’, the term for someone who has been to Burning Man.

Make no mistake – its tough, grueling and all done without money. Yes, erm, well, moneys banned at Burning Man so you all pull together, feeding each other and running the Hookah Dome experience for other people at the festival. I went out to DJ, but also ended up working in the dome as a doorman as well as helping build the structure’s around the camp. It’s an incredible buzz working for three days collectively building a musical grotto in the middle of a desert, and then seeing people flock to what you’ve invested in and dance to the music you’re playing under the galaxy’s stars and a desert moon – you’re quite literally hit by primal emotion. I’m sure I experienced ancestral reverb out there as well, as millions of years of human evolution waxed and waned inside of me whilst I lived on that land.

So, while I was having all of my beliefs and assumptions recalibrated, I also documented all of it for the BBC Radio 1 programme strand ‘Radio 1′s Stories’. The hour long radio documentary broadcasts on Monday 25th January 2010 on Radio 1. Here’s a short explanation from Radio 1′s website:

“In the last of the current series of International Radio 1, Bobby Friction heads to Black Rock Desert in Nevada for Burning Man – one of the weirdest and most wonderful festivals on planet earth. Follow Bobby as he goes on an 11 day journey into the desert, covering 22 thousand miles, only to reach a place where temperatures reach 40 degrees in the day, and sandstorms mean you can’t see three feet in front of you.

And once there, there is nothing Bobby will not do to get into the spirit of the festival. He samples 150% proof moonshine and unsurprisingly ends up a little worse for wear. He hears why if you dance too hard at Burning Man you end up with Christmas toe – when your toe-nail falls off every Christmas. And he gets to watch bands called things like Boiled Eggs and Speaker-phone Underwear. But maybe the icing on the cake is witnessing 5000 naked ladies ride past his camp on bicycles.

Listen to the programme to hear one of the most bonkers things ever undertaken in the name of International Radio 1.”

As you can see it’s a unique festival that has a lasting impact on just about everyone who’s managed to reach it over the last twenty or so years.  Listen up, as I’m a changed man now, and for sure I will spend the rest of my life evangelizing and preaching about Burning Man.

*The Documentary will be available to listen to for seven days after the 25th January 2010 here.

I’ve been playing music on my show, from a band called ‘The Komina’s’ for about three years now & have always found them hilariously funny as well as musically obsessive.  I’ve followed them through their genesis as a Desi Punk band in Boston USA, with tracks like “Shariah Law in the USA” & “Suicide Bomb The Gap”, to 2 years ago when some of the members moved to Pakistan for a while and formed ‘The Dead Bhuttos’ as well as ‘Noble Drew’.  They are now back in the US…and back in the studio.

When I first played them on the BBC Asian Network the response was three parts predictable, and one part depressing.  On one side you had brain dead haters who heard the song titles and assumed the band were ‘Islamist’ in nature, even though the band quite literally exist to give heart attacks & nightmares to the Mullahs.  On the other side you had brain dead young Brit-Islamists who thought the band were Pro-Islam & Anti-Western and saw them through the prism of Jihadi Hip Hop and the Koran.  I just loved them as they were Desi’s with guitars, and were satirical…something which many Desi’s have a real hard time understanding.  I also was kind of living out my failed rock-star dreams through them as I was in a band called ‘The Ferocious Ludoo’s’ in Hounslow, London, fifteen years ago, and we had exactly the same attitude towards subversion, comedy and our musical heritage as The Komina’s do.

The reason I bring this all up now is becuase paralell to me playing them as a new strand of Desi music, the worlds media have been laying seige to ALL of the so called ‘Islamic Punk’ bands in the US  and have been reporting on them as the ‘Taqwacore’ movement.  Named after Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel ‘The Taqwacores’,  many of the bands including The Komina’s have been influenced by his book about Muslim Punks in the US, and over time its become a fanzine/novel/bible for many of the kids who align themselves to the movement.  You just know the US news media would have lapped up bands who write songs about letting off suicide bombs in the local GAP store, and as its America you know there’s no way something like this could have stayed underground for long before the money men got their hands on it…& turned it into a commercial proposition! Well that’s whats happened, check the above trailer for ‘Taqwacore – The Birth Of Punk Islam’ The Movie!

I’m not sure about the movie and will have to see it before passing judgement, but it has The Komina’s on the soundtrack which is a very good thing, and Michael Muhammad Knight is an absolute frikkin nutter who regularly pisses off community elders, religious conservatives, islamists and the American political elite which in my book makes him more friend than foe! (His last novel was called ‘Osama Van Halen’ which any young unnamed band need to snap up as their moniker right now.)