There’s always been a fire in the work of the British-Pakistani actor, musician, and activist Riz Ahmed. In 2006, the same year in which he made his film debut in critically acclaimed docu-drama The Road To Guantanamo, he ruffled feathers in the UK as Riz MC with “Post 9/11 Blues,” a satirical rap song so caustic that it was temporarily banned from radio. On “I Ain’t Being Racist But…,” the spoken-word monologue that closes out his 2016 mixtape Englistan, he lampoons the hateful shibboleths of white supremacism with savage fury. His rise to Hollywood stardom did little to dampen the flames, as he took on roles/played characters like the coldly manipulative Omar in 2010’s Four Lions to his Emmy-award winning performance as Nasir Khan, a Muslim man accused of murder in HBO’s The Night Of. But rarely has his rage been as incandescent and pointed as on his second album, The Long Goodbye, his first project under his full name.
The ambitious concept album reframes the UK’s relationship with British Asians as a “toxic and abusive” love affair that has reached its breaking point in the wake of Brexit and the rise of the far-right. On its face, equating the weight of colonial trauma with a fictional woman is a tough sell, and in less assured hands it could easily come off as insensitive. But it’s an inspired move for Ahmed, a rapper with a PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) degree from Oxford whose lyrics often read like they should come with footnotes. The break-up album format allows him to transform the political into the personal. The dispassionate, sanitizing gaze of academic history gives way to an intimate, heart-wrenching account of the human toll inflicted by the Empire on South Asia and its diaspora.
Opener “The Break Up (Shikwa)”—set to a melismatic qawwali vocal sample—sets the tone with a monologue that traces the trauma caused by centuries of conquest, colonialism, and exploitation. The East India Company becomes a “stray pale chick” named Britney who “came to trade” but then refused to leave. The British Raj’s brutal policies are recast as acts of violence (“Beat me red and blue ’til I knew right was white and not brown”), and Partition becomes a parting act of spite (“Carved a scar down my middle just to leave me stretched out”). Ahmed’s voice turns increasingly frantic as he comes home one day to find himself locked out, his dreams of a multicultural future replaced by the grim reality of homelessness. “Britney, if you break up with me I might just break up,” he pleads, his voice cracking. “This will either be the end of me or be the wake-up.”
That idea of finding oneself in a cultural “no man’s land” is a source of both anxiety and optimism throughout the record. The anxiety is self-explanatory, but the optimism comes from the possibility of staking claim to this middle ground between “us” and “them.” While Ahmed has played around with this idea of a “third culture” identity earlier, such as on Cashmere’s “Half Moghul Half Mowgli” (and much of Englistan), there’s a renewed sense of topical urgency here. “Toba Tek Singh” takes its name from a short story by celebrated Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, about the absurdity of waking up to find that your country is no longer your own. Its central protagonist is a Sikh inmate of a “lunatic asylum” in Lahore who is being sent to India post-Partition. But he refuses to choose between the two new countries, falling to the ground in the “no man’s land” between the borders. It’s a story about the trauma of displacement, of being unmoored from your home and identity. Ahmed’s interpretation shares that pain, though he tries to put on a brave face. “Stranded, I’ll make a stand in one place,” he raps on the final verse. “I’ll dig my heels in, so what’s my damn name?”
A similar blend of despair and bravado runs through “Fast Lava,” where Ahmed delivers rapid-fire verses over a fevered jungle beat hammered out of temple bells, chimtas (traditional musical tongs from South Asia), and a bone-rattling bass drum. “I spit my truth and it’s brown,” he declares, paying homage to his Pakistani heritage. “Can I Live” drops the history lessons in favor of a harrowing portrait of a community with its back against the wall. “Please just let me live for two minutes,” Ahmed sings, begging for a reprieve from the Islamophobia, the hate crimes, the exhausting pressures of being one of the Western world’s scariest bogeymen. But he already knows that it’s not going to happen. Lines like, “Hope my people don’t just end up as a memory,” and, “My people floating face down, sinking in sand,” land particularly hard, eerie echoes of the social media posts and news headlines emerging from New Delhi over the last few weeks, after Hindu nationalist mobs carried out a pogrom on Muslim communities in the Indian capital with the alleged complicity of the police.
This is heavy stuff, but Ahmed’s wry wit and laser-focused delivery ensures that it doesn’t feel overwrought. He may be heartbroken but he’s no victim. The tide turns on the second half of the album, as Ahmed progresses from anger and bargaining to acceptance. The task of carrying on the break-up metaphor falls on the shoulders of the surprisingly fun skits peppered through the album—phoned-in messages of relationship advice from brown and black luminaries including Mindy Kaling, Hassan Minhaj, and Mahershala Ali. Ahmed regains some of his swagger on tracks like “Mogambo” and “Deal With It,” having a little more fun as he takes barbs thrown at British Muslims and turns them into thorny badges of honor. It’s reminiscent of the comic villainy of his rap duo with Heems, Swet Shop Boys, though the humor here has a darker, more brittle edge.
That’s only natural, given everything that’s happened in the last four years. The early idealism of the #Resistance has curdled into bitterness and fatalism, the light at the end of the tunnel slips further and further away. Even the jokes have barbs now: “And my cock it just grow/When they kick us in the balls,” he raps on “Mogambo,” an iron fist wrapped in locker room banter. Swet Shop Boys producer Redinho’s production mirrors the anxiety—the shehnais, 808s, synth-sitars, and bhangra drums are now used to unsettle rather than uplift, stabbing and clashing bursts of sound to get your blood up. On the rare occasion that the record strays into more commercial territory, such as rhythm-and-bhangra cut “Any Day” (featuring a heavily Auto-Tuned Jay Sean), the attempt falls flat.
The Long Goodbye is a compelling, unapologetic account of what it feels like to be brown and British in 2020—Mo Salah and “random” searches, bhangra nights and mosque stabbings, “the spoils and the scars.” Ahmed is open to the idea of a rapprochement with his country, but now on his terms, not those dictated by the erstwhile Empire or its UKIP heirs. He’s tired of playing the good immigrant just to claim a piece of what he’s already owed. While the sentiment is enough to make the album worth listening to, Ahmed’s ability to weave experience and cultural touchstones into an affecting tale of heartache, loss, and redemption is something of a marvel. After all, in these years of Brexit, pogroms, and “build the wall,” who doesn’t feel a little estranged from their country right now?
