boston progress radio

Shuffled! is a regular column appearing most Thursdays here on BPRLive. Each column, we welcome someone from the API* community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles. (Apologies readers, we are no longer linking to online playlists.)

Today’s Shuffler: Tanzila Ahmed

Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a writer, community organizer and policy researcher based in Southern California. As an organizer, she has been working to create a political voice through the power of the vote. At the age of 25, she founded South Asian American Voting Youth (SAAVY), a national organization that organizes South Asian American youth to have a political voice and get involved in the electoral process. Most recently her work in 2008, she is managed a three county-wide, eight language, six ethnicity, voter education and mobilization campaign in the Asian and Pacific Islander community.

An avid essayist, blogger, and poet, Taz can most prolifically be found on the South Asian American blog Sepia Mutiny where she writes about pop, music, politics, and anything in between remotely tied to the Desi community. Most recently, she’s been taking her poetry to the mic, and reading her words out loud since she really sucks at memorizing and wouldn’t dare call it “spoken word”. She’s created two self-published poetry chapbooks and thinks that another one may just be around the corner. But for now, she’s taking sabbatical from organizing to work on a non-fiction memoir about her personal journey on finding purpose, love, poetry and familial history. But can one ever really take time off from organizing? She is suspecting not.

Read Taz @ www.sepiamutiny.com or her blog @ www.tazzystar.blogspot.com

So shuffle it up…

I didn’t lie, technically. I did shuffle my ipod. I just…didn’t shuffle the entire collection on my ipod. Instead, I shuffled my “Summer 2009 Playlist” which includes all my favorite jams of the moment. And this is what the shuffled revealed…
Theme: Songs of Summer. Tazzy style.

Waving Flag
K’Naan
This Muslim brother is my latest summer addiction. I was turned onto him by spoken word poet Mark Gonzales who literally sat me down in his living room and made me listen to a K’Naan song on repeat so that I would hear the lyrics. Every time I tried to say something, he’d hush me and play the song again. I thought it was a little odd but finally hushed to really hear the lyrics. Like really hear them. K’Naan was a poetic genius, lyrics tripping off tongue. I was sprung. I ended up going to Coachella a few months ago and K’Naan was performing on a side stage. When he sang Waving Flag, it literally brought tears to my eyes. And yeah, just like a giddy teenager, I got my copy of Troubadour signed by the man himself.

Nine Thousand Miles
The Kominas
Taqwa to the core. That’s how I feel whenever I hear this song and it just might be my most favorite song on the album. The Kominas are like the mascot punk band to the Taqwacore movement, a posse of Muslim punk rockers wreaking havoc on the Western world. The book that genre is rooted in, “The Taqwacores” is literally one of my top ten books that changed my life. And this band basically is the soundtrack to my life changing. This desi punk band recently released their latest album, “Wild Nights in Guantamo Bay” and will be going on a cross country Muslim punk tour this summer (check the dates, it’s not a mosh pit to be missed). You can also check my Sepia Mutiny interview with Basim Usmani, The Kominas’ purple mohawked lead singer to read just what he said bout the whole punk rock mess.

Maybe So, Maybe No
Mayer Hawthorne
This is the perfect summer love song. You know, because sometimes with that summer fling, it’s maybe so, and sometimes it’s maybe no. The song has this throwback quality that makes me want to drink cherry fountain soda with vanilla ice cream and snap my fingers in that Carlton Banks way (but much hipper). I stumbled across Mayer on the Stones Throw Records label at the beginning of this summer and have been stalking him on his twitter @mayerhawthorne ever since. You should buy his whole album. There’s only four songs. It would be cheap. And they are all retro-cool.

Land of the Freaks
King Khan
Another throw back, but this one goes back to the days of knee high gogo boots, feathered hair and thick gold chains. This song gets your left toe tapping, your calf jiving and before you know it, your jumping up waving arms across your head. King Khan is quite the character (Read my Sepia Mutiny post on him here) and has led a tumultuous life unlike any hyphenated Desi kid I know. Maybe it’s because he’s Canadian. I’d still be his back up dancer.

Shadowland (feat Ojos de Brujo)
Nitin Sawhney
This song is sexy sugary deliciousness. Nitin has a way of dropping smooth seductive South Asian beats in that way. I love how, dare I say it, ‘the fusion’ of sounds meld together so effortlessly. It’s South Asian sounding but at the same time, it’s not. Fusion. I stumbled across this song on NPR one morning and obsessed over it the entire day before finding it for download purposes. This song captures the feeling behind Desi girl summer mornings here in Los Angeles in a most ridiculous manner.

Auditorium
Mos Def
Something about the sampling on this track makes me feel like I’m in a real chill Bollywood movie from the 1970’s. I picture Amitabh Bhachan popping out from behind a tree all the while wearing a white polyester wide collared suit and doing a dance number in a two step manner. From Mos Def’s latest album, “Ecstatic”, this song even features a verse by Slick Rick (Hey la di da di!). The album itself is just aight – frankly I’m a little over Mos Def’s obsession with being the boogey man. But this song is the best track on the whole album – the second best song on the album being the faithfully profound “Priority.” And honestly, how wrong can Mos Def really get? It’s the Mighty Mos!

Last 5 posts by shuffled

• Shuffled! North Star of the BROWNSTAR Revolution - December 10th, 2009
• Shuffled! Pen Khek Chear - November 25th, 2009
• Shuffled! Maanav Thakore - November 19th, 2009
• Shuffled! Jerry Ma - August 13th, 2009
• Shuffled! Slanty - July 30th, 2009

Tags: Shuffled!.