Riz Ahmed: The Long Goodbye review – breaking up with a racist Britain
Things are rarely easy for the actor who choses to dabble in pop. For every Donald Glover, apparently able to flit at will between the film set and the recording studio, pausing only to bask in the superlatives that garland both sides of his work, there are umpteen Russell Crowes or Johnny Depps, their dreams of polymath stardom crushed by a reception that ranges from suspicion to bemusement to outright hostility. Those that try and fail usually put the negativity down to the public’s desire to pigeonhole, to unfairly demand that one stays in one’s lane, but really the problem is a distrust of dilettantism.
That isn’t an accusation that anyone is likely to throw at Riz Ahmed, the Emmy-winning, Wembley-born actor who’s enjoyed a parallel career as a rapper under the name Riz MC and as one half of the duo Swet Shop Boys. Whatever you make of his second album, The Long Goodbye – a conceptual work based around the idea that British Asians are locked in an abusive relationship with the UK and that the rising tide of racism spawned by Brexit might represent the moment at which they’ve finally been dumped – really doesn’t seem much like something you’d knock together to kill time between roles. It comes complete with tracks that reference the work of poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and writer Saadat Hasan Manto and an accompanying, disturbing short film (it’s hard to explain exactly why it’s disturbing without incurring no-spoilers wrath).
Furthermore, the topical urgency of the subject matter seems to have focused Ahmed’s talents. His 2012 debut
MICroscope, released by Brighton label Tru Thoughts, was a creditable effort, but there was something faintly studied about his flow – in a genre usually at its best when it sounds effortless, you could frequently sense the hard work that went into each line. Better yet, it’s largely steered him away from the topic of sex, which anyone who heard MICroscope’s All of You (“in my bedside table there’s a drawer for you – red fishnets, hair clips, loads of lube”) might consider a mercy. The best tracks on MICroscope were powered by righteous anger, which has clearly reached boiling point here.
It’s not so much that the central conceit of this being a breakup album works – although it does, pushed along by a succession of remarkably good skits in which concerned friends (including actors Mahershala Ali, Mindy Kaling and Asim Chaudhry, the latter in character as People Just Do Nothing’s Chabuddy G) offer the rapper relationship advice. It’s that Ahmed is evidently both furious and desperate to communicate his message and his
rhymes have sharpened considerably as a result. They’re now a rush of barbed puns (drum’n’bass fans of a certain age will doubtless raise a smile at Ahmed’s description of himself as the “aboriginal nuttah”) and smart lines: “My people built the west – we even gave the skinheads swastikas.”
Furthermore, they fire off in all directions, from the expected Little Englander targets (“Came home one day, she’d changed the locks / Says she blames me for how lately she feels lost / How she ain’t what she was and our kids don’t show no love / So now she’s taking back control and she wants me to fuck off”) to Ahmed himself. Can I Live flips from self-aggrandisement – “trying to put Pakis on the telly, growing up there weren’t any, now we 24/7 either Isis or Emmys” – to self doubt: “Am I putting my foot down or tap dancing for the man?”
The music follows suit. Ahmed’s chief foil, producer Tom Calvert – better known as Redinho – has collaborated with both Hudson Mohawke and maximalist electronic auteur Rustie, and it shows. The Long Goodbye’s main currency is pointed blasts of sound, where rattling percussion and samples of traditional Indian and Pakistani instruments and singing, the latter frequently looped into insistent, hypnotic motifs, clash against bursts of harshly distorted electronics. On occasion, it slips into more commercial territory – Karma has a hint of tropical house about it, Deal With It has an impressively hooky pop melody – or something that sounds suspiciously like musical satire: Jay Sean’s appearance on Any Day repurposes Drake’s Auto-Tuned solipsism for socio-political ends. But its most thrilling moments are its harshest: the frantic Fast Lava, the scourging, stammering eruptions of Toba Tek Singh.
But it makes sense that The Long Goodbye concludes with its softest, most radio-friendly track, Karma. For all the album’s anger, it ends on a note of relative positivity, “self-love to counter the hate”, as its author puts it. There’s a lot of swaggering about Ahmed’s achievements in its final minutes, but you can see why he’s not inclined to feel modest. UK hip-hop and albums bemoaning the current state of things are two crowded markets: The Long Goodbye is potent, original and timely enough to stand out in both.
Warmduscher: Midnight Dipper (Soulwax remix)Soulwax’s take on this Fat White Family offshoot’s album track hones the original down to fierce, sleazy, mid-tempo electro-disco.