What’s behind ‘Malay power’ music – ethnic-Malay neo-Nazis playing punk and metal with a dark message
- Malaysia was an early adopter of Western musical genres, and underground bands began mixing heavy metal and punk with Malay folklore, then took a darker turn
- Apeing a notorious British white-power band, they adopted national-socialist icons and sing of racial supremacy, clashing violently with anti-fascist skinheads
The cancellation in March of a concert in Ipoh, Malaysia, featuring right-wing “Malay power” bands drew renewed attention to this thorn in the side of the country’s music scene.
If few people know that multi-ethnic but Muslim-majority Malaysia was among the first Southeast Asian countries to develop a home-grown heavy metal movement, even fewer will know that the largely ethnic Malay underground music scene harbours “national socialist” bands holding neo-Nazi views.
This is no fake news: Malay power bands came to international attention in 2013, when Vice magazine published an article that focused on the obvious contradiction of neo-Nazis with brown skin, but which failed to look deeper into the roots of the movement, and ignored the existence of a community of skinhead Malaysian anti-fascists.
“Malay national socialist skinheads do exist, and have often attacked and sabotaged our gigs,” says Nicky Padzil, guitarist of Acid Rain, an old-time Penang punk band formed in 1994.
Its singer and only original member, Pakdin Hujanasid, remembers that “around 1999, people from Kuala Lumpur came up to Penang and started spreading the wrong ideas among the local punks, such as using the swastika and the sieg heil salute, hinting that it was cool because Sid Vicious [of 1970s English punk rock band the Sex Pistols] did it”, he says in an interview at Soundmaker Studio, the only underground music venue in George Town, the capital of Penang.
