My favourite singer Asif made a warning post on Facebook. I burst out laughing seeing it. It reminded me of the famous meme: " Murubbi, murubbi, uhu hu hu!" (Sir, don't do this. Don't").
In his post, Asif warned against broadcasting vulgar language used in the post in the name of hip-hop on BTV.
According to him, it doesn't align with Bangladeshi culture. Right after, I saw rapper Shezan sharing the post with the caption: "Turn off the TV, big bro!".
In the comment section, I saw people of all ages — literally everyone — openly bashing Asif for being the gatekeeper of Bengali culture.
Well, what do you think was going through Asif's mind when he wrote that post?
I didn't find Asif disrespecting hip-hop in that post. He was actually disappointed by the use of obscene language in the name of hip-hop. But this, too, is hip-hop, or rather, it is a major part of hip-hop. To understand that, you have to go back to its roots.
Hip-hop culture was born in the 1970s in the Bronx, New York, as a form of cultural expression for Black and Latin communities. These groups had no place in the mainstream cultural space at the time.
So, when you are creating a form of art in a cultural environment that does not exist in the mainstream cultural space, naturally, your art would create a space for self-expression that is absent in the mainstream or the dominant culture.
Since this art form emerged from street culture, one of hip-hop's core elements is slang, rather the Lingua Franca of the street. That is why swearing or using "offensive" language is part of hip-hop itself.
So I would leave the judgment of how credible Asif's stance of "slang is a part of bad hip-hop" to you.
A while back, it was the local bands who used to suffer from this kind of comment. Some people used to ask whether it was even music. The so-called civil society even referred to James' songs as nothing but howling,
Once the concert culture got somewhat established in Bangladesh, that kind of talk died down.
Now, however, the burden of this civil-society criticism falls on Bangladeshi hip-hop culture.
"Hip-hop is obscene as it has a lot of swearing," is a phrase repeated over and over.
So let's try to understand who in Bangladeshi society keeps saying this, and how this statement became so widely accepted.
Any dominant or powerful culture tends to try to consume or eradicate another small or marginalised culture. They usually do this in the name of "cultural purity."
There was a time when the die-hard fans of Rabindra Sangeet or Nazrul songs did not acknowledge band music as pure songs; in fact, they often neglected it.
After band culture became popular in this country, institutions like Chhayanaut or Bulbul Lalitkala stopped promoting the snobbery.
Maybe it was because band music had finally started making money, establishing itself as the dominant culture now.
For rap, or hip hop, the feeting is yet to be firmly established, making it an easy target of dominant cultural forces, who wish to sideline the genre on the flimsy pretense of "purity".
Any dominant culture actually wants to be your cultural gatekeeper. Gatekeepers want to decide what you should listen to, what you shouldn't, what's decent and what's indecent. They try to trap everything within a fixed framework. That is why, whenever you hear someone criticising hip-hop, you should check the cultural background of the speaker. If the speaker belongs to the dominant culture, you have every reason to doubt their stand.
However, Asif made it interesting by bringing BTV into this argument, as if BTV is the saviour of Bangladeshi culture. I found his respect towards BTV a bit zealous.
Did BTV actually take any oath to uphold the culture? And if so, who did it take this oath to?
BTV is a state-owned media. As a former student of music, I know exactly which categories BTV enlists artists for. While recruiting artists for folk songs, modern songs, Rabindra Sangeet, Nazrul Sangeet, classical music, group songs, and for roles like composer or music director, BTV has always promoted a very specific frame — a so-called "pure" and "refined" cultural aesthetic, tailored to the tastes of respectable, middle-class sensibilities.
As a result, many forms of marginal or alternative music and culture are simply absent from BTV's platform.
BTV's selective cultural stance can be seen as a form of cultural elitism, where the tastes of the urban middle and upper classes have become the standard for what counts as "culture."
Now that something outside that standard, a different kind of artistic expression, is making its way onto BTV, that's what's bothering people from the cultural elite.
After all, BTV has long been loyal to them — it's their idea of culture that BTV had supposedly sworn to protect all these years.
This has made at least one thing clear. What Asif or others like him are presenting as "Bangladeshi culture" is actually the culture of the Bangladeshi elite.
But Bangladeshi culture is much bigger than that. It has many layers and is diverse. It lives in the baul and bhatiali traditions of rural Bengal — just as much as it does in urban pop, rock, or even Rabindra and Nazrul songs. And if you are willing to dive, you will find it in the underground scenes too, on YouTube, in hip-hop, in gaming culture, and even in memes.
So then, for those of us who do like hip-hop, how are we taking Asif's warning?
We can count it as an attempt to impose control over us in the name of preserving culture. That's one way to interpret it — from the lens of music, taste, and cultural politics.
But if we want, we can also look at it from a different angle.
BTV is meant for everyone — from children to senior citizens. That's why it's worth asking whether the organisers' judgment in broadcasting certain programs on BTV has, intentionally or not, created the space for people like Asif to make such hateful remarks.
In BTV's program design, content like hip-hop requires careful consideration — such as when it should be broadcast, whether it's appropriate for family hours, and if so, whether it includes proper content warnings or parental advisories. There needs to be clear guidelines and a sensitivity to these issues.
Often, the lack of structured programming, poor articulation of the content, and weak management within BTV's program division can lead to such binary reactions — giving rise to cultural backlash or aggressive criticisms like the one we've seen.
So just as we will question — and, if needed, oppose — the guardianship and gatekeeping of people like Asif, we should also hold BTV accountable when there are shortcomings in its management, even though it's a state-run institution.
That's how I see it.
(Now it's up to you — take a look and decide what feels right to you).
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