Today’s show comes courtesy of Pakistani-American cowboy @sunnyaliii who put together a mix of obscure 60s/70s South Asian & Middle Eastern rock & roll, Bollywood & Kollywood gems, plus a few Soviet & German curveballs. He says most of these tracks came from spending hours alone digging through the internet, but they’re all music he really loved learning about and felt inspired by, as a brown guy who makes rock music today. When I first met Hassan (Sunny), he was playing in Sunny Ali & the Kid and The Kominas, making Bollywood-country-punk out of Philly, in Urdu, Punjabi and English – music that got people talking and the media in a frenzy, quickly labeling them as ‘Muslim punk’ and ‘Taqwacore’. Turns out unusual religion-genre combos make people uneasy, especially when the West is already paranoid about one of them.
