Skibkhan – Punchlines and Metaphors from Dhaka

Podcast

In this episode of Long Take: Life as an Artist, we meet Bangladeshi rapper Skibkhan, a member of the pioneering hip hop crew Deshi MCs. He delves into the creative process behind his lyrics and explores his role and responsibilities as a rapper in Dhaka. Listen to this episode on Spotify or YouTube.

Bangladeshi rapper Khan M Sayeed, popularly known as Skibkhan, strives to pack as many words into a bar as possible while keeping his lines simple and not overly complex. As a founding member of Deshi MCs, the group credited with introducing Bangla Gangsta Rap and hip hop to Bangladesh, Skibkhan has played a pivotal role in shaping the country’s music scene. Currently he is mixing rap and metal with Guerrillaz of Dhaka.

In the interview, he reflects on how to deliver clear and impactful messages without unnecessarily offending minority groups, emphasizing that freedom of speech should not turn into hate speech. He shares his observations on class conflicts in Bangladesh from a middle-class perspective and discusses how reading Bangla poetry – an inspiration from his grandmother, a poet – has helped him expand his vocabulary.

Skibkhan also opens up about his journey in the music industry, the challenges he has faced, and his aspirations for the future. This interview was conducted while Sheikh Hasina, who ruled Bangladesh with an iron fist for 15 years, was still in power. Her presidency ended in August 2024 when she fled to India following massive protests against her regime.

Credits

Host: Thomas Burkhalter
Sound: Daniel Jakob, Melodies In My Head
Mix and Mastering: Daniel Jakob
Graphic Design (Cover): Pamuditha Zen Anjana
Editorial support: The Norient team and Rebecca Favale
Support in Dhaka: Kazi Tahsin Agaz Apurbo

Listen to the full episode on YouTube and find outtakes in this YouTube playlist.

The podcast «Long Take: Life as an Artist» dives into deep conversations with artists from across the globe, focusing on musicians and sound creators. Hosted by Norient founder, anthropologist, writer and audiovisual artist Thomas Burkhalter, it explores the personal journeys of these artists – their aspirations, successes, challenges, creative processes, and perspectives on the world. The podcast is minimally edited, offering authentic portrayals of each artist, revealing the person behind the art. It serves as a valuable, freely accessible resource for anyone researching music, sound, culture, and politics.

The podcast is funded by

Published on December 11, 2024

Last updated on December 12, 2024

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5 Videos from Kosovo: Post-War Indie

Playlist

by Brilant Pireva

A wild mix of flavors, from limbo and madness, melancholy and fervor, as well as a self-deprecating humor. Watch a list of independent music videos from post-war-struck Kosovo.

With the end of the 1999 war in Kosovo, an interim UN administration, and the beginning of the new millennium, the music industry in Kosovo saw itself flooded with American and European popular culture trends – hip hop, RnB, etc. – that would dominate and define the local commercial industry musically and visually. Club bangers, summer anthems, and flashy, blingy videos to suit. This would be the predominant model for commercial music & music videos that is still more or less prevalent today, where we see tropes of wealth, status, and sex rise to the top. The independent scene that did not conform to this model was often self-financed and explored ideas and themes that were not as marketable to mass audiences. Hopelessness, longing, and many other such currents often pushed out of sight. If these can be considered in a sense a counter-culture in relation to the dominant cultural trends of the day, then it’s interesting to reflect on what they also represent about the history of Kosovo.

Five videos is of course not enough to do the independent scene any justice, and there are countless others out there, but for now these are five interesting ones we can propose for a short introduction.

Music: Retrovizorja
Track: 1999 (Kosovo, 2003)
Video: Klejdi Eski

Hazy vignettes of the city. Despondent and aimless characters inhabit gray and washed out landscapes. A child’s dreamworld is interrupted and terrorized by figures in suits. Faces, bodies, and silhouettes pass by in frenetic double-time. The mood for the new millennium here is one of pessimism. The figures in suits obviously point to the bureaucracy of the day, rife with corruption and shady dealings. Shadowy figures and whispers, rumors, connections to get you in the door, things of this sort are what the UN is associated with here.

Music: Cute Babulja
Track: Kolateralisht (Kosovo, 2004)
Video: KOPERATIVA

A desolate bazaar and an air of torpor leads us to a theater. Where are we? An absurdist comedy or horror? Nightmarish scenes with just enough whimsy carry us along. A frog falls from the sky! A funny commentary on the bizarro aspects of life that dysfunction brings. There is something about the mood of the 1999–2008 period (the period of UN administration after the war and before Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence) that I personally feel is captured wonderfully here. The mixed flavors of limbo and madness, melancholy and fervor, as well as the self-deprecating humor.

Music: NR
Track: Filma Turqisht (Kosovo, 2007)
Video: Puntor’t Social

Outside of the earth’s atmosphere, extraterrestrials beam a ray and latch onto a signal from Kosovo. From here on, we are taken on a ride across a fourth-wall-breaking parody of the tropes dominating the commercial music and video industry. The aliens find it funny. A satirical commentary on the state of the commercial industry that hasn’t changed all too much since then. The music industry today is still dominated by club-friendly anthems that are annually released around the same time, to fuel the summer concerts and club performance circuit. The indie scene here doesn’t have the same options for funding, so this limits it in a way, but also frees it from conforming to the clichés to which the mainstream has to pay lip service.

Music: Aku
Track: Cactus (Kosovo, 2014)
Video: Brilant Pireva

The protagonist explores the spaces and identity of Pristina in an accusatory way, literally pointing the finger at them. Buildings from different periods of its history each contribute in their own way to the mosaic: some damaged, some unfinished, some rushed. The post-war period saw a certain type of lawlessness that also added to the character of the city, where there were over 46,000 illegal constructions. These too are now a part of its character. The track was produced with both sampling and instrumentation, part of an ongoing music project of mine.

Music: Edona Vatoci
Track: Hala (Kosovo, 2015)
Directed: Noar Sahiti
Editing: Lum Çitaku

The countryside, greenhouses, and the flora contrast with the harsh strobes, gusts, jolts, and contortions. The antagonism and contradictions are plenty. A seed, the sun, sowing and reaping. A more personal reflection of social and emotional life in Kosovo. I think here we also see in the mood and affect of the work the progression into a different phase of the history of Kosovo. At this point, it had been seven years after the declaration of independence and a new dynamic was unfolding quite different from the early 2000s.

Biography

Brilant Pireva (1993) lives and works in Prishtina, Kosovo. As a multidisciplinary artist, he works with poetry, video, music, and digital painting to explore mythology, religion, and the phenomena of failure. Pireva’s approach incorporates everyday public life into his creative process, which often generates improvised video pieces on public space and a continuous contemporary display of still life studies and objects such as food, etc. In a similar vein, his work engages in historical references based on archive research. Pireva’s photographic works tend to explore strange, mysterious moments or elements that appear out of place: his video pieces focus on peculiarities of places and things marginal and overlooked. He is currently a program coordinator at Kino Armata, a public cinema and space in Prishtina, Kosovo, promoting alternative culture and social dialogue. Follow him on Instagram.

Published on June 19, 2024

Last updated on August 21, 2024

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