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Molek FMPop Malaysiana: Soul Searching of the Music Kind
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COUPLE
MENCARI MALAYSIA, BUT NOT CONSCIOUSLY LOOKING FOR IT
“We have never equated singing in Malay with localising music. ‘The Malay album’ happened accidentally.” – AIDIL, COUPLE
Power pop quartet Couple has been making fuzzy rock’n’roll for years, amassing enough fans that could have made them a household name. They’ve even made it internationally, having been featured on a film soundtrack (Super) and listed as 1 of 25 Rolling Stone’s Myspace bands to watch out for. Yet as the name of their last LP suggests, Pop Tak Masuk Radio, unlike their peers, Couple is hardly on the radio.
With a title like that, and the sudden change of their musical lingua franca to Bahasa Malaysia, it only made sense for us to surmise that it was a self-aware commentary about appealing to the masses by, well, appealing to the masses. This is completely wrong though. As frontman Aidil says, “We’ve never equated singing in Malay with localising music. The whole full Malay album thing kinda happened accidentally.” Initially Aidil wanted to record a Malay EP before he found himself writing up to 13 to 14 songs in the language.
Fair enough, yet with the folky ‘Mencari Malaysia’, which we detected traces of dikir barat, we can’t help but think that there was a conscious decision to literally find Malaysia (as the song title implies). While correcting us on the track’s lyrical meaning, more in terms of racial lines and a reconciliation of that, Aidil confirms that musically Couple did try to put a local bent by including the dikir barat-influenced vocal melodies. However, this isn’t something they are actively pursuing.
“What’s more important is that you put a little bit of yourself, a piece of your soul in the music. If you do that, the simple fact that you’re Malaysian and have been living here all this while will somehow show itself in the music.”
Aidil did have a piece of advice against something that has been a perennial annoyance to us here at JUICE though; stop singing in an American or British accent (Indonesian in the case of singing in Malay) goes a long way to show the Malaysian identity.
This, it turns out, is more important than attempting to insert traditional instruments in your music – a disingenuous attempt at best in our opinion. Aidil agrees, “A lot of people are missing the point when they do this. It’ll only sound just like that – a token local instrument making a bit of noise in a ‘western’ genre. It’s just cosmetics.”
Interestingly, Aidil points out that the most interesting uniquely Malaysian genre doesn’t even have traditional influences – rock kapak. “Try as they might, them Westerners have got no chance to even equal our classic ‘80s and ‘90s rock kapak ballads!”
Yet rock kapak never received the contempt of the mainstream, it’s in fact widely accepted ‘til even now. Aidil thinks it’s purely a generation gap issue, “Adults will always scoff at whatever young(er) people are doing, and dismiss them as inconsequential, no matter how good the music might be.” Heck, rock kapak pioneers probably got a lot of hate initially, Amy Search was forced to shave his head at one point after all.
Answering the ultimate point of our feature, Aidil ends the interview on a pitch perfect note; “Good music is good music, regardless of whether it’s localised or not.”
Tentatived titled Today Your Love, Couple’s next LP is slated for release at either the end of this year or early next year. Like them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/wearecouple and follow them at www.twitter.com/wearecouple.
