Riz Ahmed

This is in the era of MySpace that the song very quickly went very viral, and it gave me a lot of confidence and excitement about, wow, maybe I can... If I say the thing that I feel but that no one else is maybe saying, then that is...

I can really travel, you know?

I feel that...

the poetic metaphor of love and relationship and longing is something that I grew up around in the tradition of Urdu poetry and then reading it and studying it a little bit more as an adult.

You know, a lot of Sufi poetry, if you look at Rumi or if you look at Ghalib or if you look at, you know, Ghazal writing from South Asia, the Middle East, from Iran, is often love poetry.

And love is used as a metaphor and the relationship and the beloved is a metaphor for God.

but it can also be used as a metaphor for other things.

So I kind of feel like it's something that I wanted to borrow from that poetic tradition.

And in fact, the breakup, it has an alternative title in brackets, which is Shikwa.

And Shikwa means complaint.

And that's because a very famous poem by Muhammad Iqbal, he has a famous poem called Shikwa and then Jawabi Shikwa, which is complaint and response to complaint.

And in that he's actually complaining to God saying, God, you've forsaken us as Muslims.

Like, you know, we've been colonized and destroyed and wrecked.

And like, you know, where are you?

You know, you said we should.

You take care of us, but you're not there.

And so I wanted to kind of like really touch on that because what I want to do as a rapper is I don't want to just be someone who's kind of like taken from this incredible African-American tradition.

I want to also contribute something of my own tradition and my own heritage.

And so I want to take the poetic forms, the poetic references, the musical backing of my own South Asian identity and my London identity and

and the sound system culture there and infuse the two.