Introduction

In August 2006, British film and television actor Riz Ahmed, performing as his rap persona Riz MC, released ‘The Post 9/11 Blues’. The song arises in the context of the illegal warfare waged by powerful Western Anglophone nations on the beleaguered peoples of countries of the global South, already subjected to the tyranny of brutal dictators and regimes. In a noteworthy discursive juxtaposition of innocent childhood romance with bloody mass murder, the song features the politically charged lyrics: ‘Bush and Blair in a tree, K-I-L-L-I-N-G’. In this way, it adapts the chant familiar to countless schoolchildren in playgrounds across the UK and the US that singles out for mockery pairs of children who are believed to be engaged in some manner of childhood flirtation. Here, however, the replacement by Ahmed of the double S in ‘kissing’ with a double L transforms the romantic connotations of this word to the bloody and murderous meaning of the newly formed replacement word ‘killing’. Intimations of love are thereby substituted with suggestions of slaughter. Ahmed is, of course, referring to the deaths caused by the political and military alliance between UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush as they waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq in the years following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

Through his adoption of this particular mode of irreverence, Ahmed also appositely invokes the discourse of what would very soon thereafter be dubbed a ‘bromance’ in popular discursive parlance. Furthermore, as indicated by the lyrics excerpted above, and as argued elsewhere by popular music scholar Amy McDowell, he does this in order to mount a popular cultural critique of millennial right-wing politics, particularly the aforementioned military interventions in the Middle East (McDowell 2017). The term ‘bromance’ refers to the relational dynamics that pertain to homosocial relationships between male friends in which, as film scholar Nick Davis has argued, concerning the emergence of bromantic discourses of masculinity in popular cinema of the 2000s and 2010s, ‘the intimate bond between two men, while ostensibly platonic, carries … emotional … [and] perhaps even romantic or erotic weight’ (Davis 2014: 109).