Fakemink & Islam: music as an expresser of religious tension & internal conflict

 

The city of London needs saving, and rapper, Fakemink (aka "London's Savior"), stands at the forefront of the UK underground rap and hip-hop scene. He aims to innovate, deepen, and revive traditional UK rap/hip-hop with his mellowed down version of jerk rap and spiritual lyricism. His song titled ‘Music and Me’ exemplifies this by exploring his struggle with Islam and his career. This song shows the tension and disagreements between his Muslim faith and artistic expression. Over ambient beats, the lyrics are about guilt of crossing moral lines for his earthly desire to create music.

In Islam, there is a common saying, “deen over duyna”, which translates to “faith over the temporal world”. A fundamental aspect of Islam is to prioritize and choose devotion to God over worldly distractions and desires such as fame and money. The inherent nature of Fakemink’s career and passion for spreading music goes against these Islamic values. The internal battle of choosing between his love for god and passion for rapping fuels his creativity. 

Fakemink's music is a battleground for belief, loss, and identity.

Nick Cave’s book, Faith, Hope, and Carnage, focuses on how Cave’s loss of his son influenced his turning toward Christian imagery in his music. Cave uses faith not as certainty, but as a language to wrangle with grief and spark creation. He states, “that struggle with the notion of the divine that is at the heart of my creativity”. His outlook on his creativity suggests that when detrimental things happen in life, the need for spiritual consolation can be immense. "I had a major taste for havoc… I might wake up in my hotel room surrounded by the remnants of a heavy night on the road, empty bottles, drug paraphernalia, maybe a stranger in my bed, but also an open copy of Gideon's Bible with passages underlined”. Despite his sins, struggles, and dark state of mind, Cave still reached for god, even if it was just through the presence of the Bible besides his bed. This reach was more for survival rather than about piety.

 For Cave, god was a way to put together puzzle pieces of meaning in the midst of chaos. Spirituality is like a flicker of grace in self-destruction. His belief in religion did not erase the havoc, but coexisted with it, giving inspiration to the contradictions that fueled his art.

Both Fakemink and Nick Cave use music as a way of negotiating with something greater than themselves like pain, belief, and God. The use of music as the intersection between difficult topics can be seen not just as self-expression, but also as a coping mechanism. They demonstrate that even in moments of despair, the impulse toward god persists. Not always as moral clarity but as a desperate, creative grasp at hope, freedom, and forgiveness.