Lengthy and intense lyrics delivered in the syntax of Indian immigrants characterize most of their songs. Starting with the first power track, 'Real Great Britain', ADF lays its politics down for open view. They make clear immediately that they oppose capitalism entirely, and see Blair and Thatcher as an English middle-class happily married couple. ADF's understanding of community in Britain is far different from the halcyon political phantasms of the English past that emerge from the Mac-sprawl of the Home Counties. In these songs, urban community is the protective shell that enables immigrant cultures to survive their relocation in the face of social hostility.
Community is an open and inclusive civil concept here.
As the lyrics of 'Memory War' emphasize, any community relies on retention and possession of its memories. Who controls the past controls the present. Or, as Paul Gilroy argues in The Black Atlantic by explicitly adopting Benjamin's argument in 'The Storyteller' that social memory creates the chain of ethnic tradition. By extension, to work as artists within an ethnic community is to privilege memory. That paradigm of ethnic art as memory recovery or preservation remains insufficient of itself, even very quickly a form of stultification.