Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur wants buskers to drop pop, return old city beat for tourists

Kuala Lumpur’s city hall is calling on traditional and folk music performers to reboot the busking scene and move away from pop covers, in an effort to charm visitors with Malaysia’s homespun culture.

The government is on a hard push to promote the country ahead of its Visit Malaysia 2026 (VM2026) tourism campaign, aimed at pulling in 35.6 million visitors and an estimated 147.1 billion ringgit (US$33.2 billion) in tourism receipts.

In the hyper-competitive battle to lure tourists, those numbers would put it just behind Thailand, which this year is on track for 38 million tourist arrivals, in part thanks to a concerted effort to boost its traditional arts and “soft power”.

Kuala Lumpur boasts a vibrant busking scene with performers from T-shirt-clad, grunge-era holdouts to Michael Jackson impersonators flexing their vocal muscle and dance moves to draw crowds.

The scene even drew Pakistani trader and singer-songwriter Muhammad Shahid Nazir, otherwise known as One Pound Fish Man, who gained fame for his novelty song “One Pound Fish,” which he performed on the streets during a visit to Kuala Lumpur.

Buskers across Malaysia’s capital city should look beyond the regular tropes of popular Malay jiwang or romantic ballads or pop songs and incorporate more classical music and instruments such as ghazal singing and the gamelan “to help tourists learn about Malaysian traditional music”, said Zaliha Mustafa, minister in charge of federal territories.

  

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