WET and Wild vs Mat Rempit Rally.
The war of words over the recent Rain Rave Water Festival 2026 in Bukit Bintang rages on. It has been quite forcefully argued by the rightist fraternity that such a wet display of fun was a normalisation of a hedonistic lifestyle and was unrepresentative of Malaysian culture and values.
Such a charge was unsurprisingly repeated by self-anointed defender of race and religion, the UMNO Youth chief Datuk Dr Muhamad Akmal Saleh.
The Merlimau state assemblyman had even in a rebuttal to veteran DAP lawmaker Teresa Kok who ticked him off along with PAS for fussing over Rain Rave 2026 without concrete Visit Malaysia Year (VMY 2026) strategies claimed that the state did not need have to rely on “street discos” to attract tourists.
Instead, it was able to rely on activities that reflected Malaysian culture to entertain the 15 million annual visitors to the historical state.
This claim, however, was met with a stinging retort from Malacca DAP Socialist Youth (DAPSY) head Cassel Krishnan who questioned whether the RXZ mega motorcycle event spearheaded by the self-proclaimed staunch defender of race and religion reflects the Malaysian culture.
Editor’s Note: In December last year, the “RXZ Members Ride Edition Melaka 3.0 2025” programme has reportedly attracted more than 70,000 visitors to the Melaka International Trade Center (MITC) in Ayer Keroh.
“If Akmal wants to allow Malaysian culture only to be promoted in Melaka, I ‘ve a simple question for him: ‘Was the RXZ mega motor event representative of our culture?’”
While concurring that only local culture can get support from the Melaka state government, Cassel hopes that it isn’t biased or used as a political tool given Akmal is “not a state Culture and tourism EXCO”
This spat has been widely reported in both mainstream and online media. An example of the latter was a post on The Reporter’s Facebook feed which has attracted 9.8K likes, 6.7K comments and 495 shares at time of publication, an indication that the public was not yet done with this battle for the nation’s morality.
There were many who did not agree with the DAP’s perspective with some arguing that it was comparing “oranges with apples”.
However, this was met with a retort that this was the problem when one wants to argue that only events that reflected local culture were to be entertained. Do concerts of “screaming artists” and football matches fall under this category of “cultural events”?
It was also surmised that the anger within the conservatives was that the Rain Rave 2026 was held in a public space and open to all. It might have been different if it was exclusively for non-Muslims.
The extremely different perspective was again on show when one commenter claimed that the bike rally did not have intoxicated attendees “dancing like primates”.
This also brought about plenty of backlash with claims of complaints from local residents over the RXZ rally to riders high on ketum. There were also insinuations of impropriety at the RXZ event which featured mixed gender crowd.
One enthusiastic biker sought to argue that the RXZ event was something close to the heart of the Malay community.
Those who chose to criticise the bike rally were perceived as inherently anti-Malay which was an over-simplistic conclusion.
Such a viewpoint was met with plenty of pushback reflective of the ideological divide with claims that the bike rally was promoting a Mat Rempit lifestyle coupled with inappropriate contact between male and female riders and pillion.
The anti-Rocket sentiment was also very prevalent with some commenters openly stating their opposition to anything that the DAP does. Much vitriol was directed towards Malays who joined the ranks of the party or proffered support who were simply labelled as “traitors”.
As can be seen from the narrative, common sense, sound reasoning and plain logic are largely absent in the debate. In their place, racial invective, religious hypocrisy and blind prejudice seem to be the order of the day.
Think carefully – which side ones takes will say more about you than the actual events itself. – May 6, 2026
