Talvin Singh, one of the world’s most famous danceclub deejays, is an electronic auteur who doesn’t just coolly manipulate knobs and turntables. He actually breaks into a sweat.
As he performs at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan at the College Music Journal conference, he hammers the skins of his tabla drums with palms, wrists and spidery fingertips, displaying a dexterity gained from years of rigorous classical training in his native India. While black-and-white film images from his homeland provide a backdrop of looming skyscrapers and teeming intersections, Singh builds surreal, cross-cultural soundscapes with the aid of a rock drummer and a singer steeped in the chantlike voicings of sacred qawwali music.
Singh, 28, is at the leading edge of the new Asian underground, in which performers scattered from Bombay to London are stoking interest in a land — the Indian subcontinent — and culture that, up till now, has had only an indirect impact on Western pop. Besides Singh, artists such as Asian Dub Foundation, Cornershop and Bally Sagoo are taking centuries-old traditional sounds and blending them with new technology, hip-hop and rock influences to create a new international scene.
The audience for this music reflects its broad reach. The night before Singh’s performance, Asian Dub Foundation — a London-based quintet — played in Greenwich Village to a multi-culti audience sporting turned-back baseball caps, hooded sweatshirts and turbans, jumping in sync to the group’s furious rock-raga dance mix.
“We have taken the power/and the land is ours!” chanted baby-faced rapper Deeder “Master D” Zaman, while guitarist Chandrasonic cranked out surf riffs by way of the Indian Ocean.
“The music we play represents all the (racial) communities in a way — the reviews of the shows in England claim we’re the only band able to get all these groups together,” one of Asian Dub’s deejay-programmers, John Pandit, says in an interview a day before the group’s incendiary College Music Journal concert. “When we played in Montreal a few days ago, we had young Asian kids coming up and thanking us, and it was very emotional, because we didn’t have these kinds of role models when we were young.”
In decades past, the influence of the Indian subcontinent on Western pop culture has been tenuous at best, often filtered through the music of celebrity musicians from George Harrison to Alanis Morissette. Whether it’s the Rolling Stones using a sitar on “Paint It Black,” the British popsters in Kula Shaker incorporating Indian lyrics on their 1996 hit “Tattva” or Madonna sporting Hindu mehndi markings on the MTV Music Awards, the culture of India is usually experienced only second- or third-hand in the West. Occasionally, token performers from the East have broken through to a wider market, thanks to the patronage of famous rock musicians: Harrison helped find an audience for sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and collaborations with everyone from Massive Attack to Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder brought international fame to the Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
The bhangra tradition
But now there are indications that these Asian artists are breaking through on their own terms, fired with the urgency of an oppressed and often misunderstood people as they try to forge a new life in the West. The current surge has its roots in bhangra, originally a festival music created in the Punjabi region of Northwest India to celebrate the harvesting of the hemp (“bhang”) crop. This centuries-old folk music mutated when it was brought to London by Indian immigrants whose children and grandchildren were exposed to music likewise imported from the Caribbean and Africa, especially reggae. These second- and third-generation Asians continue to incorporate an ever-widening array of underground dance beats into the bhangra tradition.
Even more pervasive is the influence of movie music on the new Asian bands; the Bombay-based “Bollywood” film industry is the world’s largest. It produces countless melodramas in which dialogue functions primarily as a linking device between extravagantly emotional, richly orchestrated songs lip-synched by the actors. Cinema remains the one facet of Indian life that brings all classes of society together, and the songs of the “playback singers,” or dubbing artists, are like the culture’s second language.
Now much of this wildly eclectic music — which mixes swelling string sections with seemingly incongruous instruments such as banjos — is finding a new audience in the West, thanks in part to compilations such as “Dance Raja Dance: The South Indian Film Music of Vijaya Anand” (Luaka Bop) and “Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars and Sitars” (Motel Records), spotlighting the work of legendary Indian music directors Kalyanji and Anandji V. Shah as produced by American hip-hop deejay Dan the Automator.
The Bollywood influence is acknowledged in the title of Asian Dub Foundation’s debut album, “Rafi’s Revenge” (London), a nod to one of the greatest Indian playback singers, the late Mohammed Rafi. And “Brimful of Asha,” the 1998 breakthrough hit by another British-based Asian group, Cornershop, refers to Bollywood diva Asha Bhosla.
But even as Asian Dub Foundation, Cornershop and deejays such as Singh and Sagoo acknowledge their heritage, they — like the bhangra artists of a decade ago — are combining it with the music they experience every day in the clubs and record shops. Purity isn’t the point.
“Our approach is more than just combining Western and Eastern influences,” says Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh (no relation to Talvin Singh). “It’s more about finding the good aspects of any kind of music and using it as a jumping-off point.” So on the band’s “When I Was Born for the 7th Time” (Luaka Bop), the band lays its hypnotic, Velvet Underground-like guitar strum over backward tape loops, a jazz-guitar sample and a sitar jam.
“People say we do fusion music, but it’s more organic than that,” says Asian Dub Foundation’s Pandit. “If you go to our bass player’s house, he might be listening to punk rock upstairs in his bedroom, while his mom will be playing a video with a Bollywood soundtrack in the living room and his dad might be in the kitchen listening to a qawwali singer. Outside, somebody else in the neighborhood will be playing drum ‘n’ bass on their boom box.”
Asian Dub’s “Rafi’s Revenge” integrates all those influences into propulsively exotic rock and rap; the guitar-playing suggests a cross between a sitar and Dick Dale’s choppy surf riffing, while the sampled voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the sound of traditional instruments such as the harmonium intertwines with fat reggae bass lines and skittering drum ‘n’ bass snare beats. The music is danceable, almost giddy, even as the lyrics dwell on highly charged subjects such as a 1968 Bengali peasant uprising (“Naxalites”) and the 1939 assassination of the governor general of Punjab by Sikh anti-colonial rebel Mohammed Singh Azad (“Assassin”).
“The hidden history of our people is something we have to raise, particularly in England where my parents have experienced and continue to experience unequal opportunity,” Pandit says.
“If you’re Asian and black, like my family is,” says Asian Dub’s Sanjay Tailor, “you can only go to a certain level in the work force. There is a glass ceiling, even in the music industry. We had to go to France before our music became popular in England, and Cornershop had to come to America before the British music industry took notice of them.”
While the notion of being lumped into a “new Asian underground” is anathema to many of these new artists, Pandit says he can hear a common link. “We’re a punk band and someone like Talvin Singh is coming out of a classical tradition,” he says. “We’re all different musically, with different backgrounds, but we’ve all been denied opportunities, and I think that brings a different urgency and freshness to what we do.”
ASIAN FUSION
A primer in the modern pop sounds of the Indian subcontinent
Cornershop, `When I Was Born for the 7th Time’
(Luaka Bop)
With its layered, hip-hop flavored production, Mad Hatter wordplay and Velvet Underground-styled melodies, Cornershop’s third album sounds like an overseas response to Beck’s 1996 masterpiece, “Odelay.”
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, `Mustt Mustt’
(Real World)
The greatest exponent of the Sufi devotional music known as qawwali ventures into crossover territory with an album produced by avant-garde guitarist Michael Brook. The title track, in remixed form by the British trip-hop group Massive Attack, became an international dancefloor hit in 1991.
Talvin Singh, `OK’
(Island)
The classically trained tabla musician and deejay, who has worked with everyone from Bjork to Lee Perry, melds the sounds of East and West, using real instuments and vocalists form around the world in his shape-shifting compositions.
Bally Sagoo, `Bollywood Flashback’
(Columbia)
Sagoo is perhaps the most popular bhangra deejay, blending traditional Indian sounds with up-to-date dance beats. The hit from this 1994 album, “Chura Liya,” became the first Indian language record ever to be play-listed on Britain’s Radio 1.
Asian Dub Foundation, `Rafi’s Revenge’
(London)
India’s musical and cultural history reconfigured as blazing rock-raga-rap.
`Anokha: Soundz of the Asian Underground’
(Island)
This album documents the flowering of the mid-’90s Asian underground scene at the Blue Note club in London, where Talvin Singh and various deejays and mixers blended Indian ragas and folk melodies with the latest break beats from the worlds of drum ‘n’ bass, dub and hip-hop.
`Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars and Sitars’
(Motel Records)
In the ’70s, India’s Bollywood filmmakers responded to the action films coming out of the West with their own “Brownsploitation” sagas, filled with car chases, gun fights and opium-dealing hoods. The dynamic music of Anandji V. Shah and Kalyanji V. Shah, compiled here by American hip-hop deejay Dan the Automator, used orchestras of up to 100 musicians.
`Dance Raja Dance: The South Indian Film Music of Vijaya Anand’
(Luaka Bop)
Everything from screaming rock guitars to mambo rhythms goes into this compilation from one of the best of India’s new-wave film composers.
