I was doing some research this morning on an unrelated topic, when I randomly came across the name Gauhar Jaan, one of the great recording artists in India from the first years of the 20th century. Gauhar Jaan is thought to have sung on the very first recording of a song ever made in India, in 1902. Here is what she sang:

It’s a kind of Hindustani classical song called a “khayal,” sung, I gather, in Raag Jogiya. At the end of it she says, famously, “My name is Gauhar Jan!”

Who was Gauhar Jaan? Her background, from what I’ve been able to find on the internet, seems remarkable:

Gauhar Jaan was born as Angelina Yeoward in 1873 in Patna, to William Robert Yeoward, an Armenian Jew working as an engineer in dry ice factory at Azamgarh, near Banaras, who married a Jewish Armenian lady, Allen Victoria Hemming around 1870. Victoria was born and brought up in India, and trained in music and dance.

Within a few years in 1879, the marriage ended, causing hardships to both mother and daughter, who later migrated to Banaras in 1881, with a Muslim nobleman, ‘Khursheed’, who appreciated Victoria’s music more than her husband.

Later, Victoria, converted to Islam and changed Angelina’s name to ‘Gauhar Jaan’ and hers to ‘Malka Jaan’. (link)

Through her mother, who depended on the patronage of wealthy Muslim noblemen (I’m presuming she may have been a Tawaif), Gauhar Jaan got training from the best classical music masters in Calcutta at the time. By 1896, she was a star performer in Calcutta, which is how she was able to charge Rs. 3000 in 1902 to have her voice on the first audio recording of an Indian song ever made. Later, Gauhar Jaan became a star all over India. She performed in Madras in 1910, and even performed for King George V when he visited India. She died of natural causes as the palace musician of the Maharajah of Mysore in 1930. (There is a fuller bio of Gauhar Jaan here, at the Tribune. Also, see this profile of Gauhar Jaan.)

Another song Gauhar Jaan was famous for was “Ras ke bhare tore nain,” which I think many readers will find familiar for reasons that will become apparent below.

Tonight, some of us in the bunker are feeling a bit shell shocked by the news of Michael Jackson’s death. Rajni in particular is taking it quite hard. She was a huge fan and had spent years learning to moonwalk which is actually pretty hard for a monkey.

There was a lot of love for Michael Jackson across South Asia, leading to things like this (Kollywood Tollywood) restaging of one of MJ’s greatest music videos:

And we’ve shared this Bhanga/Breakdancing mashup version of Thriller (set to Tigerstyle’s Nachna Onda Nei) before:

I was roped into the arms of the indie-rock band The Throws (then called Lovely) when I had first seen them perform a few years ago at the South Asian art festival Artwallah. I had been impressed by the chill post-punk polished sound and crushworthy lyrics. The band’s CD quickly became a regular rotation as I cruised the streets of Los Angeles that year.

After taking some time off, I was excited to hear that The Throws are back to making sweet music together again. I had the chance to sit down (virtually) with Adit Rao, lead singer of The Throws to talk about fears, hopes, and dreams. Instead of dropping a CD, the band is going release singles online, one at a time and for free. You can listen to the first song of the series, “Invitation” by using the player below, and you can read my conversation with Adit Rao just below that.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview for Sepia Mutiny. I’ve been following you for the past few years, back when the band used to be called Lovely. It seems like you’ve been quiet for a bit… What has been going on with The Throws?

The Throws kinda disappeared for a minute, life stepped in and took the reins for a bit. We went back into the woodshed— writing, recording, and stuff. But recently, there’s been some rumblings; we’re jones-ing to do some touring, and get the new record out.

The Throws have recently released a single called Invitation. Why did you choose to release one song via internet verses putting together an album and pressing hard copies? Do you see the future of digital music moving away from concept albums and towards this downloading one song format?

Well, it’s just easier to get people to try one song, before they think about a whole record. There’s so much music out there. So this is our way of getting more people to listen and (hopefully) talk about what we’re doing. We’ll give away a one song at a time, and then when we put out the record maybe there’ll be some actual anticipation. I don’t know that albums will go away completely, but I suspect that only the diehard fans will buy full albums. Do I personally need Rihanna’s *whole* album? No. But I’m sure her core audience would disagree with me.

Yesterday Indian classical music lost one of its greatest, master sarod player Ali Akbar Khan. Those of you from the Bay Area will recognize his name in association with the school he founded in 1967, the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, CA, which has taught North Indian classical music to more than 10,000 students. Along with sitar player Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan was the face of North Indian classical music in the United States and influenced countless musicians around the world.

Guitarist Carlos Santana once said that a single note of Khan’s sarod "goes right to my heart," while classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin - who prompted Mr. Khan to first visit the United States in 1955 - once called the sarodist "the greatest musician in the world."

Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, who took drum lessons at Mr. Khan’s college the first year it opened, said …, "All the people who studied there - it changed all our lives. Khan embodies the pure spirit of music; it’s not just the notes, it’s the spirit. Every time I listen to him, he takes me there."(link)

I read about this “Pakistani girl band” a while ago last December but only got my hands on their album Chup a few months ago. Mutineers, Zeb & Haniya is not a girl band.

Zeb and Haniya are two Pakistani women cousins, Haniya Aslam and Zeb (Zebunissa) Bangash, who make fantastic music. Two weeks ago, they were awarded “Best Live Act” in the MTV Pakistan Music Awards. They are Pashtuns (Pathans) whose families are based in the town of Kohat in the North West Frontier province.

The Taqwacores are back with a brand new chapter…

What struck me about this clip was how 9/11 really defined how the guys built their identity. I know it is a significant marker to building the identity for South Asian American of our generation, but it is surprising to see how different people have used the experience to different paths of empowerment. For some it’s voting or service work and others it’s starting punk bands.

Band members of various Taqwacore bands have started an online blog too - The Taqwacore Webzine doesn’t just talk punk, but they write about their perspective on the Lahore bombing, Cat Stevens, or South Asian poetry. But I guess all that is Taqwacore, isn’t it?

When I used to DJ parties here and there in the early and mid-2000s, I always had a quandary: what can you possibly play after “Mundian to Bach Ke”? It was such a floor-filling crowd-pleaser, and there was almost nothing that could come after it that kept up the energy. Granted, there were variations of the same song that lesser producers and remixers had started putting out, but no other Bhangra track quite compared. “Mundian to Bach Ke” was a singularity.

Perhaps it’s been a problem for the person who produced the song himself: how do you follow a monster hit?

After Panjabi MC became briefly huge in 2003, he went a little quiet. There was the re-release in 2004 of an album called “Desi” [from 2002], and then a studio album in 2005 (“Steel Bangle”) that was mostly recycled filler, to satisfy an earlier contract with Moviebox Records (see Sajit’s SM review here).

“Indian Timing,” which was finally released this spring on Itunes after many delays, is finally, nearly all new material, with very little filler. It’s also an actual album, unlike much of what is released by Brit-Asian producers these days (in the era of piracy and digital downloading, there is a greater emphasis on singles). In terms of the sound, PMC stays true to the combination he’s famous for — big hip hop beats with lively Punjabi bhangra vocals.

For people downloading selectively from Itunes, I would suggest starting with “Can’t Stop Us,” “Kee Lagda,” and “Punjabi Soldiers.” All are upbeat Punjabi songs over hip hop beats, with vocals by Manjit Jelhi. Pretty much any of those three would be good to follow “Mundian to Bach Ke” on a dance-floor.

Fans of Bollywood might also like PMC’s electro version of “I am a Disco Dancer,” which is somewhat of an anomaly on the record.

When one of the New Jersey-based Bamboo Shoots got married in Delhi this spring the rest of the band flew out to India and celebrated rock style with a five-city music tour. Concluded last month, the “Homecoming” tour brought their brand of pop/rock rhythmic dance beats to Mumbai, Pune, New Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata. The band’s blog has pics and clips from their shows and time on the road, including a description of a near-arrest situation in Bangalore where dancing and dance-provoking music can be illegal.

Indian coverage of the tour described it as part of a broader relatively recent transition for rock bands there, from one-off concerts to nationwide tours. Drummer Shiv Puri compared touring there with the U.S.: “India is a lot like the US; it’s a huge place and here, you have to tour if you want to be known outside your home town.” (DNA India). Though many people (myself included) have come to know of the Shoots’ music through their tunes online, the tour allowed an international audience to get to know them as live performers.

Screw the term “light-skinned pretty” — I say we bring on “brown-skinned pretty.” Watch this.

The lyrics are tight (and readable), but the flashing images in the video clip just make me lean back and go, “Word…!” Bad ass video stumble courtesy of the website The Poet Project, virtual home base to Canada’s Humble the Poet otherwise known as the photographic Kanwer Singh.

“Appearances can be deceiving, and Toronto based artist Humble The Poet has used every misconception and assumption about him to amplify his message to the masses. … His first public release, Voice for the Voiceless, is a social commentary on the Taboos of the South Asian community, and has been the subject of acclaim and reference during public discourse on topics ranging on domestic abuse, violence in the community.[poetproject]”

I’m really impressed with his lyrics - it’s clear this guy is poetic musician verses flipped around and he understands the power of words (Not many hip-hop artists would have lyrics dance across their videos).

My friend T.H. sent me an article today from The Root (a spin-off of Slate.com) that describes the advent of the “blipster.” The blipster for all you non-hipsters is the new official term used to describe an “alternative” African-American male or female:

…a “blipster”—a black hipster or “alt-black”? Like many recent cultural trends, this one straddles race, politics, fashion and art. For the purposes of discussion, we’ll stick with men—though I have seen some Flock of Seagulls-looking female blipsters out and about as of late. As Lauren Cooper, a Howard University graduate who admits to an indie lifestyle, puts it, “It’s probably easier to pick out a black male ‘blipster’ than a female.” [Link]

The blipster is a new thing? Ummm…hasn’t like Mos Def been around for ever? Anyways, what really got my attention in the article was a quote by one Himanshu Kumar:

Part of the blipster look is born of utility. “You can’t really wear sagging jeans without being embarrassed on your skateboard,” says Himanshu Kumar of the band Das Racist. So pin-thin pants have joined the “Spitfire shirts and SB Dunks” named by Fiasco in his now-classic skateboarding rap as markers of the new style. [Link]

The band Das Racist is a Brooklyn duo featuring Himanshu Kumar and Victor Vazquez. I’m diggin’ their video for Chicken And Meat. They just have a sound I haven’t heard before. Me likes:

Readers might like Guyanese-Canadian singer Anjulie (full name, Anjulie Persaud, which might be a variation on… “Anjali Prasad”):

What do you think? I hear shades of Morcheeba and Esthero in both the vocals and the production, though this song is clearly a bit more commercial than either of those downtempo/indie favorites. I also can’t help but think of Apache Indian’s song, “Boom Shack-a-Lak” (1993), though Anjulie flips it around slightly: “Boom Shalaka Laka,” which makes the phrase more mellow. I take it this is coming from a real slang expression in the Caribbean, but now I wonder about its origins.

More on Anjulie: her album (titled “Boom”) is set to drop on Starbucks’ house label, Hear Music, this summer — which means you may well be hearing this song the next time you’re sipping a Caramel Macchiato. Also, she is on Twitter. [Thanks, Bookworm, for the tip]

Today, I received the video below in my inbox along with this message — “Canadian desi fronted old school r&b-detroit rock. He’s like a mix between fela/prince/ and someone’s cool 70’s desi uncle (not mine unfortunately) sigh…” My interest was piqued. I watched. Then decided you should too.

Oddly, the video reminds me of some of the yellowed photos of the 1970s from my father’s photo albums (minus all the haram activities). King Khan seems like quite the trip. He and the Shrines are touring right now at a hipster spot near you. Who’s with me?

Chee Malabar is hitting the internet airwaves once again. One half of the duo Himalayan Project, last month, Chee dropped a solo EP project under the name Oblique Brown. Titled Dust, the four song EP takes us on a lyrical dust storm where hip hop is a religion, words are an ode to life, and poetry slams with beats.

I met up with Chee at a coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles to ask him some questions about his new EP, his life as an artist, and his work bringing poetry to incarcerated youth. As can only be expected with the Murphy’s Law in my life, when we walked out to Chee’s car after the interview, we saw that it had been towed - for a movie shoot going on in the street. So, please, read the interview and after you are done go to Itunes or CD Baby and download Oblique Brown’s Dust today. And hopefully, all will be forgiven.

Taz: When did you first fall in love with hip-hop?

Chee: Is that from the movie Brown Sugar? Uh, okay… Basically, I moved to my neighborhood in San Francisco when I was twelve and all the kids in my neighborhood listened to hip hop. I fell in love with it in the sense that it was so different than anything I’d ever heard before. But I didn’t really understand what I was listening to back then. I liked the beat. I could nod my head. And the kids seemed to like it and I knew I should like it. That’s how it started…I was listening to Ice Cube, Paris, NWA…You start making connections to what they were saying and you start looking around and saying, “Oh wait, what they are saying is kind of important because things are kinda fucked up.” I would say that is the first time I fell in love with hip hop.

T: Was there an album that really influenced you?

C: I loved the Paris album, Sleeping with the Enemy with the song Bush Killer. I just loved that album. And all the NWA stuff and Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted and Predator…For me it was like playing catch up, I had missed all the hip-hop history… I remember the kids at school they‘d give me a tape, and I’d ask who’s this what’s that. For them it was something that had past but for me it was something brand new. I‘d go up to friends and say, “Have you heard this?” They‘d say”…uh, yeah. it‘s four years old.”

T: When did you start performing?

C: I started writing a couple of years after that, but I kept it to myself. Talking over a beat, you know. Not seriously until high school. Ray, who’s in Himalayan Project with me, he and I would make little tapes. Ray and I have known each other since sixth grade but we didn’t start really connecting until high school …we started talking about music… and we’d make a mix tape battling each other. I’d make a tape, and I’d clown on him, and I’d give it to him. And he’d respond. So that’s how we started…

I remember that we pressed up a bunch of tape, and we’d try to sell it. We went to somewhere in the Haight where they used to sell mixed tapes. We went to the guy with this cheesy ass cover of us on the tape. Like an actual cover. Photocopied and made with a cheesy tape cassette. The guy was super nice about it. He said, “Yeah, I’ll listen to it. If I like it you guys can stop by and drop more tapes off.”

T: Did he like it?

C: I have no idea. I dunno. We were too embarrassed to go back and find out. We were like kids, pretty much. But that’s pretty much how we started.

In the ten plus years since Asian influenced electronica started making the musical rounds, the sound has gone in various directions. From the pulsating Indian classical-oriented tabla and bass to bollywood dub step, the music has evolved and morphed with other styles of contemporary and popular music. A prime example of this evolution can be found in Hello Hello, the most recent studio album put out by the New Delhi-based duo of Tapan Raj and Gaurav Raina, collectively known as the Midival Punditz. Hello, released on Six Degrees Records, sees the evolution of Punditz’s engaging electro-desi sound into new directions I haven’t see the Punditz delve into in past albums. Don’t worry though, it’s mostly a good thing!

The album’s opener, Electric Universe, is a strong tune, that marries a bansuri based melody with the now very-trendy vocoder lyrics and an up-tempo western dance groove. Universe is a good start to a very good album, and serves as a nice introduction of the diverging sounds to come. The last track is an acoustic version of Universe, except with unadulterated vocals and acoustic guitar by fellow Asian-massivist Karsh Kale. In fact, Kale’s influence on the album is heavily felt, with credits on more than five of the album’s 11 tracks.

With Hello, it’s clear that the Punditz haven’t forgotten where they came from, or the type of music that has led them to be called “the sound of 21st century India.” The album has the raga and folk influence I have come to expect and love from the Punditz, but also a classic rock and pop influence that one might hear in the nightclubs of Delhi, Bangalore, or Bombay.

Straight outta Los Angeles, born and raised, 25 year old unsigned artist Ameish Govindarajan is hitting the hip hop scene by storm. Taking a unique ‘web 2.0’ tactic of dropping his first single Save Ourselves with a viral music video even before an EP is pressed and on itunes, Ameish is part of the new generation using the internet to spread the lyrics. I stumbled across this video in my inbox last week and was blown away. The visuals were clean and crisp, enhancing the smooth hip hop hook and lyrics. I couldn’t get the song out of my head all week.

I sat down (virtually) with Ameish to ask him a few questions about life. Here’s what he said.

I saw on your facebook profile that you graduated from UCLA with a pyschobio degree. That’s quite the change from hip-hop… How’d you first get involved with hip-hop? How do your parents feel about your musical foray?

Yes, that is kind of an unexpected background for an artist, I’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to be educated. Music has always been around me since I was young, but the first time I heard hip-hop was around ten years old. I picked up a tape off the ground, which I still have, Brand Nubian. And from there I fell in love with the beats and rhymes. I was an avid listener for five years, listening to everything from Ice Cube to Wu-tang. Me and my boys started rhyming at the age of 15. We used to record on a karaoke machine and rhyme on top of the radio, then on instrumentals. My parents are fully supportive of whatever my passions are.

I saw this video last week and thought it was really polished looking and you have a great sound. I’m surprised that you are still unsigned and that I haven’t heard of your music yet. Is this your first single?

Yes, this is my debut single off the “Save Ourselves” EP. There’s plenty more music to come.

Who did your music video?

The video was a collaborative effort from four parties. The directors were from the crew Secret History. They’ve done videos for other rap artists like The Grouch and Paris. The producers are Bucks Boys Productions who worked on Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” video. The director of photography is from the ReelRoots crew, and Digital Gypsy provided the rest of the production.

I came up with the concept for the video as I wrote the song, and these productions companies were able to bring my vision to life.

It's become pretty old hat for us to find Bollywood rip offs of Western music and movies. Indian Superman is probably still my alltime favorite but this music video manages to chart new ground on an extremely crowded landscape.

Not only do they rip off the tune, they also rip off the band -

Not wanting to be left out of the fun, some Westerner's gave the video the Tunak Tunak treatment. The result is below the fold -

Good morning, Monday…Play this loud in your office and have your cubicle be this morning’s water cooler.

Sunil aka ishQ Bector from Winnipeg’s legendary hip hop group Frek Sho moved to India a few years ago, signed to a major label, and became a star…Born & raised in Winnipeg, Canada, Sunil aka IshQ has made Mumbai his second home. Certified in Chinese Medicine with his forte in Acupuncture, this multi-talented Gemini followed his first passion in life, music. He has studied acting at the famous Roshan Taneja film studio in Mumbai then went on to VJ & host shows on MTV, B4U & Channel V… Since then he has shared the stage with artists like Sean Paul, Mobb Deep, Chamillionaire, John Cena (WWE), & Rishi Rich raising the temperature a couple of notches with his skillz on the mic and as a performer.[IshQisDead]

Desi Canadian Chinese Medicine schooled Reggatone singing hip hip performer in India. Now that is international fusion right there…

And another fusion video, just for giggles, this one Chutney flavored…

I’m hopping on the next flight to Trinidad to find me some sparkle vest wearing man…Tell me these videos weren’t the wake-up call you needed this morning. ;-)

The saxophone in the opening credits to this Tamil Film (“Duet”) is by Kadri Gopalnath; it’s unlike any other commercial film opening credits music you’ve ever heard. Gopalnath has been in the news quite a bit over the past few weeks, following his collaboration with Indian American jazz-maestro Rudresh Mahanthappa, who has a new album out called Apti. I haven’t “Itunesed” Mahanthappa’s album yet (any reviews? the excerpts played on Rudresh’s NPR interview sound great), though I will be, but it prompted me to check out the Indian musician he’s talking about. (Incidentally, Kadri Gopalnath has several albums for sale on Itunes as well, at the bargain price of $3.99 each.)

Here is a quote from the New Yorker piece on Mahanthappa that describes what Gopalnath is doing on Sax:

While Mahanthappa was at Berklee, his older brother teasingly gave him an album called “Saxophone Indian Style,” by Kadri Gopalnath. As far as Mahanthappa knew, “Indian saxophonist” was an oxymoron, but the album amazed him. Gopalnath, who was born in 1950, in Karnataka, plays a Western instrument in a non-Western context—the Carnatic music of Southern India (distinct from the Hindustani musical tradition of Northern India). Gopalnath, who generally plays in a yogalike seated position, has perfected something that jazz saxophonists have been attempting for decades: moving beyond the Western chromatic scale into the realm of microtones, a feat harder for wind instruments, whose keys are in fixed positions, than for strings or voice. Jazz players, such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, had gone about it by varying intonation, blowing multiphonics (two or more notes at the same time), or squawking in the upper register, where pitches are imprecisely defined. Gopalnath does none of that. Using alternate fingerings and innovative embouchure techniques, he maintains faultless intonation while sliding in and out of the chromatic scale. (link)

I don’t play any wind instruments, and I have no idea technically what “innovative embouchure techniques” might be describing, but it sure sounds hard.

Also check out: Mahanthappa interviewed on NPR.

Here’s some Sunday afternoon feel good for you - two Bob Marley songs performed by musicians from around the world, including several from South Asia. I liked the first, One Love, better than the second, Don’t Worry, but thought both were worth sharing. (Actually, the best video in this sequence is the first, Stand By Me, but unfortunately it has no desi musicians in it)

The organization that produced these videos (and others) is called Playing for Change. It’s worth clicking through to read their (short) manifesto. They’ve used portable digital recording technology to do a series of such recordings around the world, and are releasing them sequentially. There is a documentary about the project, and a CD/DVD that will be released at the end of April. There is an associated foundation that seems to be doing good works - there is a video of a music school they built in South Africa.

I know I am going to get in trouble for this post. I mean, what kind of a**hole makes fun of a pregnant woman? This is why our headquarters is in a secret North Dakota bunker where I can be safe from shoes hurled at me:

MIA cross-bred a lady bug and a zebra and then skinned the resulting spawn alive to create her outfit. PETA is going to lose its sh*t over this. For real.

I was at a loss for words while watching this last night so I consulted a dictionary in order to find the right words:

Hot Mess: (NOUN) term used to describe somebody that has NO REASON to look the way that they are lookin at the time. [Link]

Also, I can understand why TI, Lil Wayne, and Jay-Z were up there (I guess some consider them better than Lupe Fiasco who was in the audience), but why was Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air rapping on stage with them also? What am I missing? The whole thing was just a dissonant mess.

For those of you that didn’t realize it, MIA was a real soldier last night. Her baby was actually due yesterday! Got that? The baby decided to stay inside the womb longer than it was supposed to so that it would not be around the bear witness to that performance. I mean, you got to give MIA props for her dedication but you also got to give that baby boy props for barricading the door.

Move over, Papaya…now there’s someone talented. AND cute. Introducing the latest (and easily greatest) brown singing hopeful— UNC’s adorable Anoop Desai, a.k.a. Noop Dawg (I heard Randy loved that). I may actually have to start watching American Idol again. What am I saying, you will watch American Idol and feverishly send in tips or post stories about it to the news tab. I will watch YouTube, where there is aural gorgeousness like this:

I first saw that vid on VH1 blog, which goes on to say:

Simon Cowell may have been turned off by Anoop Desai’s nerdy appearance at his American Idol audition (”you look like you came from a meeting with Bill Gates“), but we have a feeling this guy’s going to be a contender for the top spot after checking out some of his work with the UNC Clef Hangers, an a capella group at the University of North Carolina, where Desai studies Southern Folklore. Watching this guy croon everything from Brian McKnight’s “The Only One For Me” (above) to T-Pain’s “Buy U A Drank,” it’s clear that this nerd is a heartthrob. They’re already shrieking for him at school, so just wait until he gets to Hollywood. Anoop Dogg is hot! Fire! [VH1]

Dear Simon, kindly STFU. A college kid shows up to audition in shorts and you automatically think, “Microsoft”? That doesn’t even make sense. You’re about as worthless as the dozens of “all-look-same”-fools who type, “omg he luks like kal pen!” under his pictures and video clips. Sure he does.

I love that Anoop was the soloist for this song, mostly because I have always loved “The Only One For Me” but hated Brian McKnight; now I can enjoy this joint without hating myself! McKnight made quite the impression on me in 1998, when he played pool with my friend at a DC club, lost, and then sportingly threw the cue stick at the man who pwned his kundi so publicly (incidentally, the friend who humiliated him was also desi).

So, yeah…Sanjaya who? Anoop’s a cutie who sounds like he could make Stupid Simon eat his words. You know, that might actually be worth watching shit-tay American Idol for…

Earlier this week I was surveying some recently and soon-to-be-released albums as I decided what to load on to my mp3 player. Like many, I enjoy listening to music when I work out and especially when I run, so something upbeat was in order. I checked out the new Common and Lily Allen albums and they seemed worth loading. Then however, I came upon the must have release-of-the-week and used up the rest of my allowance:

Here are two Obama tunes to get you humming as you drink your Sunday morning coffee or chai.

We’ve blogged here about Bollywood Obama and I’ve written about the Japanese town of Obama’s boppy theme song “Obama is beautiful world.” Now, a couple of young musicians in Surat—Chirag Thakker, Jayesh Gandhi and Anita Sharma—have welcomed Obama into their hearts with this catchy song that praises our new president.

We have dedicated this song to Obama and uploaded it on Youtube, so that the world could see our attempts to honor him. His down-to-earth personality, faith in Lord Ganesha and great respect for Mahatma Gandhi made us feel that he is very close to us,” said Chirag, adding that they have used names of Lord Ganesha and Gandhi in the song. [full story]

The song has elements of a bhajan (the lyrics have devotionalism), but also features the djembe, which the artists chose to include in honor of Obama’s African heritage! The video is granted, a bit amateur, but it also has subtitles (so that Obama can understand it) and was shot in various parts of Surat, including the banks of the Tapi river and the city’s municipal gardens. Overall, the three artists devoted three months to it from start to finish.

I was going to wrap up this entry, but then found this Punjabi poem by California based poet and singer Pashaura Singh Dhillon. I was moved. But then again, I get weepy pretty easily these days.

One of the most famous Konkani pop songs from the 1960s is Lorna’s “Bebdo”. Here it is, with lyrics and translation:

Pretty swinging, huh? The sassy tone and subject matter reminds me a little of Trinidadian Calypso from around the same period. It’s true that there is a dark side to these types of songs (alcoholism, and the hint of domestic violence), but there is also a buoyancy and power in her voice that I really appreciate; it sounds like she won’t let anything get her down. (Are there other 60s Goan/Konkani tracks available on sites like YouTube that readers would recommend?)

When this was first recorded in 1966, the effect on the local music scene was electrifying:

From a kiosk on the beach, a pretty lady named Bertinha played records on the speaker system provided by the Panjim Municipality. She had a weakness for Cliff Richard tunes, Remo says. But that evening, she spun out a song called Bebdo (Drunkard). Miramar Beach was hypnotised. “The Panjim citizenry stopped in its tracks, the sunken sun popped up for another peep, the waves froze in mid-air,” Remo has written. “What manner of music was this, as hep as hep can be, hitting you with the kick of a mule on steroids? What manner of voice was this, pouncing at you with the feline power of a jungle lioness? And hold it no, it couldn’t be yes, it was no was it really? Was this amazing song in Konkani?”

Bebdo had been recorded a few months earlier by Chris Perry and Lorna in a Bombay studio and released by HMV. The jacket bore the flirty image that would later hang outside the Venice nightclub. The 45 rpm record had four tracks, opening with the rock-and-rolling Bebdo and ending on the flip side with the dreamy ballad, Sopon. “Sophisticated, westernised urban Goa underwent a slow-motion surge of inexplicable emotions: the disbelief, the wonder, the appreciation, and then finally a rising, soaring and bubbling feeling of pride,” Remo says. “The pride of being Goan. The pride of having a son of the soil produce such music. Of having a daughter of the soil sing it thus. And, most of all, of hearing the language of the soil take its rightful place in popular music after a period of drought. Chris and Lorna had come to stay.” (link)

The article from which that story is taken is by Naresh Fernandes, and he goes on to give a really interesting (if digressive) account of the links between Goa and the mainstream Hindi film music world.

First, even from what little I’ve heard, it’s pretty evident that Goan pop music (which is deeply influenced by big band, bebop, and 1960s R&B) overlaps strongly with the “modern,” R.D. Burman sound that emerged in Bollywood in the late 1960s and 70s (think “Ina Mina Dika”). The reason for that is simple: the majority of the musicians employed by the film studios were Goans:

It seems a little anti-climactic to say it, but given how long we’ve been arguing talking about M.I.A. here, it probably needs to be addressed: M.I.A’s “Paper Planes” has been nominated for “Best Record of the Year.”

She’s up against Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, on a groundbreaking country music collaboration, and Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida.” So she has no chance of winning (the Grammy’s usually favor established artists and veteran rock stars over rappers, even innovative rappers). Still, chica has come a very long way since she started out a few years ago.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to wish her and her fiancé the best for the child they’re expecting. There’s something profoundly humanizing and clarifying about becoming a parent, though it also changes how most people approach their work and career. (Whatever happens, I do hope that M.I.A. will show up on Noggin and do a song for Yo Gabba Gabba! like The Ting Tings recently did. Perhaps a child-friendly version of “Galang Galang”?)

Speaking of raising children, and on a somewhat more serious note, it seems worth saying that the story that moved me most this (terrible) past week was the story of the Indian ayah, Sandra Samuel, who risked getting shot by cocaine-snorting, steroids-injecting, Islamofascist psychos, to rescue little Moshe Holtzberg at Chabad House in Mumbai:

I was pleased to see that the Israeli government has given her a high honor for what she did. She deserves it.

My favorite boy band is back with a punk new edition.

“A South Asian mother’s worst nightmare,” The Kominas is a Boston-based Bollywood punk band. Band members range in age from 22 to 30 years old and are a hodgepodge of middle-class, frustrated but fun-loving musicians, chemists, journalists, college dropouts (and graduates) who are trying to find their place in society. [Wiretap]

Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay, The Kominas first full length EP dropped last month on CD Baby as well as on iTunes. I’ve been listening to the album on repeat while at the gym and have found myself jaw dropping on more than one occasion as the album took me on a lyrical journey intertwining Islam, politics, and profanity. The album is polished, with a clean sound and reflecting a range of punk sounds and complicated influences. Wild Nights reminds me of a NOFX album in composition — up beat crass punk while subliminally highlighting social and political complexities. But in The Kominas case, the added spice of intersectionality between Islam, American, Desi, South Asian, and punk rock.

I had previously introduced the The Kominas to the Mutiny, and Abhi blogged about a punk benefit concert that the halal punkers did for a Hindu temple. I like them, their music, and what they represent - they are a bunch of desi kids wreaking punk rock havoc internationally. Currently two band members are based in Lahore working on a new band, Noble Drew. For our Indian Mutiny, the guys plan on crossing the border to India for a punk rock blitz in New Delhi at the end of December, so be sure to check them out.

I sat down (virtually) with The Kominas band member Basim Usmani (a fellow blogger and SM reader) for a long talk about the album, what it’s like to be a Muslim punk, and the Taqwacores growing movement.

How would you describe The Kominas?

Like Madhuri’s belly during the Choli Ke Peechay Kya Hain video.

In a previous interview I did with your band mate Shahjehan, he mentioned that you guys met at the mosque and he didn’t grow up on punk rock. He said that you made him a mix CD called Punk 101. When and why did you start listening to punk? When did you start playing music?

It was 9th grade in this Suburb called Lexington - and high school was weird. I had an accent. I was unpopular. I wanted to go to big arena concerts all the time…but my parents thought they were a den of decadence. I was only allowed to attend local shows at VFWs and veteran halls, which were incidentally crust punk and d-beat shows. The first concert I saw was a band called CLASS ACTION, and the singer had the ‘charged’ liberty spikes. People were pogoing, stomping, circle pitting, and the charged singer let me get on the mic for a few songs. Suddenly I had cool friends, I cut class and took the train, I saw all-ages shows (most non-Punk shows are 21+ in Boston). I had friends who thought being foreign or unique was cool. I was no longer unpopular. I was legion.

Australian-based Boymongoose is back with another video gem from their 2006 album Christmas in Asia Minor. You may remember the 12 Days of Christmas song we posted back then. Here is the video to Single Girls set to the music of Jingle Bells. Make sure to play this at your desi Holiday party. It will definitely be spinning here at our North Dakota headquarters come December.

So by now everyone must have had the surreal experience of turning on commercial pop or hip hop radio over the past couple of months, only to hear M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” casually playing in between various mind-numbingly bad Pussycat Dolls and Rihanna tracks, as if it were perfectly normal to hear a song with lyrics like this:

Pirate skulls and bones
Sticks and stones and weed and bongs
Running when we hit ‘em
Lethal poison through their system

No one on the corner has swagger like us
Hit me on my Burner prepaid wireless
We pack and deliver like UPS trucks
Already going hell just pumping that gas

“Paper planes” peaked this summer at #4 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, which is truly remarkable for any piece of music that prominently features the phrase “third world democracy.”

We’ve had our debates about M.I.A. here over the years — including the most recent episode, with Cicatrix’s post on Delon Jayasingha’s remix, which tears apart M.I.A. for her appropriation of LTTE imagery, fairly or unfairly.

Whatever our thoughts on M.I.A. in general, I think we might all agree that the recent remixes of “Paper Planes” by mainstream rappers leave something to be desired. The one I’ve heard on hip hop radio in Philadelphia features Bun-B and Rich Boy:

Listening to this reminds me that, whatever her faults might be, I’d rather listen to M.I.A. than “Bun-B and Rich Boy,” any day. There’s also a Lil Wayne remix , which is so terrible to my ear that it makes the Bun-B and Rich Boy remix sound like a work of art. (What do people see in Lil Wayne, again?)

Not to be outdone, via Ultrabrown I learn that Jay-Z has gotten in on the remix game as well though not with “Paper Planes.” Rather, Jay-Z’s remix is of “Boys,” and someone has YouTubed it here. As usual with recent Jay-Z, it’s a cut above what his peers are doing. What do you think of it, or the various mainstream hip hop remixes of “Paper Planes”?

I recently came across some music on LA’s KCRW by Nicholas Giacomini who goes by the name “MC Yogi.” He’s got an eclectic backstory:

Inspired by artists like the Beastie Boys and Run DMC, he began writing and performing his own raps for friends at house parties. He spent most of his high school years at a group home for at-risk youth, and Hip hop culture provided both a soundtrack and a creative outlet during those turbulent teenage years. Then at age 18 he discovered yoga.

On a whim, he joined his father for a yoga and meditation intensive with a famous spiritual teacher from India. Deeply moved by this powerful experience, MC YOGI devoted himself to learning everything he could about the ancient discipline. He began studying the physical forms of yoga, as well as meditation, philosophy, and devotional chanting.

It was at a yoga teacher training program in San Francisco that he met and fell in love with his wife, Amanda. After there first trip to India, they opened Yoga Toes Studio in Point Reyes, California, where they currently reside.

By combining his knowledge of yoga with his love for hip hop music, MC YOGI creates an exciting new sound that brings the wisdom of yoga to a whole new generation of modern mystics and urban yogis. [Link]

I’m digging this. Given some of his subject matter it has the potential to come across as really cheesy but the dude rhymes with heart and without a hint of being self-conscious. Here MC Yogi raps about Gandhi to some kids (at a Yoga camp I think):

There was a great story about a Pakistani fusion group, the Mekaal Hasan Band, on NPR this morning, the text of which is here. For starters, you might want to check out one of their songs on YouTube, “Huns Dhun”:

On their website, Mekaal Hasan Band says the following about the song and video above:

The video is a real life account of the mass evacuation of the Afghan Refugees who, according to the Afghan Repatriation Deadline, were supposed to leave the border areas of Pakistan for Afghanistan by 2005. Seen through the eyes of three young Afghani friends, the video traces their journey from the area of Bajaur, NWFP, Pakistan to the bordering hills of Afghanistan.

I knew about the Afghan refugees in Pakistan, but I didn’t know about their forced repatriation, and I haven’t heard much about how they’ve been doing in Afghanistan since this happened in 2005. (Does anyone have more information about this?)

In the NPR story, the part that I found most interesting is the story of how Mekaal Hasan first went from Lahore to Boston, to study at the Berklee College of Music, and then returned to Lahore, where he started the long, slow process of finding a way to be a rock musician in a non-rock oriented culture:

There wasn’t much opportunity to advance his craft in Lahore. So Hasan, like many of his peers, decided to leave Pakistan. He applied to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and got in.

“That jump was just insane,” Hasan says. “It’s like going to another planet and watching people play unbelievable stuff. I had never seen anyone play that way before. I would just listen to music all the time. That’s all I did. I never felt more at home than when I was in Boston, ‘cause I was surrounded by so much great music and so many great musicians. I think all creative people need an environment to flourish in.”

But Hasan was on a student visa, and his parents bribed him to come home early by offering to build him a studio. In 1995, he returned to Lahore.

“For a while, a good two to three years, I was massively depressed and really angry, as well,” Hasan says. “I was like, ‘Why am I here? What am I doing here?’ Then you had to reconcile yourself to the fact that, ‘Well, hey, man, you’ve always lived here.’ I resolved to make the best of it, and in some ways, this turned out to be a good exercise in just practicing the concepts that I’d learned in music school.” (link)

Ok, so not everyone has parents that can build them their own music studio! But however it happened, what’s important is that he managed to make the transition back — and now Mekaal Hasan and his band are making some really impressive music, using classical and jazz fusion.

Incidentally, another video I liked is Rabba. Mekaal Hasan Band’s album, “Sampooran,” is available on ITunes; they’re about to go on a tour of India (no word on a tour of the U.S. yet…).

First of all: thank you for the opportunity to blog. I’m so excited!

And now, my post:

The city of Bangalore has banned dancing and live music in places that serve alcohol, according to this Indian Express article here.

And according to this friend of mine here:

one Abhi M., who along with famed playwright Girish Karnad and 100 other people, protested the outmoded rule. Karnad spaketh thus:

“It is tyranny of the police. It is against every artiste. Instead of going after criminals the police are going after musicians.”

[Note: Karnad’s first two lines rhyme. A true artiste, that one.]

Apparently Bangalore officials have decided to enforce a part of the decades-old Karnataka Excise Law that prohibits live music and dancing in places that sell alcohol. (Used to be, only the section barring women from dancing was enforced, which led critics to hire dancing eunuchs in bars across the city this past February. Too bad that wouldn’t even be clever this time around.)

Abhi tells me,

“it’s an outdated law that’s being dug up by immature and backward-thinking bureaucrats and cops.”

But those Bs and Cs have their defenses. Says Bangalore’s Police Commissioner in an NDTV article:

“There is no [dance] ban on discos. They have to obtain a license and they can function.”

The article goes on to say however, that not one such license has been granted in the past four years to the many places that have requested them, according to sources in the police department.

The law is being used to temper progress, and the upshot is that the city is confused. I saw it myself two years ago.

Not long ago, I was cajoled by my better half into coming out of DJ retirement for an Indian Independence day Bhangra party sponsored by NET-IP Philadelphia. It’s been about three years since I’ve DJed even a house party, and for two of those years we’ve been new parents, listening to a lot of “Wow wow, wubbzy!” on Noggin (an insidious little brain-hammer of a song), and not much in the way of desi dance music.

I’ve been trying to get back into it a bit these past couple of weeks (no more grousing, I promise!), and I have a preliminary playlist of old and new favorites. My main focus has been on hip hop-influenced Hindi and Punjabi music:

• “Right here right now” from Bluffmaster
• “Singh is Kinng” from Singh is Kinng (this song was panned by Mr. Cicatrix as a “hot mess,” but it makes my son nod his head and do a little bhangra motion with his wrist every time)
• “Uncha Lamba” remix by Dr Zeus, from Welcome 2 Da Club (original song from the movie Welcome)
• “Kiya Kiya” remix by Dr. Zeus, from the same album (Puran likes this one too, and cutely starts singing along to the repetitive chorus — “Kiya kiya, kya kiya, kya kiya hai sanam”)
• “Glassy” by Jazzy B/Sukshinder Shinda (not to be confused with Hard Kaur’s “Glassy” — a song that I’m a little tired of)
• “Pyaar Karke” from Pyaar ke Side Effects (can’t go wrong)
• “Teri Baaton Mein” by Raghav (a brilliant conjoining of a sweet Hindi love song to a well-known dancheall riddim)
• “Basement Bhangra Anthem”, by DJ Rekha (with Wyclef), off of the Basement Bhangra CD

What tracks am I missing? I will also probably play classic bhangra, and popular Bollywood tracks like “Bhool Bhulaiyya,” “Mauja hi Mauja,” “Ya Ali,” “Meter Down,” “Om Shanti Om,” “Soni de Nakhre” (“oh kaindi e, Pump up the jam!”), and “Pappu Can’t Dance,” but the above playlist is probably the music I’m most into right now.

Below the fold, a couple of technical things related to DJ software, for anyone who might be interested… and a little something extra.

As much as I love MIA’s music, explaining her politics has been one continuous migraine. Especially since I live in hipsterland, and all the kool kids wanted to know if I was related to a “freedom fighter” too when she first made a splash with Arular. She’s toned down the LTTE rhetoric recently and, heaven help me, I’m still a huge fan…but there’s a new Sri Lankan kid on the scene, and he’s determined to inject another perspective into the fray and take her down a peg or two.

“All she wanna do is [bang][bang][bang] and [ka-ching!] take your money” he raps over MIA’s “Paper Planes” instrumental while images of the aftermath of LTTE suicide bombs flash across the screen. (The images are as gruesome as one would expect, so please consider this a disclaimer.)

The video was released less than a week ago, and keeps getting yanked off YouTube by Universal Music Group (MIA’s record label). Go to CeylonRecords to see it if the embedded video above has been disabled.

Meet Giju John, 33. Born: Thiruvananthapuram, India. Lives: Silicon Valley. Employer: Intel. He’s an electical engineer who’s got his groove on.

Fascinated by the salsa dancers at night clubs in downtown San Jose, he started taking classes several nights a week. He was so good that his instructors, members of SalsaMania, a Bay Area dance group, invited him to join their professional team and compete in the US, Europe, and Mexico. This was back in 2001.

Today, John has a successful solo Hindi/salsa career. By way of the San Jose Mercury News:

John loved making microchips tick, but he loved his dancing, too. He remembered the Indian dance steps he learned as a boy. He noodled around, adding them to salsa steps and coming up with his own Hindi/salsa genre. He’s left Salsamania for a solo career. Yes, a Hindi/salsa solo career. Why not? John was in Silicon Valley - a place with a prominent Latino population and tens of thousands of Indians and Indo-Americans. He produced a CD, “Rang Rangeeli Yeh Duniya,” … It is a CD of Hindi language songs set to the pulse of salsa, cha-cha and rap. He shot a music video. He launched a start-up, Beyond Dreamz, to produce his music. And he continued to focus on the reliability of the next generation of Intel chips.

There’s an interesting blurb from Tyler Cowen on why he thinks Desi music isn’t as popular in the West as other types of world music (at least for now… times are always a-changing, of course). Asked by a reader -

Why do the US (a wealthy country) and Africa (a poor continent) put out more influential modern music than Asia (a populated continent of both wealthy and poor extremes)?

Tyler responds -

3. The micro-tonal musics, as we find in India and the Middle East, don’t spread to many countries which do not already have a micro-tonal tradition. Cats wailing, etc., though it is a shame if you haven’t trained your ear by now to like the stuff. It’s some of the world’s finest music.

4. Many Asian musics, such as some of the major styles of China and Japan, emphasize timbre. That makes them a) often too subtle, and b) very hard to translate to disc or to radio. African-derived musics are perfect for radio or for the car.

The comnentors also make some important points. For example, even though we don’t see desi tunes in the West very much, they are all over the rest Asia (outside China/Japan/Korea), the Middle East, Africa, and even some former eastern block countries. Second, most Indian pop music it is driven by the film industry rather than by a separate “music” industry. Another commentor further expands Tyler’s point about the micro-tonal aspects of Indian music -

While there is no contemporary popular style that uses the scalar melodic microtones of the Ancient Greek enharmonic scale, both the Islamicate and Indian (Hindustani and Karnaktic) repertoires use intervals that differ audibly from the Western tempered scale by microtonal intervals, thus the Islamicate scales use both intervals very close to the western semi- and whole tones, but also intervals close to three-quarters of a tone and somewhat wider than a whole tone (with a ratio of around 8:7). A scale approximating a western diatonic scale is possible in both these repertoires, but is only one among 18 or so in wide use in Arabic/Turkisk/Persian music and among significant many more in Indian practice.

I’m going to go way way way out on a limb and toss out another personal, vastly underinformed, pet theory on this question. Instead of musical structure, language barriers, and the like I also wanna toss in some cultural context…

I was catching up on news at Huffington Post this afternoon when I came across this really disturbing (yet oddly compelling) music video by Devendra Banhart featuring his hottie girlfriend, actress Natalie Portman. I like that the video (to his song “Carmensita”) even starts out like an authentic Bollywood movie. Even though I don’t see what she sees in this disheveled mess of a Venezuelan “folk rocker,” I thank him for the new images of Portman he’s now put forever into my mind. The rest of the video (except for Natalie) is a mess of religion, mythology, and camp (Nina Paley did it better) and I can’t wait to see if the fundamentalists start rioting somewhere in the world.

Here are the lyrics in Spanish. Now I’m just afraid to see the eventual YouTube clip of Arnold that you know is coming.

Update: Looks like Manish at Ultrabrown took the time to translate, hoping to find deeper meaning perhaps

Three years ago, Indian singer-songwriter Rabbi Shergill exploded on the Indian alternative pop scene with “Bulla Ki Jaana,” a distinctively spiritual — and yet extremely catchy — hit single. The song was unusual because it took the words of the Sufi poet Bulleh Shah, and gave them a modern context. And Rabbi Shergill was himself unusual (even in India) to be a turbaned, unshorn Sikh, making a claim on popular music with a sound that has nothing in common, whatsoever, with Bhangra. From my point of view Rabbi has been a welcome presence on many levels — most of all, I would say, because he seems to aspire to a kind of seriousness and thoughtfulness in the otherwise craptastic landscape of today’s filmi music (think “Paisa Paisa” from “Apna Sapna Money Money”; or better yet, don’t don’t).

After a few years of silence (disregarding, for the moment, his contribution to the film Delhi Heights), Rabbi finally has a follow-up album, Avengi Ja Nahin (which would be “Ayegi Ya Nahin” if the song were in Hindi). The album is available at the Itunes store — so if you’re thinking of getting it, it should be easy enough to resist the temptation to download it illegally off the internets.

The video for the first single, “Avengi Ja Nahin”, can be found on YouTube:

I’m personally not that excited about it. The good part is, Rabbi has moved away from his earlier image as a kind of Sufi/Sikh spiritualist, and is here singing about a much more earthly kind of longing (i.e., for a girl: “Cut the crap/ Will you come or not? / Shade my face with your tresses/ Will you or not?”). But the bad part is, the song just isn’t that exciting.

Fortunately, the rest of the album has some much more provocative material.

I remember the year I went to the Bonnaroo Music Festival. It was the summer of 2004, and I was trying to register people there to vote. Trying because getting people that are high registered to vote was really tough. I remember that I felt like I was the only brown girl in a sea of hippy-dippies.

If only I would have gone this year. I would have definitely seen another brown person.

“This is my last show,” the rapper M.I.A. announced from the stage of That Tent, “and I’m glad I’m spending it with all my hippies.” If, as she announced at least three times, it was M.I.A.’s last gig ever, she went out with a boom….For her finale, “Paper Planes,” the audience that spilled far outside the tent pumped fists happily at the gunshot sounds that are also one of the song’s hooks. “Thanks for coming to my last gig,” she said, amid noise that continued well after she was gone. [NewYorkTimes]

Is this the end of M.I.A.? Will she actually retire, or will she retire the way Jay-Z retired and be back within another year with a new album? She did cancel her European tour so maybe this was just the residual effect of that? Or maybe she simply doesn’t like touring?

M.I.A. never liked touring that much, anyway: “I’m an artist and it’s really difficult when you become the art, and you’re like, ‘Look at me!’ every day,” she explained. “I was never supposed to be like that. I’m eight things [painter, film director, musician, etc.], and I’ve figured out that you can get pleasure from being all of them, and that’s great. But I don’t want to be the thing. And that’s what touring is.”[Paste]

Or maybe it’s because M.I.A. got engaged last month and she’s feeling like she needs to settle down…

M.I.A. announced to her audience in Edmonton, Canada that she’s engaged! Not only that, but her beau-to-be comes from an “affluent” Montreal family. Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam agreed to marry Benjamin Brewer, the frontman/vocalist/guitarist for Exit and son of Warner Music Group’s chairman and CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr.[MOG]

Is this a green card marriage or the real deal? Last year when I saw M.I.A. she kept talking about how she needed to get married so she could stay in the States. But then, why would she marry a Canadian?

Will M.I.A. retire? Will this be a love marriage for M.I.A.? Will she get kicked out of the U.S. for an expired Visa? Or is this all a part of her turning 30 meltdown? Only time will tell in the saga of M.I.A….

When I was in India in January, I ended up hanging out at Mumbai airport for about 4 hours while waiting for a domestic flight. In one corner of the terminal was a group of twenty-something year-olds - mostly boys and two girls or so — all dressed in jeans and tee-shirts, all with longish flippy hair. One of them was carrying a guitar and they were all sitting in a circle, close together, humming, strumming, and singing English songs that sounded like a cross between David Byrne and Bon Jovi. I tried to park myself near them and kept trying to figure out their story. I never did—it was the middle of the night and I was an unabashed victim of jetlag—but in my mind, I’d made up a story about them — they were college buddies traveling together (probably to Goa); maybe they were even a band, getting amped to sit on the beach around a campfire singing their songs after a full-moon rave at Anjuna Beach. …

I was reminded of this scene when I read Akshay Ahuja’s feature essay on the Indian subculture of heavy metal in the April issue of Guernica, a print and online magazine of art and politics. In “Death Metal and the Indian Identity”, writer Akshay Ahuja is asked to carry a guitar to India for his father’s colleague’s son. The guitar is to be delivered to Pradyam, who is part of “a semi-pro death metal band” called Cremated Souls (now defunct).

A simple guitar delivery leads Akshay Ahuja into the vibrant subculture of heavy metal in India, as he becomes friends with Pradyam and his band members, many of whom work at call centers.

There are several sections in the piece where the author makes small observations about the little differences and nuances between India and America, cultural and otherwise. These gave me pause, not only because some of them rang true, but also because I enjoyed the way they were being articulated in a very specific context.

For example:

A few days later Pradyum came to my parents’ house on a black Royal Enfield motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket. He was strong and well-built. I found out later that until a few years ago, he had been serious about track and field before a scooter accident had crushed his leg. Pradyum would drop me off several times after this, but this was the only time he came inside. He was always afraid that he smelled like cigarettes (he smoked constantly) and that this would offend my parents. Once in the house, he complimented my mother on her beautiful home—and such a nice garden! This immense politeness was strangely incongruous. Looking just like James Dean, he had all the American gestures of rebelliousness, but without the appropriate American attitude.

(Link stolen from PTR.) I have no idea what the song is about [translation help, anyone?], but I love the video, beats, and the sound of the rap.

People in Chicago this week might want to head down to the University of Chicago for a Desi Hop Hop Conference, HipHopistan (April 17-19). It’s a mix of performances, roundtable discussions, and hands-on workshops. Among the performers present will be Yogi B & Natchatra (featured in the video above), as well as Chee Malabar, Kabir, Abstract/Vision, and the ubiquitous DJ Rekha.

I must admit I’ve stopped aggressively following developments in Desi Hip Hop and Bhangra/hip hop fusion somewhat lately. (Have I been missing much?) If I were in Chicago, I might show up at this event just to see if anything these guys are doing might inspire renewed interest.

The New York Times has a behind-the-scenes look at a new version of Phillip Glass’s modernist opera, “Satyagraha,” which is playing at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York until May 1. There is also a companion video piece, which I could watch but not listen to from the computer I’m working on this morning.

The libretto uses the Bhagavad-Gita as a source, and the opera as a whole aims to index some of the key events in Gandhi’s early political awakening in South Africa with the plot and text of the Gita. That alone might be a little confusing, since the central question facing Arjuna in the Gita, as most readers will know, is whether or not to fight — and Gandhi’s signature political contribution (“Satyagraha”) is the philosophy of non-violent resistance. The choice could of course be defended depending on your interpretation of the Gita, and indeed, I gather that Gandhi did his own translation — with commentary — of the Bhagavad-Gita in 1924. I haven’t read Gandhi’s version, though I should note that it has recently been re-published as a volume called Bhagavad-Gita According to Gandhi.

The current interpretation of Glass’s work adds some new elements, including a strong focus on newsprint and newspaper culture as a theme in Gandhi’s story (that at least seems dead-on). There are also towering puppets, made of “newspaper, fiberglass kite poles, light cotton cloth and lots of latex glue,” which symbolize historical figures from Gandhi’s past (Tolstoy), present, and future (MLK).

It seems like an interesting work, though I have to admit I’m not sure I personally would enjoy it. (And most tickets under $100 have already been sold out, so it’s not something where a person would go casually…) Has anyone seen this? Is anyone planning to?

One of the things that marks me as an ABD is the fact that the Indian national anthem leaves me cold. Largely that’s because I don’t identify as an Indian politically, but it’s also in part because most national anthems don’t move me. The Star Spangled Banner, for example, is a horrible song. I feel something when I hear it only because I am an American and am conditioned to do so, but honestly I’d far rather have a song like the Marseillaise which is actually catchy.

The first rendition of Jana Gana Mana is sung phonetically by Kenyans who make it sound a bit like church music - it loses the rhythm that it has when Indians sing it, but it becomes etherial and quite haunting (courtesy Chick Pea):

The second rendition is A.R. Rehman’s bombastic cover, as if John Phillip Sousa decided to set a lullaby to 24 tubas:

Do you guys have a favorite version of the anthem? How about the other regional national anthems (none of which I know) - Pakistan? Bangladesh? Lanka? Nepal? Afghanistan? Feel free to share youtube links but no rickrolling please …

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today. The book I previously gushed over won the fiction prize. A Pakistan-born photojournalist named Adrees Latif of Reuters won for his picture of a journalist shot and killed by the military in Myanmar. What moved me deeply however, was reading the article that won the “Feature Writing” award. I need to provide some background before we get into that.

Normally I wouldn’t blog about a story that was one year old and has no explicit desi angle. Many of you probably already read it. However, there is something universal about the…incident…chronicled in this article. One of the things I have come to appreciate about a blogging community like SM is that we (bloggers and commenters) get to share our appreciation (or criticism) of art with each other. Whether it is via the comment section of a book review or in the form of a heads-up about some upcoming event, blogs make great forums to share thoughts which may be incongruous with the rest of our days. Regardless of why you visit SM in particular, I think the bloggers here feel pretty honored that you would “waste” part of your day on our site, reading what we produce (even if you know you could do much better). Just this morning I was visiting Unclutterer to figure out how to waste less time during the day and to streamline my chaotic life. Sitting here typing this now (instead of packing for a business trip tomorrow) I’ve changed my mind. We should stop and waste time during the day if it so moves us.

And that brings me to the year old article from the Washington Post that won a Pulitzer today. You can’t read it yet, however. First you have to play this audio file. Once you start listening to it you can move on to the next line.

It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?… [Link]

Writer Gene Weingarten helped orchestrate a brilliant “stunt” on commuters passing through L’Enfant Plaza last January in order to take a stab at settling the debate above. He took one of the most gifted violin players in the world, dressed him up as a humble busker in jeans, and asked him to play his 3.5 million dollar violin on the metro platform. Who would recognize brilliance? Who would even stop?

To mark Women’s History Month, I’ve been featuring works by desi women poets in a “Poetry Friday” series all month long. Here’s the last of four installments (1, 2, and 3.)

Songs are poetry, and singer-songwriter Rupa Marya has been on my radar for the past couple of weeks, ever since I found out about her world music band Rupa and the April Fishes (think the Indigo Girls meets traces of Natalie Merchant meets “classic French chanson, Argentinean tango, Gypsy swing, American folk, Latin cumbias, and even hints of Indian ragas”). [It turns out that Abhi wrote about them last year. link]

The group’s debut album “Extraordinary Rendition” has been picked up by Cumbancha, a record label founded by the head of music research and product development at Putomayo World Music, Jacob Edgar. It releases on May 1, and Rupa and her gang are in the middle of a North American tour that includes NYC and the Montreal Jazz Festival.

A musician, songwriter, and (yes!) physician, the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants spent part of her childhood in France. Many of the songs on the band’s new album are in French. From an article in the SF Chronicle:

The years between the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 and the 2004 presidential election changed her outlook on life and prompted [Marya] to alter her sound completely, by writing in French.

“What happens if you communicate … in a way that people who don’t speak that language can understand what you’re saying?” Marya says. “Especially when the world was becoming much more afraid of differences. That’s when everything sort of took off into another place.

Her song Une Américaine à Paris, I think, conveys some of her post 9/11 reflections. The lyrics (reprinted with permission of Rupa and the April Fishes) follow, both in the original French and in Rupa’s English translation.

Every so often I link to musicians I learn about via MTV India, a desi TV channel I subscribe to at home. Sometimes readers groan in horror at my taste (“God this is a horrible song”), but for some reason I persist…

Today, meet Raghu Dixit, whose song “Hey Bhagwan” is starting to show up in the rotation on MTV India:

The sound quality in the YouTube upload is poor, but at least you get a sense of what the music is like (you can hear a higher quality preview of the song here; also, another video sharing site, Vimeo, is carrying the video). I also like the lyrics (My rough translation of the chorus: “Hey Bhagwan, give me life all over again”).

Raghu Dixit also has a blog, with a detailed account of the shooting of this video at Mehboob Studios in Bombay.

In the U.S. Raghu Dixit’s CD is on sale at CD Baby, where you can also preview the other songs on the album (check out “Mysore Se Ayi”).

As has been said (by some of the individual bloggers that write here) many times in the past, we don’t always have the time to blog all the wonderful news tips, events, causes, new blogs, etc. that are sent to us via the tip line, email, or the top secret phone line. It isn’t that your tip/cause/event isn’t worthy, it’s just that there aren’t enough hours in the day to blog everything and still pursue a normal, blog-free life. In order to be worth crafting into a post in the first place, some items take a lot more research and individual interest than others. We all attempt to add some value to any item we post. We encourage you to use the News Tab and Events Tab as much as possible.

That being said, I did want to draw your attention to three recent “tips” that I didn’t want falling through the cracks:

1) The fellowship application deadline for Indicorps is fast approaching and I know there are many SM readers who would make perfect candidates:

Who: You! Indicorps seeks to engage the most talented young Indians from around the world on the frontlines of India’s most pressing challenges; in the process, we aim to nurture a new brand of socially conscious leaders with the character, knowledge, commitment, and vision to transform India and the world.

Why Now: We are currently recruiting soon-to-be college graduates and professionals of Indian origin for our August 2008-2009 Fellowship. There are over 50 exciting community-based projects ranging from educating tribal youth in Maharashtra to increasing production of natural dye based products in Karnataka.

2) There is a new blog worth checking out called Out Against Abuse. It is a forum dedicated to issues surrounding domestic abuse in the South Asian community:

Out against abuse is an online blog based forum created to bring together activists, volunteers, survivors, and members of the community to encourage the discussion of gender related abuse and how it affects the South Asian community. We hope through constant dialogue and collaboration we can all learn from each other and work to educate our community on how to end gender related violence in our homes and lives. [Link]

3) Finally, The Kominas have a new album out titled, “Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay.” Taz featured them in a post back in 2006. I hope they get on to the new Harold and Kumar movie soundtrack with that title:

This is the highly anticipated debut release of quite possibly the most popular Taqwacore band in existence. The CD was recorded with the band fresh off the first US Taqwacore tour. The CD includes old crowd favorites like “Suicide Bomb the Gap” and “Sharia Law in the USA,” but also includes newer songs with a more punk edge, like “Blow Shit Up.” [Link]

Keep sending in the tips. We won’t be able to blog each one but we do read them all.

It’s difficult for me to wake up once I hibernate for this long in our North Dakota Bunker, but for few things, like good music, I’ll tend to get out of my bunk for awhile. The thing that woke me up this time was the familiar sound of musical adventure in the form of bhajans (Devotional Songs).

I disliked bhajans growing up. I don’t know if it was the monotonous/repetitive tone of the vocals or my inability to understand the words or meanings of the songs. I was able to avoid bhajans from the time I left home for college until a trip to India (I know, in India, how cliché?), four years ago, when the songs just seemed to click as a natural soundtrack to my travels. I started to appreciate the songs more. Maybe it was the place and time, or maybe I was able to contextualize the songs more, but I think I was finally able to grasp the intent of the song, of its purpose as a tool for Bhakti (Devotion).

So it was with much excitement when I saw the most recent musical release from one of my favorite global music pioneers, San Francisco based producer/DJ Cheb I Sabbah, entitled Devotion. This album, his seventh on six degrees records, is his fourth album focused on religious music from India — the first three, also available on Six Degrees Records are Shri Durga (1999), Maha Maya: Shri Durga Remixed (2000), and Krishna Lila (2002)-and while mostly similar in content, Devotion features music from three religious traditions found on the Indian Subcontinent, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Sufi Islam.

It’s important to note that Cheb i Sabbah’s work is not a “remix” album, of bhajans simply reworked electronically. The eight songs on Devotion are entirely organic creations of Cheb and various artists, including Master Saleem, classical songstress Shubha Mudgal, and the bhajan maestro Anup Jalota. The album opens strong with Jai Bhavani (Praise to Durga) with vocals by Jalota, in a typical “call and response” structured bhajan that builds slowly into a frenetic ending. Other highlight tracks include Morey Pya Bassey, featuring an inspiring Mudgal vocal, and Qalanderi, featuring the vocals of Riffat Sultana, and reinvented by Cheb I Sabbah to create a from of contemporary qawwali. (Click here for a free download of Qalanderi, courtesy of Six Degreees).

Cheb is in in typical form on Devotion, intricately weaving modern sounds with ancient vocals, without losing the music’s underlying intent, Devotion. His production, is as always, impeccable. I should be clear, the songs on Devotion are slower than those on his other albums, and unlike Shri Durga , Maha Maya, or Krishna Lila, I can’t picture hearing any of these tunes on the dancefloor, outside of Qalanderi. As Anna mentioned last week, Mutineers in DC will have a chance to find out what songs Cheb i Sabbah plays at one of his shows when he takes the stage at the famed DC venue, Bohemian Caverns. Joining him for the show will be one of my favorite turtablists Janaka Selekta, V:shal Kanwar, DJ Darko, and Julez. Bohemian Caverns is located at 2001 Eleventh Street N.W. Washington, D.C. Hope to see you there.

In this edition:

1) I buzz the hive mind, about Jackson Heights
2) a cool event in DC next Friday, for a good cause
3) mentions of a NY meetup

::

I get a lot of different requests from you mutineers, and though I am usually not able to write back, I try to help whenever I can. I’ve also noticed that sometimes, I have a few things I’d like to bring up, but they don’t seem worthy of an entire post— asking what days might be good for a New York meetup, for example. So, every so often, I’m going to put up a post called Salmagundi [I like the word so much, it used to be an entire category on the right sidebar of my personal blog :)] and it will contain a few utterly unrelated but mutinous things. Either that, or I’ll use SM’s newly-created Twitter account to ask questions like the one below:

Dear Anna

I was wondering if you knew when Jackson Heights would be closed if they close at all? We are planning on coming to NYC for 2 days as my husband needs a visa. So I thought we would go to Jackson Heights when somebody mentioned that they were not sure but it may be closed on either Monday or Tuesday.

That’s a question from one of our faithful readers. I want to help, because next week is spring break and that’s when they want to go, but I don’t know the answer! I went to Jackson Heights a few times when I lived in NYC, but I never did anything useful, like pay attention. I usually bought pista kulfi on the street (blew my mind, every time…I could do this in America? Don’t hate, I grew up somewhere 98% pale), looked for Hema Malini DeeWeDees and then got back on the subway. So, what’s up Jackson Heights-area mutineers? When, if ever, does brown-town shut down?

::

Next chunk of stew-y goodness: A special event, NEXT WEEK (thanks, Kenyandesi) at the historic Bohemian Caverns in DC (now home to SubDrift), starring Cheb i Sabbah, someone I tend to associate with home (yay urrea).

Legendary DJ, producer and global electronica icon Cheb i Sabbah returns to DC for the first time in many years with his special blend of outernational beats and lush organic soundscapes at electroganic 001 on march 14 @ bohemian caverns!

Joining him on the decks will be one of San Francisco’s best DJs, Janaka Selekta, as well as DC’s own v:shal kanwar, mr. darko and julez.

Proceeds to benefit local women’s shelters through Race Against Domestic Violence…

What do you get when you combine a half-Black, half-Irish Mom with a Guyanese-Indian Dad? A lovely Pinay woman named Thara, with an even lovelier voice, that’s what. ;)

Blogger Cherez (thanks!) helpfully left a tip on our News Tab which inspired much googling and listening after my very late dinner. I had no expectations as I surfed and contemplated a possible post, but then I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard; this girl can sing. In fact, she can sing well enough that I’ve finally listened* to a Jay Sean joint! The duo collaborated on the single “Murder”.

The second time I hit play on the video above, for Thara’s “Jump on”, I focused on her voice vs. the video. I did that for two reasons:

1) The video doesn’t do the song justice

2) She really does look like one of those Sigma Omicron Pi princesses who inspired all the boys (Filipino or not) to go to MGA Kapatid meetings at Davis.

Hence my “pinay” joke. :) I know. She’s a quarter white, a quarter black and half-brown, but to me, she looks Asian. In fact, the first time I watched “Jump on”, I nearly jumped, because I swear I used to race this girl (and her white, ‘92 GSR) to the last covered parking space across from Freeborn Hall at Davis, every other day. Couldn’t be Thara, though…she was six back in 1993. ;)

If Thara, whose full name is Thara Natalie Prashad, looks familiar, here’s why:

Via Pickled Politics, here is an upbeat track from a British singer named Bishi:

She’s rocking the sitar, and the music has kind of a new wave synth feel, with a driving bass. (Or whatever — we could also just call it London pop music.)

There’s also this slower song (with a pretty silly video).

A couple of quick music notes for SM readers. Up first, Chee Malabar has released a few songs he has been working on as an internet mix tape titled “Unearthed Hurt and Other Disappointments.” From my past reviews you guys know that I dig his stuff. You can download the songs for free here (.zip file).

A friend of mine also tipped me off to a new Hindi-ish song by Timbaland (he who just remixes other peoples stuff) with “Amar & Jim Beanz.” The song is titled “Bombay” and although there is no video for it yet, you can at least listen to it in the Youtube clip below:

So…I meant to have this post up last week, but I have pneumonia and my life has come to a screeching halt after one damning chest x-ray. Despite such extenuating circumstances, I feel terrible about the delay, because the video embedded above, for New Yorkers Soul Tap featuring Nivla and P. Oberoi’s “Be Easy (Koi Naa)” is part of a contest sponsored by Doritos called “Crash the Superbowl”, for which voting ends either tomorrow or tonight (I’ve read both dates, so just vote asap).

I’m slightly comforted by the fact that the grassroots outreach on behalf of this South Asian American quartet has been solid, so you probably didn’t need SM to tell you about them (though you may have read about them on our news tab). I’m massively tickled by the fact that Nivla peppers rap with Malayalam phrases like I do my posts, though he is not as consumed with the word “kundi”. Despite that minor shortcoming, when he’s flowin “edi penne…ingota va “, I’m goin’, “HELL YES!”.

Barest of details about the group that is fighting off two Texans for a shot at an Interscope record deal plus sixty-seconds of prime-eyeball time for their video, during the biggest bowl of ‘em all:

Straight Outta Compton my inbox, an invitation to the first Subcontinental Drift of 2008. This event/collective is one of my favorite things about living in DC. Come find out why for yourself:

2007 sure brought some of the district’s talents out of the basement and into the spotlight. It was nothing less than inspiring to witness the expressive potential of our collective South Asian community.

Subcontinental Drift is excited to be back with the first open mic night of 2008 on Monday, January 28th at 7pm. Come bless us in this new year with your art, your thoughts, your ideas, your presence. The mic will be open from 7-9 pm (to sign up for a spot, shoot an email with your name and performance genre to subdriftdc@gmail.com). And stay for the after party with some chill beats and groovin’.

Where?

Bohemian Caverns, at the corner of 11th and U. We’ll be upstairs. www.bohemiancaverns.com

When?

Doors open at 6:30pm.

More info?

myspace.com/subcontinentaldrift or email subdriftdc@gmail.com

I never go out on Mondays or Tuesdays because those are my most challenging (read: no lunch) days at work, but I’m about to do some serious juggling in order to attend this— THAT’S how amazing Subcontinental Drift is. It is worth the stress and exhaustion. ;) If you are in DC, please come out so that you, too, can babble beatifically about all the awesomeness. And if you are not in DC, remember that it is a new year; resolve to start something similar where you are. Abhi did it fabulously in Houston, so can you. Everyone deserves to drift.

I reviewed Falu’s recent CD back in August. Now, she and her band have been featured in a Fox show called Fearless Music, which generally airs late at night on Saturdays (this may vary, depending on where you live). This is the song “Rabba,” from the show:

(I like the Hindi + rock sound… Though I wonder how it will play, as it were, in Peoria?)

Incidentally, Falu will be teaming up with DJ Rekha for a new, hybrid live music + DJ dance party at Canal Room, on January 31. The event is called “Bangles and Backbeats.”

Quick, when was the last time I wrote a blog entry on the topic of high fashion for SM? Do some of you view me as a mere niche blogger who only writes about Antarctic exploration or freaky kids? These days, bloggers must remain sufficiently versatile so as to compete in a cut-throat business, one where the profit margins are razor thin and the trolls are out with knifes. And so I bring you news of designer Marc Jacobs’ spring/summer 2008 line (thanks for the tip “Meenbeen”):

Marc Jacobs can do anything he wants now. He’s even feeling confident enough to open up about a troubled private life that he once kept very private. And one expression of that confident spirit is the injection of willfulness he’s given to his collections. It’s a definite boon to the menswear in his second line, which can occasionally seem a little too close to the contents of College Boy’s closet. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but Jacobs has proved himself a virtuoso at distilling the talents of his various collaborators, and he has some keen ones at M. by M. We could rightly expect a little more. With this latest effort, we got it.

The menswear took the mixed-up, mumbled-up, shook-up world that Marc presented for his signature Spring collection and toned it down to one key discombobulation: asymmetry. [Link]

The above review was written during 2007’s Fashion Week in NYC. Since the majority of the clothes-buying-public didn’t attend Fashion Week, they will mostly base their opinion of his men’s clothing line on print ads seen in prominent men’s magazines, and based on the reviews of prominent fashion bloggers like myself. Some of you may recognize one of the models he has chosen to show off his new men’s line: the musician M.I.A. Below each photograph I will comment on the effectiveness of these ads from the perspective of a male with a disposable income.

In the above picture M.I.A. poses like that one potential child molester uncle in the family who the relatives all shield their kids from. Her clammy skin and disheveled hair seem to scream, “what!?” and I imagine that in the next frame (had it been published) her head and chest would have been lurching forward as she said just that into the camera. This look would suit a stockbroker or I-banker, the kind who will never be the best in his field, but has some cocaine to party with after work…so its all good. And those hands. Greedy, clutching, talon-like hands that will find a way to collect what’s coming to them. All things eventually find their way into those hands so you may as well just “give it up” without a struggle. Belt not needed for a look like this (in case you were wondering). The man wearing those pants shouldn’t have to be bothered with a belt anyways. Those pants need to be easy to pull down and easy to put on in a hurry when he needs to sneak out. And he sneaks out often. The tie? The subliminal message being sent by this ad is that even if you think the tie is ugly, you can still use it for something else. Like to tie something in place. Utilitarian clothing is in for 2008. [As a side note, this is the most attractive I’ve ever seen M.I.A. look, and I’ve seen her up close. I kept looking to see if there was a wire leading from one of those red sockets at the bottom left of the photograph, into her, to make her so electric].

Yay for reader Pallavi, who alerted me to this life-altering news: Sanjaya is back! How’s THAT for some Friday fluff? Via Page Six(sixsix):

No this isn’t a game of: “one of these things is not like the other.” PageSix.com has learned that Sanjaya Malakar and his sister Shyamali are in talks to headline their own variety TV series called The Sanjaya and Shyamali Show! The program plans to showcase a special blend of singing, dancing, comedy and, naturally, their lush manes of hair.

I am glad Shyamali is part of this project. I didn’t really see much of her because she was eliminated from AI and then her brother became this cultural sensation. It’ll be interesting to get to know her better, so that people are aware of more than her occupation.

Sanjaya, who was spotted outside The Groundlings Theater on Melrose Ave over the weekend, was actually at the comedy mecca to cast improv actors for the show, his manager Suzy Sachs tells PageSix.com. “He has a huge following and a background in musical theater,” she says, adding that the duo is currently in negotiations with MTV and plans to film a pilot in early spring.

The Groundlings = teh awesome. Peep their alums and see for yourself, if you haven’t heard of them.

But it gets better Fan-jaya’s! The formerly faux-hawked wonder, who is either the most loved or loathed contestant in the history of American Idol depending on your opinion…

We interrupt this blockquote to declare, loved! Loved! Loved!

…is also prepping to release his first CD. “He’s in rehearsals for a new album,” Sachs tells PageSix.com. Sanjaya is studying with famous vocal coach Seth Riggs (who has worked with artists like Kelly Clarkson, Faith Hill, Ray Charles and Ricky Martin) and is heading into the studio this weekend to begin laying down some preliminary tracks. “He did very well,” Riggs tells PageSix.com of their sessions. “I wish I could have done what he’s doing at 18-years-old.”

In her email to me, Pallavi asked:

Is this the 1st potential live variety show in America featuring Indian-Americans?

I don’t know mutineers, is it? :) Oh, I must prepare! I’ll need puns, and anecdotes and wacky terms of endearment, oh my. This is Sanjaya we’re discussing! That screen-filling smile. That highly-ductile, malleable hair. That bizarre ability to only make one pale, pigtailed-girl cry uncontrollably for the camera…it’s all so…bloggable.

Abhi posted a link on the news tab which I just had to click…Guns N’ Roses? Sweet Child o’ Mine?

Indian-ishtyle??

I thought my brain would implode at the thought but I was hooked immediately. That song (and that group) dominate my memories of my freshman year in high school— mostly because I hated myself for secretly kind of liking it.

Check out the following video, which is currently in rotation on MTV India:

Who are all these people? I hadn’t heard of any of them: the producer and male rapper calls himself Deep (he seems to be an ABD rapper). The woman singing in Hindi (with the short hair) is Pratichee (she is definitely a DBD). The woman singing R&B style, in English, is Janina Gavankar (who has had a role on “The L Word”; she was also featured in an earlier Sepia Mutiny post by Abhi). And the woman rapping — ferociously! — in Punjabi is Navraaz (could not find any links; I have no idea who she is).

I won’t try and translate the Punjabi rap (any takers?), except to say that the English chorus (Back the ** off me) makes a good summary. (I might also add that the lyrics might make even Ms. Hard Kaur blush…)

Incidentally, the label responsible for this track, IndiAudio, has made an MP3 available for downloading here.

What say you?

Between the snow, the looming holidays, sundry drama and Keeping up with the Kardashians marathons, it’s gettin’, it’s gettin’, it’s gettin kinda hectic these days. It’s been heavy in addition to hectic, depending on which thread you’ve been marinating in (despite Abhi’s heroically adorable post about every college male’s dream sitch). Time for some high jinks and hilarity, I say.

The link to this wideo has been sent to me so many times, all that copying, pasting and emailing should be put to good use, right? Who cares. You’re gettin’ some Bharath und Bollywood, whether you want some or not. Don’t blame me, blame SAFO; this concoction has the manicured fingerprints of those over-educated hipster doofuses all over it.

If this mesmerizing mash up doesn’t inspire you to…um…do…something, then perhaps the crushing pressure of high expectations will— soon after Denton-offspring Wonkette posted this vid, a commenter thither wondered what we were thinking, here at Sepia Mutiny. Don’t disappoint everyone now— it’s bad enough that you didn’t go to med school, you sepia slacker. What’s that? Oh. Well if you did go to med school, it’s bad enough that it was overseas. And if you…ad absurdum.

Watching the following video (from the Hindi film Johnny Gaddaar), it occurred to me that Hard Kaur is in some ways the British/Desi equivalent of Missy Elliott:

Like Missy, Hard Kaur depends a lot on the producers she’s worked with. In this case, the song wouldn’t be much at all without the ideas and beat from the legendary Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. In Missy’s case, of course, the wizard behind all of her big hits has been Timbaland. Admittedly, neither Missy nor Hard Kaur could be called serious “auteurs” — but then, they’re not trying to be Radiohead, they’re trying to make money.

Like Missy, Hard Kaur has become a success based on her talent and street swagger, not so much her looks. (Though I really don’t want to get into a “hot or not” discussion of looks if it can be avoided; my point is, there are plenty of pretty pop princesses out there whose careers have gone nowhere, while Hard Kaur is crossing over into Bollywood like a bullet.) Just like Missy, there’s something about Hard Kaur’s rapping that has nothing to do with clever production tricks or computer software; there’s a realness and hip hop confidence (i.e., “hardness”) there that can only come from the street. Finally, both Missy and Hard Kaur have a particular fondness for a) “songs that make you dance,” and b) songs about intoxication (alcohol or drugs).

I’m not saying that Hard Kaur is ever going to make as much money as Missy Elliott, but I don’t think she quite gets the props she deserves for her originality. Is it because she’s too ‘beisharam’ (shameless)? Are people threatened by this Punjabi Kuri who writes songs about getting drunk, and her need for “Sexy Boys” (who should be, as she says, “thora sa lafanga/I need a gangster”)?

In effect, what I’m saying is that I, for one, am a fan of Ms. Hard Kaur — though I concede I may be the only one here. (I also still like Missy, though in my view she hasn’t done anything inspired in awhile.)

People in New York tonight might want to stop by the release party for the Basement Bhangra CD, which is officially coming out today. It’s been 10 years of Basement Bhangra nights at S.O.B.’s — and for all that time DJ Rekha has held it down on the ones and twos. (It’s also, coincidentally, been 10 years since the first ‘Mutiny’ party, and the old gang are coming out of hiatus in a couple of weeks for their own celebration — with guests Talvin Singh, and Shaair and Func.)

Rekha’s approach here is to take some familiar Bhangra anthems (like Lehmber Hussainpuri’s “Tin Cheejha”) and mix them up with solid Bhangra tracks most people probably won’t know (Sunil Sehgal’s “Fakir”). The “Basement Bhangra anthem” that opens the CD is really cool — respect to Wyclef Jean (“Mr. International”) for contributing an original rap, and Queens-based Bikram Singh is as usual great (he was also responsible for the absurdly catchy “American Jugni” song a couple of years ago). Incidentally, you can listen to the “Basement Bhangra Anthem” here.

Many well-known remix masters are represented here, including Panjabi MC, DJ Sanj, Dr. Zeus, and Tigerstyle. There are also a couple of tracks from Hard Kaur, a British Punjabi pop star who has been kind of omnipresent for the past couple of years (see “Glassy”). But alongside some staples there are also some surprises, including a track by the drum ‘n bass influenced Dhol Foundation, as well tracks from producers I hadn’t heard of (Ominous DJs).

I should note that this CD isn’t by itself a “definitive” statement of where Bhangra music is today — but that probably wouldn’t be possible to do in a single hour of music anyway. In the liner notes, Rekha describes it instead as a “cross-section of a living musical culture that connects New York City to the Punjab,” and that sounds about right to me. Some people, including commenters on Cicatrix’s earlier post on this, have criticized the selection of songs here, but I actually think the choices are quite good. Some hard core bhangra downloaders listeners may be tired of “Tin Cheejha,” but I suspect most people — including readers of Sepia Mutiny — haven’t even heard of Lehmber Hussainpuri (though they may have heard his hit song). For them, the Basement Bhangra CD is going to be like a one-hour living room Bhangra party to go.

And doesn’t everybody need one of those every once in a while?

More reviews: here and here. The Basement Bhangra CD is available from Amazon.

Our favorite Sri Lankan world runner played at Terminal 5 in NYC last night, as part of the CMJ showcase. Terminal 5 is cavernous space with two tiers of balconies, a giant bar island, and draconian crowd-control policies. They made you get into lines to go outside for a smoke.

Doors opened at 7pm. So with nothing but a faintly entertaining opening act (“we’re the new Black Beastie Boys!” was probably their best line) that didn’t do much to help kill the time until M.I.A. came on, people got drunk. Finally around 10pm her presence was felt rather than seen - a roaring, sucking noise as people stampeded toward the stage.

I think she opened with “Bamboo Banga,” but I don’t really remember too well. The next 80 minutes flew by in a blur of jaw-dropping energy, radiating charisma, mind-blowing mashups and the surreal spectacle of pretty white girls moaning “ajaa!!”

If you’re South Asian and live in New York, you’ve probably heard about Basement Bhangra, maybe stopped by a few (every month) times, and possibly brought all your friends to boot. It’s ridiculous to think that the monthly bhangra party at S.O.B’s has been going on for over ten years. Clubland years are like dog years - this thing should be arthritic and/or dead by now. But instead, DJ Rekha (disclaimer: I’m a friend) still brings live-wire energy and mad-scientist enthusiasm to the party as she continues to expand her empire (Basement, Bollywood Disco Mutiny, NYU Artist-in-Residency), relentless in her determination to bring joyous bhangra to the masses.

To that end, Rekha’s releasing a Basement Bhangra CD. According to the press release:

This 17 track album is a mix CD – with four exclusive tracks including two original productions… DJ Rekha has collaborated with an array of incredible artists including Wyclef Jean, Panjabi MC, and Bikram Singh – to name a few. The album skillfully weaves together Punjabi folk traditions and dancehall rhythms from Jamaica and DJ techniques that are 100% New York.

The album comes out on October 23rd. More info, track listing and ordering here.

Madlib is a prolific California-based hip hop producer who normally works with alternative rappers like Talib Kweli. Recently he released an album called Beat Konducta in India, and I finally got my hands on it a couple of days ago. Here’s a track that has been posted at Imeem:

And here’s the YouTube video montage, which is also an album promo:

What do you think? I love the video, but I’m still trying to decide whether I like the album as a whole. I feel like this album should come attached to an hour-long video montage, edited as sharply as the two minute promo above. That way you get the hip hop sensibility and the sense of filmi nostalgia (and kitsch) all wrapped up together. The music by itself is ‘cool’ (like the track ‘Movie Finale’ above; or ‘More Rice’, which you can sample at Amazon); with video, there is something schizophrenic and exiting happening. There is certainly an art to remixing and reworking old music (and Madlib certainly knows what he’s doing on this score), but with film music in particular it seems somewhat incomplete if the video isn’t ‘remixed’ in parallel.

(Or we could just can the whole thing and sit around watching old Rajnikant videos on YouTube all day.)

The following video has already been viewed 3.2 million times on YouTube, so it hardly needs a link from me. But what the hell, it’s funny:

Penn Masala have a new CD out, and they were recently featured on NPR. But why do I have the feeling that they will now be best known — and beloved — by college students everywhere for “The Facebook Skit”?

Via Nirali, check out Shaair and Func. Shaair (think “Shayr”) is a desi girl who grew up in the DC area; Func is a Goan from Mumbai who grew up listening to Metallica. What you get when you mix the two is something that sounds like this:

She reminds me a little of Nikka Costa… what do you think? The best part of the profile at Nirali for me were these paragraphs:

And so began a relationship—”We fell in love with each other’s person first,” stresses Dogra—based on the mutual desire to make accessible music, free of the pressure to impose a contrived “Indian” sound (think twangy sitar solos and misplaced tabla beats). “Before I met Randolph, producers would be like, ‘Write a line in Hindi’,” says Dogra. “I can’t even speak Hindi! I’d listen to it and think it was so insincere.”

Give their debut CD a listen, and it’s obvious that Shaa’ir and Func are staying true to their mission of keeping themes universal. “We want to pave a better way for the next generation of not just Indian kids, but kids the world over who want to put out an idea. They can do it without having that ‘Who are you?’ pressure on themselves,” explains Correia. It’s increasingly apparent that the two are committed to their goal as they sing about everything from illegal-alien ancestry to the downsides of long-distance love. (link)

A video with higher production value than the one above is “Oops”. Lots of eye candy, but I’m not feeling the song as much as “Hit,” which I linked to above. Another one to check out is “Government,” a spoken word poem over music.

The Himalayan Project, consisting of the duo Chee Malabar and Raymond “Rainman” Lie (see some previous posts here, here, here, and here) recently released their third album, titled Broken World.

Himalayan Project’s third studio album, Broken World, is finally available for audible consumption!… The crew would like to thank everyone who’s waited patiently for this labor of love to get done, you won’t be disappointed. For those of you who would prefer do legally download your copy, hang tight, it should be a couple weeks tops before it gets to your favorite digital distributor.

One last note/favor, if you like what you hear, don’t be shy… hit up the comments page of the store you bought it from (CDbaby, itune, Rhapsody, etc.) and write a review. Hell, if you didn’t like it, write one too and let us know what you didn’t like (if you really don’t have a life and like stomping out the dreams of independent artists just trying to do their thing ;). [Link]

Here are the lyrics of the track Manchild (which can be heard on their MySpace page):

I read brown’s the new black, thanks to henna and bhangra,
Shit, I’m thinking lock-up in a Guantanamo slammer,
Geronimo Pratt style, panther type stances,
To keep raisin’ questions till they can’t suppress the answers,
Camphor based prose, C10-H16-0 flow,
I brandish the stress my pops’ handsome face shows,
Homes I don’t dance for dough or pamper hoes, case closed
No rest haven, I’m Wes Craven when they bring the breaks in,
Murderous Raven, staving off your blocks’ onslaught,
Playa, break down lines like Ray Lewis and make music,
That’s makes Buddhists embrace Uzi’s,
And let the spark from their shot light the darkest region in your
heart. [Link]

Is it already that time again? As if my weekend couldn’t get any better, Subcontinental Drift, DC’s singular South Asian music/dance/open mic night, is back this Sunday.

If Subcontinental Drift sounds familiar, it’s because I wrote about this rapture on SM before, here. If you live in DC, you are fortunate that your comrades in browndom have come together to create such a fantastic event; support their considerable efforts, come out and play, you’ll be thrilled you did.

This Sunday night a recently-hatched event is descending again on the district. If you’ve been before, you know it is not to be missed; if you haven’t, don’t miss it. It was born early in 2007 when a handful of the District’s desis (Mona, Munish, Nabeel, Nina, Sophie, Surabhi & Vishal) graciously took it upon themselves to fill an artistic void in our community. Thus was born Subcontinental Drift: a creative experiment in open space(s) where artists, poets, songwriters, lyricists & others can share and showcase their talents with the local South Asian/South Asian American diaspora.

Join us this weekend. Observe, absorb, listen, learn, encounter, experience, perform (really, you can - email subdriftdc@gmail.com)! Indulge. [quoted from an awesome email]

Every edition of SD is precious, but this one is more so— Seema Patel, a.k.a. SM commenter “SP”, a.k.a. one of the forces behind Team Vinay (and the heart of their DC operations) is leaving the right coast to go home. Join me, Sunday, as I gnash my teeth at our misfortune. Baltimore/D.C.’s loss is California’s gain. Sigh.

Subcontinental Drift

Sunday, September 9, 2007

6 PM - 11 PM - (Cost: Free)

Bohemian Caverns
2001 11th St. NW
Washington, D.C.

Metro: Green + Yellow- U Street station

It wasn’t just standing room only, last time— we took over the street. This event, let’s do the same. Finish your Art…there are kids starving in cities with less Desis.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has a new CD out. While that may seem unlikely, given that he passed away ten years ago, it’s true. Italian/British producer Gaudi took old master tapes from the early 1970s in the possession of Nusrat’s original Pakistani record label (Rehmat Gramohpone), and reinterpreted them with Dub/Reggae beats. The sound is fresh, if not technically new — a successful way to bring back the ghost of Nusrat in a recording studio. Dub Qawwali has recently been released on Six Degrees Records; Gaudi was interviewed by NPR here.

Dub Qawwali is a collection of Nusrat songs that, for the most part, I hadn’t heard before, though admittedly my Nusrat collection is hardly definitive. The production quality, for those who pay attention to such things, is flawless, and the sound is “warm” — mainly because Gaudi used live musicians and vintage analog equipment to create a rich soundscape. It’s most definitely not the cheesy Bally Sagoo remix approach, where you get the feeling that the whole thing was put together on a computer by a stoned teenager. Here is how the record label describes the approach:

The use of vintage analogue studio equipment and dub production techniques such as tape echoes, valve amps, Fender Rhodes, spring reverbs, Hammond organ and Moog, characterizes Gaudi’s production style, however it is not without its share of 21st century intervention and wizardry… Individual tracks from the original 70’s multi-track recordings often contained multiple parts together on them. These had to then be carefully cleaned up in order to make them usable in a way that would enable the composition of these new works. (This included much of the vocal parts which were mixed in the same track as the Harmonium and other instruments!) (link)

While on the subject of pop culture as a force for Good, I thought it would be interesting to point mutineers at a current chart topping song in Pakistan. “Yeh Hum Naheen” (“This is Not Us”) has been making waves and the title is apparently becoming a catch phrase of sorts.

Thanks to the magic of YouTube, we present it here with English subtitles -

Personally, the tune doesn’t move me too much but the message kicks ass….

Via Shivam Vij, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India.” The song is performed here by Ayane Iwanaga.

This version is a more musically sophisticated, “professional” performance, but it somehow feels a little colder, less sweet. There’s also the vocal version of the song, which was originally part of an opera, in Swedish here.

Happy independence day.

People interested in Asian Underground music have probably already heard of Falu, a singer who first appeared on Karsh Kale’s Realize back in 2001. Since then she’s been featured on a number of other people’s CDs, but today she releases her own, self-titled CD. Rather than going for more in the way electronic beats, here Falu works with a live rock/desi fusion band, doing a mix of English and Hindi/Urdu songs.

It’s a strong first effort. Falu has trained in Hindustani classical music with Ustad Sultan Khan, and there are several nice Hindi/Urdu tracks on the CD. The strongest is certainly her version of “O Lal Meri” (aka, “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar”); here the music is traditional, and Falu gets to really show off her Qawwali chops. I found Falu’s version of Asha Bhosle’s “Dum Maro Dum” less exciting, perhaps because I’m too attached to the original — and to Asha Bhosle’s voice (still, Falu’s rock/fusion band seems to be having a good time rocking out a bit here). Also good are “Rabba” and “Poojan.” Ustad Sultan Khan himself shows up playing Sarangi on two tracks, and he joins in the vocals to “Copper Can.”

Thus far, I’ve been somewhat less excited by the English language songs on the CD, though there are some notable exceptions. The lyrics to “Without You” are a mix of English and Urdu, and it’s intriguing to hear Falu do Qawwali-esque vocal trills on the English as well as the Urdu parts of the song. “Hey Baby” is entirely in English (albeit with a desi musical touch), though from listening to the lyrics it occurred to me that Falu is replicating in a secular, English, rock idiom the themes that are also prevalent Qawwali music: longing, desire, and the inaccessibility of the beloved. The difference, of course, is that in Urdu the longing is for God, while in English the longing is for a lover. (Note: you can listen to “Hey Baby” on Falu’s Myspace page)

You can get this CD at Falu’s website; it’s also available on Itunes and at Amazon. Readers in the New York area might want to hit the CD release party at Canal Room tomorrow (more details here). I won’t be able to go; perhaps Falu and her band will come to Philly sometime…

[Disclosure: the folks at Press Here music sent me a review copy of this CD.]

Tipster Sparky left a link to an interview with MIA on the News Tab. The part that seemed most interesting had to do with the role producer Diplo has played in her music. According to M.I.A., the influence of Diplo has been seriously overplayed by the media, for reasons that might have to do with gender and race:

M.I.A.: Yesterday I read like five magazines in the airplane— it was a nine hour flight— and three out of five magazines said “Diplo: the mastermind behind M.I.A.’s politics!” And I was wondering, does that stem from [Pitchfork]? Because I find it really bonkers.

Pitchfork: Well, it’s hard to say where it originated. We certainly have made reference to Diplo playing a part on your records, but it seems like everyone plays that up.

M.I.A.: If you read the credits, he sent me a loop for “Bucky Done Gun”, and I made a song in London, and it became “Bucky Done Gun”. But that was the only song he was actually involved in on Arular. So the whole time I’ve had immigration problems and not been able to get in the country, what I am or what I do has got a life of its own, and is becoming less and less to do with me. And I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can’t have any ideas on my own because I’m a female or that people from undeveloped countries can’t have ideas of their own unless it’s backed up by someone who’s blond-haired and blue-eyed. After the first time it’s cool, the second time it’s cool, but after like the third, fourth, fifth time, maybe it’s an issue that we need to talk about, maybe that’s something important, you know. (link)

Go, Maya. As she goes forward, she puts more emphasis on the gender question, and less on the whether “people from underdeveloped countries” can have “ideas of their own”:

One of the Christian Science Monitor’s reporters recently caught a showing of the apparently eagerly awaited film “Khuda ke Liye (In the Name of God)” in Lahore:

Why would I drive 4-1/2 hours to see a Pakistani movie?…

The film is being hailed in some segments of Pakistani society as the most important cinematic event in memory…

As the title suggests, the movie is about Islam and the battle between two polarized groups - modernized elites carrying the banner of “enlightened moderation” and radicals with their “jihad” - both had claims to the religion…

For many Pakistanis - or at least those in this theater - the movie offers an explanation for the unrest around them.

“I had been dying to see this movie,” Sara Malik, a 17-year-old student, dressed in jeans and a powder-pink T-shirt told me after the movie. “It’s an amazing story, because it explains what really happens behind things like the Lal Masjid [Red Mosque],” she said, with nods of agreement by nearby school friends. The violent weeklong battle between religious militants and the Pakistan Army this month in Islamabad was unnerving for the entire country and unlike anything the youth of the country had ever witnessed. [Link]

A synopsis of the movie, about musician brothers caught up in a post September 11th world, can be found on the film’s website. Adding to the local relevancy of the film (as mentioned by the young woman above) was the recent Lal Masjid siege (a.k.a. Operation Sunrise) against the militant Ghazi brothers:

Abdul Rashid Ghazi of the Red Mosque, for example, made one of his last anti-vice stands against the release of “In the Name of God.” Mr. Ghazi called the movie blasphemous and anti-Islamic. “We won’t allow this,” he warned the government earlier this month.

Ghazi was killed a few days after uttering those words at the hands of the Pakistani military, and the movie is now showing all over the Punjab province, the Pakistan Army’s stronghold, in the city of Karachi the financial capital, and a few well-to-do surrounding towns in Sindh. It is unlikely to make its way west to the provinces bordering Afghanistan and Iran. The uncensored movie is not only likely to be rejected by the provincial governments led by Islamist parties, but also by the Pashtun and Baluchi tribes themselves, who are portrayed as violent, cunning, and chauvinistic religious fanatics in the movie. [Link]

Via my Auntie Valsa’s kid, Jasmin, over at ASATA, news of an upcoming free M.I.A. show at Amoeba Records in Berkeley, this Saturday at 2pm.

I “hella” thought those of you in the yay area who have reconciled your inner turmoil regarding her connection with/representation of/grahpic allusions to the LTTE might want to know. Me? I’m still conflicted, so I’ll keep humming

Let you be superior

I’m flithy with the fury ya

…it’s easy being morally inferior when there’s such a sick soundtrack to feel shame to. I keed, I keed.

I heart Bat For Lashes, which is half-brown. ;) Like the blog I am currently so addicted to, I have a massive girl-crush on Natasha Khan. This is complicated, and not just because I’m straight; it means that even though I also have ole voice of the beehive on my iPod, I’m totally going to be a bitch to her, since she is also up for a Mercury Prize, and I want my Natasha to win (no, not because she’s desi, because she rules):

Kind of like how Chan Marshall is Cat Power, Natasha Kahn is Bat for Lashes, a British singer/songwriter and visual artist whose album Fur and Gold made the short list for the 2007 Mercury Prize (but will most likely lose to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black). Kahn is beginning to make waves on this side of the pond. She’s touring the U.S. right now with her all-girl live show lineup. [Jezebel]

The line about squash in her bio keeps summoning “The Royal Tenenbaums” to my memory, I’m random like that:

Bat for Lashes is the stage name of Natasha Khan (born 25 October 1979), a Brighton-based songwriter.

Born to a Pakistani father, part of the eminent family of squash-playing Khans, and an English mother, her early childhood was spent travelling the world following her father who trained the Pakistani squash team, summers in Pakistan, and the rest of the time in Hertfordshire[1][2]. She had a strict religious upbringing until her parents separated, when she was eleven years old. [viki]

Her next four Amreekan shows are in Chicago, Minneapolis, SF and LA. Sigh. Why couldn’t she come to Hollywood for ugly people? Oh, and FYI, she is SO not a creepy Lily Allen. That is like, sooo mean.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cry, which is what I always do after watching this video, but only because it reminds me of my beloved BMX, which got stolen when I was seven. That and those stuffed animal heads haunt my nightmares.

this whole week has been heavy, can we have some light reading please? has there been any coverage on Ash and Shek? or has their marriage ended in hell? [link]

You are right, it has been a somber sort of week. Sometimes, it’s okay to marinate in that for a bit before we pick ourselves up off the floor and throw out that bottle of whiskey. ;)

Via an anonmyous tipster on the news tab, who wrote:

the finger picking ,the slide, this is a masterful bluesy rendition of an old pathos filled malayalam song

I’ve never heard anything like it (not that I’m conversant with either blues OR Mallu music).

I recently emailed five questions to Sophie, who is part of the force behind D.C.’s Subcontinental Drift.

Several Mutineers discussed SD’s last event at the most recent D.C. meetup— in fact, a few of you even performed at it! I get the feeling the rest of you would be VERY interested in what Sophie and her dynamic crew are trying to do— so I thought I’d post a wee reminder that your next chance to marinate in creative splendor is tomorrow night, June 29. But first, some essential information:

Subcontinental Drift is __?

…an effort to bring out the “basement talents of the District’s desis.” Basically, we’re trying to provide a creative space for people who are artistically-inclined (that’s a broad term and encompasses pretty much anyone from professional artists to people who like to watch other people read poetry) to connect with each other and share each other’s work.

What inspired it?

A few of us “D.C. desis” felt like there was a void in the South Asian community —in a place like D.C. where there are soooo many talented people, there wasn’t a cohesive group or space that was encouraging or nurturing that talent. The need was something that was floating around in the air, and we just grabbed it. Specifically though, the catalyst for me was when I was with Munish and Vikash at Bossa lounge in Adams Morgan and we watched Vishal Kanwar play tablas there. We’re like, wow, this is cool..let’s do more cool stuff. Something like that.

What’s the best thing about it?

The best thing is watching new artists get up in front of nearly 100 desis, and coming more and more into themselves. When you see people willing to get up there, be vulnerable, share a sacred part of themselves, and the audience is so warm and appreciative—it is the most beautiful thing.

What if someone wanted to get involved with it?

They should email us at subdriftdc@gmail.com .

What if a mutineer who isn’t lucky enough to live in D.C. wanted to emulate such awesomeness— any advice for them?

Get a few like-minded people together who are committed to the same thing you are, pick a venue, and go to the ends of the earth to SPREAD THE WORD about it. If your community doesn’t have a creative space for people, chances are people are hungry for it. As long as word spreads, people will come. And especially in the beginning, keep the vibe pretty informal and verryyy welcoming—human connection is the key!

I went to the last Subcontinental Drift and I’ll be at tomorrow’s, as well. The atmosphere that Sophie, Munish, Nina, Mona, Nabeel, Vishal and Surabhi create is extraordinary; upon being dragged to last month’s event, a friend of mine from out of town was actually envious of us DCists, because he thought the open mic/dance performances/live music/stand-up comedy/ridiculously good sangria made for one fantastic night. I agreed and immediately grew mindful of how lucky I was to live here, where creativity manifests like this. I’m telling you, the very air in that room pictured above felt charged, different, exhilarating. You should go, and see for yourself. :)

Subcontinental Drift

An open mic for and by South Asian Americans.

-experiments in words, sound or art
-music
-comedy
-spoken word

Friday, June 29, 2007
7:30pm-10pm
Cost: FREE and we have drinks and snacks!

La Casa Community Center
3166 Mt. Pleasant Street NW
3 blocks from the Columbia Heights metro stop.
(Green or Yellow Line)

Earlier this week the band Bamboo Shoots, and unsigned college band out of New Jersey (finally, something good about Edison), won an MTVU sponsored contest beating out over a 1000 other bands (thanks for the tip Anmol):

Propelled by votes from college students nationwide, the foursome from New Jersey emerged as the top choice of the more than 1,300 unsigned college acts registered on mtvU’s BestMusiconCampus.com. Bamboo Shoots - fusing upbeat, danceable rock, electro and South Asian/Indian sounds - was announced as mtvU’s inaugural “Artist of the Year” via a network debut performance on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” a platform which has helped launch countless up- and-coming bands to superstardom. The band will now set out on an unprecedented journey that will see them record a full LP with Epic Records, premiere two music videos on mtvU/mtvU.com, perform on tour dates with top national artists and collect a $50,000 cash advance - all of which will be documented in an original mtvU series premiering in the fall. [Link]

Even though word was out that the group had won the MTVU contest, the official announcement came during their live performance on the Conan O’Brien Show:

It’s Friday, which means another work week is over and it is time for some flash fiction-fabricating.

Between the last post I wrote, the edifying discussion on hair which spontaneously occurred when we failed to identify a brown model, AGAIN (Sorry, Sree) and the most precious Gmail I’ve received in weeks (which contained this query-via-wideo from a four-year-old) well, The Papaya, he is playing on my mind. One of you messaged me regarding your surprise that I hadn’t voted for Sanjaya, a secret I revealed here, but American Idol has nothing to do with my passion for papaya. I sweat him because he’s so kind and ingenuous, because of his sweet nature.

I’m thinking in particular about Papaya’s last performance (available in the video above), which took him from tears to a tiny bit of triumph when he customized the chorus of Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About” to “other than haaaaaaaair”. That was the moment when my affection for him became solid, when I realized that it wasn’t just idle amusement; he had put up with so much and he was still smiling in his typical, good-natured way. I was amazed, mostly because I’ve never been a fan of this song, but also because he seemed so poised for a teenager. “My hero,” I thought. All those detractors piling on him in addition to the biggest hater of them all—Simon—plus the blatantly racist slant to much of the criticism he received (uh…where were the anti-Italian comments?) equaled humility and niceness, not bitterness or resentment. When I grow up, I want to be a papaya.

::

This week, write about gossip, the blues, papaya, fanjayas or continue the week’s trend and 55 away about hair, ‘pooed, oiled or otherwise. If none of this tickles your knickers, pick your own plot to flash some fiction with, but please play along anyway. I’m sure you have something to talk about, how about packaging it in a mere fifty-five words?

Who dat? Why, that’s your girl M.I.A., doin’ the damn thing in Jamaica during a video shoot last week; a tipster on the news tab blessed us with a link to this and several other photos from the shoot posted at hip arbiter Pitchfork Media. Apparently the sister’s new album, called Kala, drops in August; we’ve already gotten down to “Bird Flu” a few months ago, and now if you check the Pitchfork item you’ll find a link to a MySpace page that offers a stream of another new song (though not on the album), called “Hit That.” The topic is, um, exactly what it sounds like — a pure sex/party jam, containing interpolations of previous classics of the genre like Wreckx-N-Effect’s “Shake Your Rump.” Anyway make of the music what you will, but I’m digging the pan-Third World aesthetic that M.I.A.’s been putting forward of late in her videos and indeed, her choice of settings; she’s a reverse ambassador of mash-up globalization, bringing it back to its multiple sources, and the brown skins, big butts and ramshackle backdrops express a politics far more creative, democratic and satisfying than the tired and tendentious tigers of her first go-round.

You normally don’t want to call your project something like Reheated Naan & Curry, because you’re setting yourself up for some clever critic (or blogger) to take the reference and turn it into something ugly, along the lines of: “‘Reheated Naan’? Sorry, Just Stale Bread.” (This game could be extended — if you wrote a highbrow novel called Ennui, a reviewer would surely title his or her review something like, “Ennui, Another Name For ‘Boring’”).

In this case, Deejay OM’s new releasee, which is being released this week on the Galapagos4 label, should be safe from “clever” put-downs by the likes of yours truly, because it’s pretty good. People who listen to a lot of retro Bollywood might in fact find the concept somewhat familiar (reheated, if not rehashed), as Deejay OM seems to be mining samples from forgotten scores from old Hindi films, and recontextualizing them with hip hop beats and loops. As such, Reheated Naan & Curry reminds me a bit of the 1998 CD by producer Dan Nakamura, Bombay the Hard Way — but for most people the approach taken by Deejay OM may nevertheless sound pretty fresh.

The standout track on the record has to be “The Arrival,” which you can hear at Deejay OM’s Myspace (if that doesn’t work, the song can also be listened to at NPR). You can also hear samples of other tracks at Amazon.

Of course, this music is just beats, and I’m often left thinking what these tracks could sound like with great rappers or singers on them.

One final thought: in case you were wondering, Deejay OM has no “substantial” connection to the Indian subcontinent — as far as I can tell, he’s an Italian American DJ and producer from San Francisco who is sampling the old Bollywood sound to create a particular effect. (That appropriation mostly isn’t an issue for me, as long as the beats are interesting. Though I suppose one could object to the revealing use of the word “curry” in the title of the CD — the incorrect western term for all Desi khana. And are there readers who also object to the use of the word “OM” in Deejay OM’s name?)

The thing I’ve missed most about L.A. since I left is the live music (and my barber). Seriously, there is no better place to get an introduction to new sounds. I’m especially kicking myself because I didn’t get to see two bands that I really wanted to see live. The first was Goldspot. The second one was Rupa and the April Fishes. An Indian girl that sings in fluent Spanish and French and can stop you from bleeding out if you’ve been shot? That is absolutely hot enough to fry fishes!

As a doctor by day and a singer by night, third-year UCSF internal medicine resident Rupa Marya, MD, is living her dream…

Marya, 30, is an Indian woman who grew up in the Bay Area, France and India. She has known that she’s wanted to be both a physician and a performer since childhood, and has found ways to achieve balance while pursuing both passions.

“My kindergarten teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, ‘a surgeon and a ballerina.’ She said I had to choose one. But I couldn’t choose, and now I find I’m a better doctor when I’m an artist and I’m a better artist when I’m a doctor. The passion for both comes from the same source,” says Marya… Previously part of an American folk duo, Marya has gone back to her multicultural roots, tapping into several cultural genres and singing most of the songs in French. “What is created is a living music and lively performance which gives voice to the fluidity of experience moving between different places, a sonic examination of being at the edge of different cultural identities,” according to her website.

The six band members bring together an eclectic assortment of music traditions — mixing French chanson with Gypsy waltzes, Indian ragas, sultry tangos and bossa nova — to create a romantic and lyrical sound reminiscent of bohemian Paris. [Link]

The group’s sound has a Devotchka-esque eclectic-ness to it. Enough talk! Bring out the music:

* une américaine à paris

* c’est moi

* wishful thinking

Their MySpace page has even more music. I especially like the song “Poder.” While I am listening to it I imagine myself kicking ass and taking names in a shady Mexican bar, like Antonio Banderas in the movie Desperado. And then Rupa could come along and heal them all because…ummm…she’s a singing doctor. Okay, maybe that was too much info to put out there.

No, I am not referring to Sanjaya Malakar, because I wouldn’t want American Idol commentators to think that desi-Americans are monolithic in their support of him (we’re not), and I am not referring to me because well, desi never left my life. What I am getting at is the attempted resurgence of desi influences in mainstream American popular music, and surprisingly (or not so surprisingly depending on how you look at it) the current effort by producer extraordinaire Timbaland to bring desi back by featuring two desi-ish tracks on his latest release, Timbaland Presents Shock Value. The first of the two is “Bombay” featuring British-Asian songstress Amar, and the other “Come Around” with our girl M.I.A., which for some strange reason is only available in the U.S. as an import.

Like much of the album, both tracks are solid. Bombay is a straight up Hindi track, it features Amar’s vocal (rather than simply using it as a hook), its addictive, and makes good use of the “Bollywood of Yore” effect. The track has additional production by long-time Timbaland collaborator Jim Beanz, who recently released a couple of sanctioned remixes of two Nelly Furtado Tracks featuring Amar, Promiscuous Girl and Maneater, both of which are available for free download on Amar’s myspace page. Many of you might remember Amar for her hauntingly awesome vocal on the opening track Jaan of Talvin Singh’s groundbreaking compilation Anokha. On the heals of Anokha, she released a solo album, Outside, produced by Nitin Sawhney, but then seemingly fell off, until Beanz’s remix of Promiscuous started to make the rounds. For now anyway, it seems Amar may be the new Raje Shwari, the singer Timbaland and many others used for their Indian hooks a few years ago (Indian Flute, Bounce, Disco etc.), but hasn’t really been heard from since. I hope things work out better for Amar then they did for Raje.

As for the M.I.A. track, I don’t know, I can’t get enough. It’s got M.I.A.’s grimey rapping style, Timbaland’s typically solid production, and desi beats, incorporating and flipping the hook from a recent indi-pop hit “Let the Music Play.” The only thing wrong with this track is it isn’t on the American release.

Do I think Timbaland can bring desi back? I hope so. He’s gonna need help though, and by the lack of really good records from the desi diaspora over the past couple of years, it is going to be tough. For too long the desi music scene has relied upon British-Asian talent to bring the heat. I love British-Asian music, but its sound has gotten stagnant and it is time for desis on this side of the Atlantic to step up. From the word on the street and from what I’ve been hearing, I’m hopeful.

Then:

KFC Popcorn Chicken using MC Hammer’s “2 Legit 2 Quit”
This commercial ran during the early 90’s on american television. It puts Hammer in a back stage stand-off. Hammer refuses to go on stage for some reason, then someone holds out a box of popcorn chicken to Hammer. Hammer takes a piece, flicks it up, catches it in his mouth and says “Now that’s popcorn”. Hammer then takes the stage performing “2 Legit 2 Quit”.

Now:

An open letter to Sanjaya Malakar:

Congratulations on catching America’s ears…and eyes.

Over the past month, you’ve wowed the world with your original performances. And, your ever-changing hairdos have made you almost as famous as KFC® Original Recipe® Chicken and Colonel Sanders himself.

On behalf of Kentucky Fried Chicken®, I want to serve up to you a tasty offer. If you don a bowl hairdo during one of your next nationally televised performances, KFC will grant you a free lifetime supply of KFC Famous Bowls®. We’re sure America will be as ‘bowled-over’ by your take on this classic look as they are by our KFC Famous Bowls.

From wavy to Mohawk to now the classic bowl – who knows, your bowl cut could start a trend as big as KFC Famous Bowls, which consumers ranked as THE most memorable new product of 2006.

In addition to free KFC Famous Bowls for life – if you sport a bowl cut, KFC will cut a check in your name to Colonel’s Scholars, a charity providing young people with much needed college scholarships. We’re confident that helping students afford college is something that even the toughest of judges would stand and applaud.

Your Fan,
Gregg Dedrick
President of KFC

Join the legacy. [Thanks, tipster Sonia!]

At a time when a desi male singer is in the news for all the wrong reasons, it’s good to remember that there’s such a thing as the art of the song, and nice to come across a desi brother who is honing his craft like a devoted apprentice: slowly, steadily, and with growing success.

Sachal Vasandani, 28, has been singing on the New York jazz circuit for a few years now: he’s performed with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra under the direction of Wynton Marsalis, and he has a regular early-evening gig at Zinc Bar in Greenwich Village. That’s where Manish heard him almost two years ago now, which resulted in this post; and the fact that it’s taken this long for Sachal to drop his first album, which comes out tomorrow, and that the disc features the same core trio (David Wong on bass, Quincy Davis on drums, and Jeb Patton on piano) that Manish heard that night, tells you a lot about the consistency and hard work and constant plugging away that it takes to develop your sound and make your move in the real music world, as opposed to freakshows like American Idol.

The album is called “Eyes Wide Open” and is out on Detroit label Mack Avenue. It’s really an album of songs, by which I mean, songs with lyrics, verses and refrains, melody and exposition — this is not free jazz, in fact it’s not even what most listeners would consider edgy, and that centrist disposition makes it eminently accessible, perhaps more so than some heads would be willing to cop to liking. Three of the compositions are Vasandani’s own; the remainder divide among standards and covers from sources as diverse as Sade and Iron & Wine.

I sat down with the brother recently for a story that you can find here. It will give you the rundown on his life story and all the usual profile elements. Here’s a little excerpt that will give you an idea of his approach and sensibility:

Set adrift on memory bliss…

My screen says, “Please replace this generic password.”

Either my kappipaal hasn’t kicked in yet or I’ve got a severe case of Spring fever (perhaps cowbell could cure it?). I can’t focus, let alone devise a password with 12 letters, one symbol, two numbers and an exclamation point. One of my favorite co-workers stops by my desk, with an eyebrow raised.

“You look lost.”

“Can you like, pick a password for me? Like, passwords are hard.”

“Like math?”

This is our favorite inside joke, this reference to Barbie’s great fustercluck of ‘92. Still, despite legendary vacuous utterances, Barbie is beloved not just by me but also his six-year old daughter, because as we three agree, them Bratz dollz are slatterns.

“Sure I’ll pick something for you.” He seems serious.

“You like music. Use a song lyric.”, he instructs, before striding in to his office, which is next door to my desk. Then he pops his head back out…

“I used to use ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine’ as mine.”

“R.E.M. fan, eh?”

He smiles at me in response. We’re nearly the same age; we were both dorky loners who probably spent all our free time between classes with our headphones on, tuning out the world. We both remember how the release of “Green” in 1988, during the fall quarters of our Freshman/Junior year in high school defined a moment, a mood.

…wherein Whose God is it Anyways? inspires a second cricket post in a row!

The education of my cricket-ignorant kundi continues; I shall torment you with my progress, much like a toddler rushes back to a parent to exclaim, “I did it in the potty!” Like aforementioned kid, I, too would like a cookie and a pat on the head. Thanks, you’re the best.

So. WGiiA left a comment on my last World Cup post which piqued my kitten-like curiosity:

ok. just got very emotional seeing inzi get out and leave the field for the last time in an ODI. he deserved better circumstances under which to leave. [link]

I immediately assaulted consulted one of my cricket tutors, the one who kindly told me a bedtime story via speakerphone last night which starred Sachin Tendulkar— look, when one runs out of Ambien, one reaches for desperate alternatives— and expressively typed “?” in his GChat window. I didn’t expect to like or care about what I’d learn, but I wanted to find out more nonetheless, if only because I’m a sentimental wench and anyone’s last __ always makes me a bit verklempt.

Last week, the Daily News (thanks Dave) had a fascinating article about Deevani, the Hindi singer on the Daddy Yankee hit “Mirame”. Details about this singer were always shrouded in mystery, at least until she granted her first interview and cleared up the fact that Deevani (née Adalgisa Inés Rooney) was actually not Indian or even South Asian at all, but a Puerto Rico raised Dominican who fell in love with her first husband’s Bengali language and culture.

Normally I’d want to snark all over something like this. But I can’t. The woman is just too impressive. I think she’s single now, so let me pass on her biodata:

• She is a 31-year-old mother of 3 kids
• She has an MBA in finance
• She is the CEO of her brother’s (Luny, of superproducing duo Luny Tunes) company Mas Flow
• She taught herself eight languages - Chinese, Japanese, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi and Arabic. So with her native Spanish, and English, that makes ten.
• In an industry crammed with female “divas” and all the cliches that the term engenders, she is refreshingly comfortable presenting a low-key, domestic image:

  “I’ve just written this song for [new artist] Nicolle,” she says, passing her iPod across the table. “The melody came to me when I was dusting my house.”

Ughhhrrr…on most mornings, I’m lucky if I can find a pair of black tights without holes, and leave the house with my glasses still on my face. And she records hit songs while she’s dusting. F*ck! Maybe I need to step it up a little…

Rooney also appears to be a driving force behind the electrifying (should be if “Mirame” was just a teaser) Bhangra-Reggaeton fusion known as Bhangraton:

Last week, the Daily News (thanks Dave) had a fascinating article about Deevani, the Hindi singer on the Daddy Yankee hit “Mirame”. Details about this singer were always shrouded in mystery, at least until she granted her first interview and cleared up the fact that Deevani (née Adalgisa Inés Rooney) was actually not Indian or even South Asian at all, but a Puerto Rico raised Dominican who fell in love with her first husband’s Bengali language and culture.

Normally I’d want to snark all over something like this. But I can’t. The woman is just too impressive. I think she’s single now, so let me pass on her biodata:

• She is a 31-year-old mother of 3 kids
• She has an MBA in finance
• She is the CEO of her brother’s (Luny, of superproducing duo Luny Tunes) company Mas Flow
• She taught herself eight languages - Chinese, Japanese, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi and Arabic. So with her native Spanish, and English, that makes ten.
• In an industry crammed with female “divas” and all the cliches that the term engenders, she is refreshingly comfortable presenting a low-key, domestic image:

  “I’ve just written this song for [new artist] Nicolle,” she says, passing her iPod across the table. “The melody came to me when I was dusting my house.”

Ughhhrrr…on most mornings, I’m lucky if I can find a pair of black tights without holes, and leave the house with my glasses still on my face. And she records hit songs while she’s dusting. F*ck! Maybe I need to step it up a little…

Rooney also appears to be a driving force behind the electrifying (should be if “Mirame” was just a teaser) Bhangra-Reggaeton fusion known as Bhangraton:

It looks like everyone’s favorite Canadian (after Alex Trebek, Michael J. Fox, and the late Peter Jennings) is having a bit of trouble with the mother tongue. It’s been getting her quite frustrated (thanks for the tip Mona):

Napanee, Ontario native Avril Lavigne is showing appreciation for her fans around the world, and looking to sell a lot more albums, by recording her new “Girlfriend” single in eight different languages.

While some detractors aren’t convinced that Lavigne has mastered English yet, her annoying single can now be heard in Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. Lavigne even went so far as trying to record it in Hindi, but the language was too difficult to match the song’s western rhythm, said manager Terry McBride in a Canadian Press interview following his keynote address at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel as part of the Canadian Music Week conference. McBride said that Portuguese was the hardest language to learn, next to Hindi, and that the singer spent hours studying foreign language recordings before going into the studio to record the song. [Link]

Obviously Lavigne, an icon of the punk rock movement, didn’t have the right Hindi tutor. I’m sorry but am I the only one offended here? Don’t be tellin’ me that Mandarin is any easier than Hindi. Why do Indians always seem to get shafted? Why did she have to make the Hindi version of her song match the white man’s “western rythym?” So let’s watch the video together and imagine it in Hindi. Lavigne, you’ve let us down this time.

So is anyone coming down to Texas for SXSW? An anonymous tipster with good taste in music points out that The Big Sleep (see also here), The Cassettes, Voxtrot, Swati Sharma, and Aziz Ansari will all be representing the brown.

Speaking of Aziz, as I am sure many of you heard, MTV (not MTV Desi) just gave him his own show titled:

Here is a little taste. You can check out more on their website.

Falak is the name of a Pakistani-Canadian rock band out of Toronto. You can check out their Myspace page to listen to some of their tunes and read their blog entries. Searching the name “Falak” on Youtube will turn up a bunch of clips of their music videos and live performances. At face they sound like a typical hard rock band destined to obscurity. However, MTV Pakistan recently banned them…but not before they had already been airing their video over there for a while (since December).

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

So….just wanted to let you all know…that FALAK’s first video is officially airing in Pakistan. It’s a bit scandalous for North American television though….so don’t really know when you can expect to see it here….maybe when these fascist pigs try exercising real freedom of speech …

In the meanwhile, remember, CNN is bullshit…. [Link]

The ban of course will generate some attention for them. Why the ban? Watch this video, titled Yadein part II:

So I ask the question to SM’s readers because I am still trying to decide. Is this art/expression, or does it lend a rock-and-roll mystique to something else…

One of the sources of creative vitality in Third World popular cultures is the uncanny ability to seize on local or global events and use them as symbols or metaphor, or simply to re-purpose names and words from the news for the purpose of entertainment that, by virtue of this method of assembly, is never completely innocent and certainly not mindless.

Also evidenced, not coincidentally, in the best hip-hop, this instinct to appropriate the signifiers of large and possibly uncontrollable events and redeploy them in the service of local meaning results in a constant renewal process in which, as one signifier runs its course, another emerges to supplant it, bringing with it new nicknames for objects in regular use — minibuses, beer bottles, bank notes, lengths of cloth — and new jokes and new dances and new fashions.

With “Bird Flu,” her new single, your girl M.I.A. taps into this endlessly rich seam. Vaguely mysterious, unpredictable, global in scope and potentially catastrophic, the bird flu that moved across several continents in 2006 was perfect for semiotic appropriation. Especially since birds, especially poultry, in various stages of ecstasy or distress have long been inspiration for dance moves — the Funky Chicken and the Dirty Bird come to mind. So it’s a chicken stuttering across a dusty village street that sets, in the video, the rhythm for the song, and much dancing, declamation, and additional avian imagery ensues. No connection to the “real” bird flu, and yet, all the connection in the world.

It’s a cool song, but before we rush to celebrate its originality I want to share with you another Bird Flu song that actually predates homegirl’s.

I’ve blogged earlier about how India tends to attract B-list musicians, ones no longer at the peak of their popularity but often with some emotional connection to India. Here’s another example — Ricky Martin will be performing in India next month (HT to Hilal)

Do I have enough gel in my hair?

However, this concert is a bit different. It’s a private performance at a “high profile shaadi in Jaipur”. The match between former Menudo star and “Mumbai-based industrialist Neeraj Raja Kocchar” (the father of the groom) was made by DJ Aqeel, fresh from spinning disks for the well heeled at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Apparently slightly past their prime international pop stars are the new status symbol for extravagant weddings — who knew? Now I know what to get the tycoon who has everything.

I was also surprised to read that this wasn’t Martin’s first performance in India. In 2005, he performed a benefit for children with HIV/AIDS at the Taj Mahal as part of his ongoing engagement with the issue of children’s rights:

Martin, however, is no stranger to India. He has visited the country several times, most recently to record the string arrangements for his first English-language album in five years, “Life”. Martin, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, has long been a strong advocate of children’s rights and protection through his Ricky Martin Foundation. He also backs groups working to prevent child trafficking and prostitution in several countries, including India. [Link]

Martin rescued three young girls from the streets of Kolkata from a life of prostitution… [Link]

Social activism. It’s not just for Bono and Madonna and Peter Gabriel and Bob Geldorf and … any more.

Swamini A. C. Turiyasangitananda, who passed away on Friday in Los Angeles, was a working-class, African-American daughter of Detroit who embraced her spiritual calling nearly 40 years ago:

During the end of 1968, Swamini, directed by God, entered a most significant period of isolation. The Supreme Lord provided wisdom, knowledge, guidance, and instruction consonant with and essential to her designated life’s tenure… Swamini received her initiation into the renounced order of sannyas directly from the Supreme Lord. … Swamini took mantra initiation with Swami Satchidananda.

It was a time of great cultural turmoil and motion in American society, and Swamini had found herself at the heart of it. Known to the secular world as Alice McCleod Coltrane, she met John Coltrane in 1962, married him in 1965, and joined his band, playing piano and other instruments, in 1966. After his death of liver disease in the summer of 1967, she continued on both tracks of the path they had traveled together: the musical and the spiritual. Journey in Satchidananda, the album she released in 1970 featuring among others Rashied Ali, Charlie Haden and Pharoah Sanders, is an early document of her progress and the depth of her research and dedication. It still listens well today, one of the strongest surviving documents of the sincere fascination the creative music scene had with both Indian music and Hindu spirituality at that time, a far cry from the more superficial flirtations of the Beatles or the ephemeral Haight-Ashbury philosopher-kings.

For the rest of her life Alice was considered a recluse, recording at a limited pace and rarely appearing in concert; her vow of sanyas and commitment to the spiritual life meant that she spent most of her time at home with her family, at the ashram she founded in the Santa Monica Hills, or traveling to India to worship with Sri Satya Sai Baba.

In 2004, Alice Coltrane released a spectacular album called Translinear Light. It features sons Ravi and Oran on saxophones, Jeff “Tain” Watts and Jack DeJohnette on drums, and once again Charlie Haden — a veteran of the final Coltrane bands and a deep humanist, in addition to a master of his instrument — on bass. (The group conducted a rare tour last fall, and I am sad that I missed their October gig at NJPAC in Newark. It’s a reminder that one must never miss an opportunity to see a great master perform as you never know when she will be taken from us.)

The passing of Alice Coltrane is a sad moment for jazz. It is also an chance for those of us who live at the intersection of American and South Asian cultures to honor someone who embraced that conversation at a very deep, creative level. On the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., who learned so much from Gandhiji, it’s another fitting reminder that the conversation has a rich history, and that its potential is far from exhausted.

This is a sister called Shakti who is making commercially-oriented urban pop music and is based as far as I can tell in New York (thanks tipster Sonia!). She’s another MySpace-era striver who has a single on iTunes, a website with more bells and whistles than she has material to fill it, an embryonic line of fashion accessories, and a producer-songwriter-laptop wizard behind her looking to become the next Timbaland. (He has another artist called Asia Minor.)

She’s also generous with the Indo-flavored exotica, announcing “Namaste” on her website and putting forward, in her various materials, the full complement of noserings, silk scarves, saris, and the like, combined with the racy iconography of today’s commercial R&B. There’s also a Kama Sutra reference and a camel (not together). And there’s some really ugly short promotional clips online that truck in cab driver and 7-Eleven nonsense.

And the music? It’s pretty good on balance, although the single for sale (and yo, what kind of viral marketing strategy is it to put your first record out and charge folks for it?) called “Do the Thang Thang,” hardly does justice to Shakti’s extensive classical and jazz training AND Berklee School of Music bachelor’s degree AND Chicago Music College master’s degree with lyrics like this:

Do the thang thang
Freak your body body
Don’t hurt nobody body
Let’s get naughty naughty.

There are a couple of remixes that make things a bit more interesting, thanks in part to the singer on the bhangra version (a free copy of which is floating around online).

The song on the YouTube clip here, “Let Me Dance,” I like a lot more. Now the Orientalism police (which I occasionally roll with, I admit) won’t be feeling Shakti’s thang thang overall, but if you suspend that reservation for a minute the sinewy groove and bedroom themes might just get to ya.

What I can’t figure out is the end of the line that begins “Just like the Kama Sutra…” It occurs twice in the song. Any sharp ears out there able to decode it? Conferral of the official Sepia Mutiny seal of approval might just depend on those hard-to-make-out words…

In the spirit of the holiday season and the Macaca Music Poll, here’s a gift of Sepia hype for another aspiring rock band with desi leadership. It helps that they’re pretty damn good! Prabir and the Substitutes are from — where else? — the real world of Virginia and play real short power-pop songs with throwback 1970s/psychedelic inclinations, all the way to the background ooh-ooh harmonizing, Brian Wilson references and best of all, Prabir-ji’s monumental muttonchops, in which small animals could take shelter from the elements, and which you can admire in their full glory at the end of this clip. Rock on, blood!

YES YES Y’ALL, and you don’t stop! It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. I am happy to bring you the results of the 2006 Inaugural Sepia Mutiny Macaca Music Poll. It took me some time to compile the results, a task made both necessary and pleasant by the high quality and fabulous diversity of your submissions. The best part of all, for me, was that you forced me to listen to a whole lot of music I’d never heard of, or not gotten around to hear. Dhanyawad, bahut dhanyawad, for expanding my ears.

After weeding out submissions of music that came out earlier than 2006, and disregarding entries of a trollish or spamlike nature, we were left with 56 valid ballots. They seem to divide evenly among men and women, confirming that music geekery is a democratic and universal condition. Regulars and lurkers are evenly represented as well. The full list of voters is at the end of this post.

And now…drumroll please…the results:

I recently discovered the music of Arthi Meera on Myspace, and even though it’s probably too late to get counted on Siddhartha’s end of the year poll, I think readers might want to go check her out.

Of the songs that are up at Myspace, “Silty Sea” has gotten the most plays — and it’s a lovely song. But “Wander Away” is a catchy and infectious pop melody. Her album is also available via Itunes (I would recommend “In my head” and “It’s not you.”).

Arthi, who plays guitar and sings on all her songs, was raised in Chicago, and lives there now. She says she was trained in classical Hindustani singing, though the songs on her album show no trace of that particular background. Snippets of her voice, singing “Pardesi Jaana Nahin,” are in the closing credits of the film V For Vendetta (listen to BKAB Speechless at Ethan Stoller’s Myspace page; incidentally, Manish mentioned this song months ago). [Correction: that is not Arthi Meera’s voice, I’m told.]

I was a little curious about how she went from ‘A’ to ‘B’, so I sent her an email with some questions. Her reply was pretty thought-provoking.

You dandies must be too busy shopping for lipstick or fretting about your naughty bits, because the volume of submissions to the Macaca Music Poll has been shamefully low. Don’t get me wrong: the quality has been high, and I’m going to need a couple of days to track down some of the picks and pull together a wrap-up post worthy of the contributions. However, there are a LOT of regulars who have yet to submit entries — yeah, y’all know who you are — and I know some of you lurkers have some cool picks to share as well.

So here it is: Last Call for the poll. Send me a list of up to five songs or albums that did it for you this year. Need inspiration? Here are my choices for the Boston Globe and for WNYC. You’ll also find picks in all categories from my colleagues at both outlets here and here. Email your suggestions here. I’ll post results by the weekend. Peace and humptiness forevah!

Sacrificing to a year-end ritual, I’ve been compiling my “best of 2006” music lists for various outlets. It’s a cool exercise as long as you don’t take it too seriously; when you’re in the arts writing business, you have the chance to check out oodles of new releases, and you need to employ filters like genre, or label, or simply your own whimsy, just to sort through the pile let alone pick your favorites. Despite this, I get value from learning what other critics enjoyed, and I do my best to make my own picks useful and interesting, in particular by looking for sounds that folks might have missed, yet are not so obscure as to be un-findable in stores or online.

Still, they say everyone’s a critic, and (to endorse what Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd stated in the comments I quoted here) these days technology and the emergence of online communities makes everyone even more of a critic than before. It’s easy to set up your soapbox, and there’s even a chance someone will hear, maybe even respond. So since we’re all critics, and I know there’s some serious, multi-faceted, all-over-the-place music listening that goes on out there in Sepia-land, I am proud to bring you the MACACA MUSIC POLL.

Here’s how it works. I can’t be bothered to figure out how to code a poll, and besides, I have something much simpler in mind. I would like everyone to tell us five pieces of music that they would recommend to the community. Each piece can be an album or an individual song. All genres are included, and there is no desi criterion. Just as long as it came out in 2006 (or late 2005), if it moved you, grooved you, or soothed you in ‘06, tell the world about it.

Email your list of 5 picks to this address. I will stop taking entries in one week, Wednesday, December 20, and I will compile the results and present them in some fun manner in the following days.

To preserve the spirit of the exercise, please don’t enter your list in the comments to this post; email it to me instead. (I will keep all addresses in confidence, of course.) More general conversation is welcome, however, about the directions music went in ‘06, the value or otherwise of year-end lists, criticism and its pitfalls, or anything else that comes to mind. C’mon, let’s play!

One of the difficulties in being a non-Christian in a predominantly Christian country is the relentless onslaught of Christmas jingles you hear around this time of the year. The latest culprit in my mindspace is the JCPenney’s ad featuring Bing Crosby’s voice and Fatboy Slim’s beats, which makes for a ridiculously catchy breakbeat version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” (via Tamasha). Earlier, we talked about “Songs for the Sleepless”; this is more like “songs for the hyper-caffeinated.”

The “original” video to the Fatboy Slim song is here, but it’s so bad I actually prefer this Youtube-ified anime remake.

Speaking of Youtube and Fatboy Slim, I was reading a Jon Pareles article about the phenomenon over the weekend, and thinking about the possible desi connections. The paragraph that stood out to me was this one:

In the process, another thing users generate is back talk. Surfing YouTube can be a survey of individual reactions to pop culture: movie and television characters transplanted out of their original plots or synched to improbable songs, pop hits revamped as comedy or attached to new, unauthorized imagery. (Try searching for Justin Timberlake on YouTube to see all the variations, loving and snide, on his single “Sexyback.”) (link)

While Youtube has millions of teenagers doing dance karaoke with varying levels of skill, as far as I can tell the current younger generation of desis hasn’t really taken advantage of it as much as one might expect. Part of the problem, of course, is that there aren’t really very many iconic desi figures to “personalize” (or travesty) to begin with.

You know what the world needs more of? It needs more desi boy bands.

We have plenty of desi doctors, lawyers, engineers, I-bankers, actors, astronauts and rappers, but there’s a real deficit in the boy band category. This is why I love the idea of the Montreal based boy band JoSH (that’s a long O, like Joe, not like Joshua). [The band’s slick webpage; their myspace page]

The group is actually only the duo of Q (Qurram Hussain) and Rup (Rupinder Magon) - Q is the one who looks like Lenny Kravitz, and Rup is well, the one in the turban.

This raises an important question - can you have a boy band with less than four members? Don’t you need the cute one, the sensitive one, the goofy one, and the quiet one? I don’t really know how the band is marketed - do they double up attributes? Can one of them be cute and sensitive and the other one be goofy and quiet? I was never a teenage girl, so I don’t know how to answer such esoteric questions.

Musically, they’re also a bit different from a traditional boy band - they’re more of a desi/hip-hop fusion band that a traditional pop-ballad heavy quartet. This makes sense since their fan base is largely in the subcontinent:

While largely unknown in their home country of Canada, JoSH is extremely popular in South Asia, particularly in India and Pakistan. Their sophomore album, Kabhi, as well as its title track, remained in both Indian and MTV World Top 20 lists for 26 weeks from October 2004 to January 2005. Additionally, JoSH was awarded MTV India’s 2004 “Immie” award for Best New Non-Film Artist. [Link]

They may be getting their biggest break ever when they open for Nelly Furtado in Bombay New Years Eve as part of a 5 city tour. This is probably an outgrowth of their remix of Furtado’s Powerless that seems to have boosted their profile:

They come from Canada and their bhangra mix of Nelly Furtado’s “Powerless” has made them powerful. Soon after radio’s all over the planet started flooding the airwaves with Josh’s version of “Powerless,” the duo from Montreal started receiving offers from various artistes and labels. [Link]

I’m not crazy about most of their music - I like the idea of an Indo-Pakistani-Canadian boyband more than I like their execution. I like Mahi Ve, a song from their new album, better than some of their other material: