August 05, 2008
Backlash to Terrorist Chic: MIA Gets Dissed With Her Own Song
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 Delon Jayasingha. Biodata are thin on the ground, but it looks like he’s from L.A. (born there?) and going by his last name, clearly has a Sinhala Sri Lankan dad. He’s coined a new genre named “Salsa Hip-Hop” that sounds exactly as described - hiphop rhymes over salsa rhythms. Check out the link to see a video from his album, The Connection.
His original songs don’t grab me quite the way MIA’s do, but it’s pretty fantastic to have two Sri Lankans out there making ripples. And yeah, I still do think that MIA’s a musical phenomenon. The song is catchy, however you cut it. In terms of her SL politics, however, she’s an opportunist at worst and terribly naive at best. Can’t wait to see how this plays out!
cicatrix at 09:20 PM in Music · 97 comment(s) · Direct link
Salsa Raja
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.
In February, John spent five weeks traveling through India offering Hindi/salsa dance workshops and promoting the genre and himself. But he didn’t take vacation.…“During the day I’d go around and do my salsa workshops,” he says, “at night I’d log onto my network.” He says his bosses are very understanding. [full story]
Giju John is back in India right now, on a three month sabbatical. He’s giving his salsa career his all, shooting music videos, performing, and attending … the 3rd annual India International Salsa Congress in Bangalore from the 14th to the 20th of August. Who knew Salsa was so big in India?!
Next up, maybe we’ll spot Giju in a Bollywood flick set on the streets of San Jose?! I think we’ve definitely got a Hindi movie there. In the meantime, here’s a salsa music video from his first album.
Sandhya at 10:59 AM in Music · 15 comment(s) · Direct link
July 31, 2008
Why Aren't Desi Tunes More Popular in the West?
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…
Although I speak / understand basically zero Hindi, I can still readily feel a certain cultural optimism / fantasy in a lot of Indian music. When the singer speaks of love, longing, lost, and the whole lot, it really is coming from a deep, pure place in the heart that’s uncorrupted by the acknowledged Tragedy of the modern world. The world is great as-is or could be just around the corner. Good and Bad are clear. And for both better and worse, there’s a lot of escapism.
By contrast, a LOT (though clearly not all) of today’s Western music is about, well, the Tragedy of the post-modern world. You were fooled by love until your boyfriend / girlfriend went psycho and slept with someone else in the band. A song about parental love is likely to be about the lack of it and that’s the reason young Jeremy started a fight in school. Everything’s screwed up and we’re not gonna take it. He’s only sorry he got caught. Ideals are tools of the Man and the opiate of the people. The real world is cynical, only things you can physically smack are real and everything else is equally good or equally bad. And so on and so on…
So, in that sense, thematically, Indian pop music often has more in common with American Country than globalized Rock and Roll & hip-hop. AND, this invites many of the same judgements from the mass Western cultural market. Don’t they know that “sophisticated” sad music is supposed to be about existential angst rather than love lost? And that “authentic” happy music is about chemical highs, sporting bling, or tonight’s ecstasy rather than looking into her eyes?
I know I’m painting with some very broad brush strokes here and exceptions abound but I really do think that when folks in a Bollywood frame of mind want to listen to some tunes, the last thing they want is sophisticated cynicism. And I think a lot of modern western culture has a tough time with all that sappy naivete (country music again being the massive exception).
So, all these stray thoughts are far outside of my usual blogging comfort zone and I suspect we’ve got some serious Indo- and Western-music philes in the SM cabal. What say you? 
vinod at 03:18 PM in Music · 86 comment(s) · Direct link
July 22, 2008
Disturbing, yet...
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 
abhi at 08:14 PM in Music, Video · 81 comment(s) · Direct link
July 07, 2008
The Rabbi Shergill Experience
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’m particularly impressed that Rabbi has taken on some political causes, including a very angry Hindi-language song about communalism, called “Bilquis”:
Mera naam Bilqis Yakub Rasool (My name is Bilqis Yakub Rasool)
Mujhse hui bas ek hi bhool (I committed just one mistake)
Ki jab dhhundhhte thhe vo Ram ko (That I stood in their way)
To maen kharhi thhi rah mein (When they were looking for Ram)
Pehle ek ne puchha na mujhe kuchh pata thha (First, one asked me but I knew nothing)
Dujey ko bhi mera yehi javab thha (Then another but my answer was the same)
Fir itno ne puchha ki mera ab saval hai ki (Then so many that now I have a question)
Jinhe naaz hai hind par vo kahan the (Where are those who are proud of India)
Jinhe naaz hai vo kahan hain (Where are those who are proud)
For those who hadn’t heard of Bilquis Yakub Rasool, here is a description of what happened to her during the massacre in Gujarat in 2002:
Bilqis Yakoob Rasool, herself a victim of gang-rape who lost 14 family members reported: “They started molesting the girls and tore off their clothes. Our naked girls were raped in front of the crowd. They killed Shamin’s baby who was two days old. They killed my maternal uncle and my father’s sister and her husband too. After raping the women they killed all of them… They killed my baby too. They threw her in the air and she hit a rock. After raping me, one of the men kept a foot on my neck and hit me.”
A litany of institutional failures added to the suffering of women like Bilqis Yakoob Rasool and prevented justice being done against their assailants. During the attacks, police stood by or even joined in the violence. When victims tried to file complaints, police often did not record them properly and failed to carry out investigations. In Bilqis Yakoob Rasool’s case, police closed the investigation, stating they could not find out who the rapists and murderers were despite the fact that she had named them earlier. Doctors often did not complete medical records accurately. (link)
Also named in the song are Satyendra Dubey, a highway inspector who was killed after he tried to fight corruption, and Shanmughan Manjunath, killed in much the same way.
With songs like this, I see Rabbi as doing for Indian music what singers like Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie have done in the U.S. — documenting injustice, and telling the story of a society as they see it. It’s vital, and necessary.
The album isn’t all protest music, however. There is a surprisingly catchy and touching Punjabi song about a failed romance (is it autobiographical? I don’t know) with a Pakistani woman, called “Karachi Valie”:
Je aunda maen kadey hor (Had I come another time)
Ki mulaqat hundi (Would we have still met)
Je hunda maen changa chor (Had I been a good thief)
Ki jumme-raat hundi (Would tonight have been a ball)
Je aunda jhoothh maenu kehna (If I knew how to lie)
Tan vi ki parda eh si rehna (Would this cover have still remained)
Hijaban vali (O veiled one)
Karachi Valie (O Karachi girl)
And one other song I couldn’t help but mention is Rabbi’s rendition of a Punjabi folk song, “Pagrhi Sambhal Jatta,” which names a long slew of Sikh martyrs, most of whose names I don’t recognize (you can see the complete lyrics, in Punjabi and English translation, at the Avengi Ja Nahin website; click on “Music” and then on “Download Lyrics”). In an interview, Rabbi says he wrote his version of this song after an experience in London. I’m not quite sure what to make of the song yet, since I associate these types of “shahidi” songs with much more militant postures than Rabbi Shergill generally makes. (Note: there is also of course 1965 Mohammed Rafi version of “Pagri Sambhal Jatta,” which you can listen to here; it’s totally different).
From all the various Indian media sites that have done pieces on the new album, I could only find one intelligent and thorough review of the new Rabbi Shergill album, at Rediff. (I do think Samit Bhattacharya is a bit too unforgiving at times. Not every song on this album is highly memorable, but there are several that I find riveting…)
I’d also like to point readers to the Rabbi Shergill fan blog, Rabbism, which seems to be following the new album’s release closely.
amardeep at 12:14 AM in Music · 39 comment(s) · Direct link
July 04, 2008
M.I.A. Performs Her Last Show to Hippies
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….
taz at 11:45 AM in Music · 21 comment(s) · Direct link
April 29, 2008
Metallic Identity
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.
Here’s another:
It was near midnight on the eve of India’s independence, and I was at a concert called Freedom Jam, held at a club on the outskirts of Bangalore called only The Club. Watching the band perform from beside the stage, I noticed a girl with a nose ring. My grandmother’s nose was pierced when she married at thirteen; her nose ring was a sign that she adhered to a certain traditional image of Indian womanhood. For this girl, however, the ring indicated that she was not just westernized (such girls simply chose not to get their noses pierced) but a member of an alternative community that existed outside the mainstream of westernized Indian youth. Essentially, the nose ring had traveled to the other side of the world, assumed a fringe rather than traditional meaning, and then come back to India, where it now has two different meanings. Such dual gestures exist in America, but they usually have one sincere and one ironic meaning—trucker hats on truckers, for example, as opposed to everyone else. In India, however, both meanings are perfectly sincere, both carry conviction.
And, this one:
The rest of the band wasn’t very talkative. Charlie was wearing a black shirt with something silver painted on it in jagged gothic letters. I looked at it: “Cytos…” “Cryptopsy,” he said. Then he explained that it was a band he liked. He couldn’t find a t-shirt of theirs in India so he made it himself with red and silver puffy paint. Pradyum was wearing a History Channel t-shirt. I wondered if members of any American band would have worn these two items of clothing—a homemade shirt, and one that advertised for a television channel—without being enormously conscious of what they were doing, of aiming to produce some sort of effect. Things that have been weighted down in the west with ironic associations—Scooby Doo T-shirts, hair metal, huge striped V-shaped guitars like the one Ganesh had—had regained their innocence on the other side of the world. In India, they mean nothing more than what they are, and people either like them or don’t, but they never “like” them.
The piece was a fascinating commentary on an desi’s experience going back to India and discovering various subcultures that have sprouted up as a result of globalization - heavy metal and call center “vampires” are just a few:
Pradyum’s fiancee “managed a call center for Alamo car rental at night, and then slept during the day. She was basically living on American hours. A couple of my cousins in Bangalore did this too, and they told me that entire malls and restaurants had sprung up in certain areas of the city to cater to people who followed these vampire schedules. One cousin told me that he went to such places after work to “freak out.” After much confusion, I discovered that this term has, like the nose ring, crossed the oceans to mean its exact opposite—in India, it means to relax or hang out.”
In “Death Metal and Identity,” Akshay Ahuja proposes that “generally, it seemed, it was no longer necessary to slowly build a career through extensive education and continuous professional diligence. A decent livelihood was available at any point, as long as one spoke English. This easy money allowed for a semi-bohemian lifestyle that hadn’t been possible or acceptable in India before. Until keeping a serious job was absolutely necessary, you could do anything you wanted with your time. This withdrawal of obligations was perhaps the first step in creating an artistic class outside the mainstream of a culture.”
[As a sidenote, Amitabha Bagchi’s IIT novel “Above Average” explores this subculture a bit — his main character is a ” middle-class Delhi boy with an aptitude for science and math but a yearning to be the drummer of a rock band ..”]
Any metal musicians in the house? Past? Present? Wanna-bes? Is Akshay right? Has “easy money allowed for a semi-bohemian lifestyle that hadn’t been possible or acceptable in India before”?
Sandhya at 08:49 AM in Identity, Music · 70 comment(s) · Direct link
April 15, 2008
HipHopistan -- upcoming in Chicago
(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.
amardeep at 09:30 PM in Music · 29 comment(s) · Direct link
April 11, 2008
"Satyagraha," by Phillip Glass, at the Met Opera House
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?
amardeep at 10:19 AM in Music · 29 comment(s) · Direct link
April 07, 2008
Jana Gana Mana sung two ways
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 …
ennis at 11:29 PM in Music · 111 comment(s) · Direct link
Art Without a Frame
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?
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend? [Link]
All of us hope that beauty will transcend. Shoot, sometimes I will write something at 3 a.m. in the hopes that just one person will get it . If transcendence isn’t a probable outcome somewhere, then all our lives are somehow cheapened and we all know it. We count on others to make up for our mundane. But on that platform on that day only 7 people recognized the beauty reverberating all around them.
White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He’s heading up the escalator. It’s a long ride — 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don’t walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn’t race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark…Mortensen doesn’t know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there’s something about what he’s hearing that he really likes…
As it happens, he’s arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of “Chaconne.” (“It’s the point,” Bell says, “where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There’s a religious, exalted feeling to it.”) The violinist’s bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big. [Link]
See, Weingarten’s article isn’t about who has the best ear or eye for art or who is the best critic. What he’s trying to really figure out is who (what kind of person) will stop. Who will break out of their drone-like lives to appreciate something out-of-place and time because it so obviously cuts through both?:
You can see Evan clearly on the video. He’s the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.
“There was a musician,” Parker [Evan’s mom] says, “and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time.”
So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan’s and Bell’s, cutting off her son’s line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs…The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away. [Link]
That last line is probably the most depressing line I’ve read in a long time. Its enough to send even a young 25-year-old into a midlife crisis. In order to get the kid to school and herself to work, the mom unknowingly rushes him past brilliance. Scoot.
I also got to thinking about the cross-cultural implications of this experiment. What if, instead of Joshua Bell playing the violin it was the young Lata Mangeshkar that was singing at that same metro stop? When I was a kid and watched Bollywood movies with my mom I was shocked to learn that most of the actresses didn’t really sing the songs. They were all dubbed and my mom told me that Lata Mangeshkar was the voice behind many of them. What if, in her prime, she started singing at L’Enfant Plaza. Would her voice be recognized as beautiful or just dissonance?
Let’s say Kant is right. Let’s accept that we can’t look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people’s sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?
We’re busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth. [Link]
The most poignant story of that day was that of John Picarello, “a smallish man with a baldish head.” I won’t even quote him because its too beautiful too read just an excerpt about it. The article is very long. I read it three times tonight. I listened to the 40 minute performance. It really is beautiful and you can hear the footsteps of commuters in the background. Don’t take my word for it though, they don’t give Pulitzers out for nothing.
And thanks for wasting your time here. We aren’t art and we sure aren’t brilliant but it still feels good to know some of you actually stop here.
abhi at 10:59 PM in Music, Musings · 38 comment(s) · Direct link
March 28, 2008
Poetry Friday: Rupa Marya's "Une Américaine à Paris"
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.
|
une américaine à paris by rupa marya
il y avait quelque jours en silence
assis près de moi dans un bistro
un monde entre nous
tu m’as demandé
j’ai dit non, je ne suis pas américaine
un monde fou entre nous
qu’est que tu pense de tout cela?
t’as voulu prendre ton photo avec moi
je ne suis pas américaine
un monde fou entre nous |
an american in paris by rupa marya
there were a few silent days
sitting next to me in a bistro
a world between us
you asked me
i said no. i’m not an american
a crazy world between us
what do you think of all of this?
you asked me if you could a photo with me
i’m not an american, you are not an arab
a crazy world between us |
Surely this song is also influenced by her experience growing up as a brown girl in the South of France. From the Cumbancha website:
When Rupa was ten, her parents fell in love with and moved to the South of France. One of the few people of Indian descent in an area with a large Arab immigrant population, Rupa was immediately aware that the color of her skin lead people to make judgments about her before she even opened her mouth. “I remember being going into town with one of the ladies from my school” recalls Rupa, “and she said, ‘don’t worry, I’m going to introduce you as Indian otherwise they’re going to think you’re an Arab,’ as if that was a horrible thing. I remember being ten years old and always very aware of race and how people perceived me, and how I perceived myself. Living in the south of France , people always assumed that I was either Roma (Gypsy), or Arab. And so I was always very aware of how people treated my shade of brown ….
Here’s the music video for Une Américaine à Paris. I love the accordions and the aunties sitting at a corner table.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering how she balances the music and medicine life - I sure was — according to the SF Chronicle piece mentioned above, she spends exactly half her time on her music, then every two months does a two-month stint as a physician resident at UCSF. Her songs are inspired by this experience, she says, in this “like seeing an old woman lose her love of 40 years to cancer.”)
Sandhya at 06:10 AM in Music · 15 comment(s) · Direct link
March 26, 2008
Your Indi-Pop Fix: Raghu Dixit
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”).
amardeep at 03:40 PM in Music · 27 comment(s) · Direct link
March 16, 2008
Posts that fall into the cracks
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.
abhi at 10:21 PM in Blog, Music, Non-profits · 5 comment(s) · Direct link
March 13, 2008
Sounds of Devotion
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.
sajit at 09:53 PM in Arts and Entertainment, Music · 12 comment(s) · Direct link
March 06, 2008
Salmagundi
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…
event details:
Friday, 14 March, 2008
9pm - 3am | 21+
$15 at the door
$12 advance tix (tba march 1st)
Bohemian Caverns / Liv
2001 11th St, NW (at U St.)
Washington, DC
Get your advance tickets here.
::
Finally, because residents of my favorite city have waited long enough…what…about…a…NY meetup? :) Stop jumping up and down, I need your help with planning. In the past, we’ve done meetups in conjunction with events, i.e. Central Park’s SummerStage. Is there anything fun going down in the next few weeks? I’m pondering early-April, but if something extraordinary is happening in late March, I’ll see what I can do. Discuss. :)
anna at 04:41 PM in Events, Meetups!, Music · 20 comment(s) · Direct link
February 27, 2008
Hotness, thy Name is Thara
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:
…the savvy singer has done commercials for Verizon, Reebok, Finishline and American Eagle. Additionally, she took on minor roles in Guiding Light and One Life to Live - two daytime soaps - and has appeared in a recent Spike Lee special, Miracle“s Boys.
Musically, the sassy yet classy songster has recorded “You Want It” and “Shake It,” and has collaborated with John Legend, Fabolous, Joe Budden and Fat Man Scoop.
Thara can also be seen in music videos, from Jay-Z“s “Excuse Me Miss,” and Fabolous“s “Make You Mine,” to Sean Paul“s “Ever Blazin,” in which she plays the leading video vixen. [link]
Considering some of the discussions we’ve had on SM over the years, I think some of us might be sympathetic to what Thara went through, while coming out to her parents (as someone who was not going to go to med or law school):
Well, I started at Fordham as a pre-med, bio major with a minor in theater. But I wasn’t happy. So I kind of started doing stuff, and seeing where it was going to take me, and then I got my first production deal with Orange Factory. We started producing my demo, and doing all that stuff, and it just got to be too much. I was kind of doing school, and kind of pursuing music until I said, ‘I need to be giving 100%.’ So I did.’…
(Laughs) My parents freaked out. I wrote them a four-paged letter. I wrote it because I’m an extremely emotional person. I knew that if I tried to talk to them, I wouldn’t be able to express myself clearly. I literally stood in front of them, just reading this letter, tears falling down my face. But it was out there, you know? [Cherez]
Finally, her family “got” it, as she revealed in this excerpt from an interview she did with MoraFire.com:
You recently performed at the Bollywood Awards? How was that?
Thara:“Yes. Oh my god, that was such a big deal, not so much for everyone else, but for my family! Cause it was the first time that they could get what I was doing. My grandma was able to come and my aunts and uncles and all my cousins. For them the Bollywood Awards were such a big deal because it was with all the stars they watch in their movies … and for me to perform on the stage with all of them was really big!”
I must admit (bashfully) that the moment I read that, I wondered what Thara had worn to the event, because I had a flashback of Truth Hurts moaning her way through that awful “addictive” song on-stage, at some similar desi show, while sporting a pair of kundi-cutters which were painful to behold. Whatever. It’s wonderful that Thara’s loved ones support her, despite the fact that she doesn’t “come from a family that’s ever done this.”
Thara was on DJ Clue’s label, Desert Storm, an honor she shared with Fabolous (holla back young’n, hoooo hoooo!), but according to her MySpace page, she’s no longer with them. I agree with a comment I saw on YouTube, under her “Jump on” video; she sounds just as good as, if not much better than what I’m subjected to when I masochistically turn on my radio (I hate DC stations). If Thara’s music doesn’t catch on, perhaps she should do an MTV reality show; it’s not like Heidi Spencer would have been able to writhe around on the beach in a bikini if she hadn’t been on The Hills. Oh, what passes for talent these days…
::
*I know a lot of people who think that writing for SM must make us super-brown, but at least in my case, I find that I’m ignorant of a lot of what constitutes “desi culture”. Jay Sean for example— I had never heard a single song of his until tonight. It’s an odd feeling, to be in the middle of the baddest, brownest blog of ‘em all and to not have exposure to what I “theoretically” should know all about…:)
anna at 11:32 PM in Music, Musings, Profiles · 49 comment(s) · Direct link
February 21, 2008
Bishi: Bengali Brit Pop
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).
amardeep at 08:53 AM in Music · 26 comment(s) · Direct link
February 18, 2008
Some music for your Monday
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:
Here is a taste of the “lyrics” of Bombay:
Ahja tu ahja mere saminay tu ahjaFinally, NPR’s Weekend Edition this past Satarday featured DJ Rekha. Most of the interview is about stuff that SM readers probably already know about. However, there are some music clips you can listen to along the left hand side if you, unlike me, had to work this President’s Day and need a music break.jaanu (Come on baby come to me or
come in front of me)
Haah! (Timbaland)
Kitna tashowu gay, kitna bolowo
gay muchay tum (how much will
you tease me, how much will you
call me)
Haah! (Timbaland) [Link]
abhi at 04:23 PM in Music · 24 comment(s) · Direct link
January 27, 2008
Soul Tap's Nivla and P.Oberoi-- Crashing the Superbowl
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:
Soul Tap Presents Nivla and P. Oberoi (yup, that’s their name), is a group composed of rapper Alvin “Nivla” Augustine, Punjabi folk singer Parag “P. Oberoi” Oberoi, Sharad “DJ Sharad” Bhavnani and sound engineer Raj “RVM Sounds” Makhija…
Their Indian-fused hip-hop - a nod of sorts to Jay-Z and Punjabi MC’s collaboration on the “Beware of the Boys” track a few years ago - lends Sub-continental style to the traditionally American rhythms.
“It’s who we are. We grew up listening to hip-hop, and then going home and our parents would have on a [classical Indian singer],” says DJ Sharad.
“We grew up with two cultures; the New York American one and the Indian one.” [NYP]
Read more of that article which was in the New York Post, it has the entire story about how the video which has got them this far almost wasn’t. Meanwhile, I will try to get over my raging disgust for MySpaz and log in, since that’s the only way to vote for the brown contenders. Voting ends soon; I know you have a profile on that visual-assault of a social networking program which crashes my browser every other time I visit— if you are so inclined, log in and vote to let Soul Tap/Nivla/P.Oberoi crash the super bowl. That just sounds mutinous.
anna at 10:23 PM in Music, Video · 83 comment(s) · Direct link
January 21, 2008
DC: Subcontinental Drift 2008- January 28
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.
anna at 03:53 PM in Art, Arts and Entertainment, Events, Identity, Music, Theater · 11 comment(s) · Direct link
January 16, 2008
Falu on FOX
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.”
amardeep at 02:56 PM in Music · 38 comment(s) · Direct link
January 13, 2008
Prêt-à-Porter for Boyz
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].
What I like most about this shot is that with those juicy puckered lips and cocksure tilt of the head, M.I.A. captures the attitude you’d have to exhibit if you (a male) wore this outfit while grocery shopping on a Sunday, just as neighborhood churches were letting out. The jaws of young mothers navigating the produce section would drop open and they wouldn’t know whether to cover their children’s eyes or their own, as you gently squeezed the Roma tomatoes (needed for your vegetarian sandwich) to ensure proper ripeness. As you moved on to the frozen food aisle the goosebumps on your legs would stand at attention. You’d probably have to rub your hands together real fast and then touch your legs to warm them up, the way Pat Morita did to Daniel-san in The Karate Kid. By that time this one PTA mother, who seems to always be lurking at this grocery store, would have alerted the store’s rent-a-cop about your “provocative clothing.” Lucky for you the rent-a-cop is a woman who appreciates a man with good fashion sense. To placate “PTA mom” she offers to take you in the back to check your drivers license…or whatever. She gets off work in ten minutes anyways and is both a vegetarian and hungry. Marc Jacobs is on to something. I’m always looking for the perfect grocery shopping outfit.
This photograph, from as best as I can tell, is part of the same ad campaign. At first I didn’t understand because I don’t see any men’s clothing in this entire ad. And then, finally, I grasped the genius that is Marc Jacobs’. In this photograph M.I.A. is posing as a men’s “accessory.” If I dressed up in either of the two outfits featured about above, I would need a beautiful woman like this hanging off my arm, left nipple peaking out with confidence, daring someone to make a comment so she can slap them upside the head with that gold hand bag as she says, “and who gave you permission to look?” I would chime in with a “yeah punk. Don’t be looking at my girl’s chest.” I also like the fact that photographer Juergen Teller was able to capture M.I.A. in a shot where it looks like she has a “man arm” (as opposed to man hands). I’ve always appreciated women with strong muscular arms who’d be able to kick the ass of any other women that might be vying for my much sought after attention. And believe me, in a Marc Jacobs outfit, many women would be vying for my attention.
Finally, there is this shot above. Anna insisted I include this because unlike me, she didn’t find the Marc Jacobs ad campaign very effective…except for this lone picture which she found redeeming. I’m not sure. I hate to disagree with Anna (whose fashion credentials are legendary) in a public forum but I think that any fashion ad should really highlight either clothes or accessories. It is possible that if we were able to pan down M.I.A. might be wearing some tighty-whitey underwear that I would find appealing. This shot however, features only one mustard colored shirt and a magnifying glass. As a man, I don’t find a magnifying glass a very useful accessory (and I surely don’t want a magnified image of the inside of her mouth). Underwear is a must though, and so I wish we saw at least one ad featuring M.I.A. in the type of tighty-whiteys I’d consider wearing around the apartment after work.
In any case, I hope you enjoyed my fashion review. Since I am not known for my fashion reviews on this website, this is the last one you will probably see for a while.
abhi at 08:07 PM in Fashion, Humor, Music, Musings · 55 comment(s) · Direct link
January 11, 2008
Return of the Papaya!
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.
anna at 06:45 PM in Music · 21 comment(s) · Direct link
January 07, 2008
V are all Rockstars
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.
Fortunately, no one uncovered my shameful positivity towards this anthem of the popular set. I say “fortunately” because my friends wore flight jackets, smoked cloves and paired Fluevogs with our somber tweed uniforms; we listened to The Smiths, not this group we would later derisively hiss at for being ignorant and intolerant since it obviously had issues with homosexuality and people of color. Never mind that GnR’s lead guitarist Slash is half-black himself, to 14-year old me any group which was going to diss gay people was evil (I had just gotten over my crush on George Michael, my favorite member of Depeche Mode was Martin and I hearted Erasure…I really wanted to be Grace Adler when I grew up).
Part of the reason why this video— which is actually a wonderful commercial for Indian MTV-rival Channel V— jolted me like a quadruple-shot-latte was because none of the things I associate with Sweet Child o’ Mine are brown. High school, my friends from it, the TG parties I grimly attended with all my pledge sisters at UC Hippie…not brown. This video? Brown, and fabulously so.
This song has serious staying power. It went from being my bete noire twenty years ago to what I was giddily shouting the lyrics to a few months ago, at the National Geographic Halloween party. Upon observing how unanimously thrilled everyone aged 21-61 was the second those unmistakable, evocative first notes blared, I think I drunkenly decided that SCoM would be on my wedding reception play list, should I ever resolve my fear of adulthood and move beyond the existential crisis of “nomenclature for feminists”, i.e. “Do I take his name?”.
Wait, where was I? Oh, yes SCoM. Rather, “Ooooooh, woah-oooooh Sweeeet Chile of Miiiiiiiine”. A song so infectious, I’m sure every one of you has your own memory or five associated with it. I must say, the version we’re highlighting above is fantastic. Well, the first almost-half is. I loved it until 00:24. I just wanted more of those bliss-inducing strings. The vocals ripped me out of the euphoric haze I had been lifted in to and I was bewildered and slightly annoyed until Auntie’s hilarious, monosyllabic reaction at the end, which punctuated the minute nicely.
It’s a Monday and I thought you deserved something Happy; see how many times you watch it before you can tear yourself away. Me? Four. Just when you think something familiar can’t surprise you…
anna at 02:10 PM in Humor, Music, Musings, Video · 188 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link
December 12, 2007
For the Ladies: "Tell Me What," A DBD/ABD Hip Hop Video
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?
amardeep at 11:53 AM in Music · 47 comment(s) · Direct link
December 05, 2007
Further Proof That Bharath Obama is so Desi.
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.
anna at 07:21 PM in Humor, Music, Politics, Video · 30 comment(s) · Direct link
October 30, 2007
Hard Kaur = the Desi Missy Elliott (a theory)
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.)
amardeep at 12:04 PM in Music · 43 comment(s) · Direct link
October 23, 2007
Basement Bhangra CD: a review
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 ‘Muti