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Coalition of the Thrilling: Hip-Hop's Long Hot Indian Summer

Sterling Clover

I could give you the standard story on Bhangra. 500 years of history starting with Punjab peasants celebrating the harvest, brought to Britain, revived, mixed with house, hip-hop, reggae, 2-step, etc. But what does that say about the big grin from my local supplier when he saw the flash of recognition in my eyes at the bass from Kylie's "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" dropped inna middle of a set from Chicago's own DJ Banti? Or the for real rush I got last weekend strolling down the Gold Coast with my best girl and noticing a straight Desi track blasting out the rolled-down windows of a passing black Cadillac? That track being "Mundian To Bach Ke", recorded by Panjabi MC in '98, steadily building steam on the club circuit across Europe until recently blessed with a verse from Jay-Z, rechristened "Beware of The Boys", now blowing it up on hip-hop radio nationwide, propelling the new album *Beware* up (or at least into) the charts, and the ostensible topic of this article.

jizza my nizzaHip-hop's been flirting with the Asian sound since Gotti produced Ja Rule's "Put It On Me" in '00. Since then we've had "Oochie Wally" from QB's Finest, the Neptunes getting into the action with N.O.R.E.'s "Nothin'," and a Bollywood star-turn from DJ Quik on Truth Hurts' "Addictive". Lately we've had some folks get it spectacularly wrong too. Shania Twain's *Up* came with pop and country mixes stateside, but included the infamous Blue Disk for worldwide distribution where producer Mutt Lange just changed-up the instrumentation to something a bit more exotic with a few pro-tools keypunches, leaving everything in the original song-structure intact. While not quite as blatant, about a third of Lil' Kim's *Bella Mafia* sounds nearly the same, a last-minute multicultural/orientalist fetishism which comes out disastrously dull. Give Shania and Kim the benefit of the doubt and maybe they're really going for some fever-dream of global harmony and a better world. But the world they describe has about as much relevance to ours as J-Lo's fantasyland where all our Jennys stay true to their blocks.

As originally cut, Jay-Z's "Beware" verse was pretty minimal, his usual top-of-the world shtick with a few passing references to R. Kelly's "Snake" thrown in for good measure. You know Jay and producers -- he'll love 'em and leave 'em but he don't really need 'em. Like he just stopped by to lay down the J-Hova Good Pimping seal of approval en passant to his next real project. As his verse comes in though, right on time with the introduction of the insistent bassline lifted from the Knight Rider theme, there's one line that knocks me out: "as soon as the beat drop / we got the street locked". And that's what I hear Bhangra as really *about*.

The one time a hip-hop producer got Bhangra truly right was Timbaland on Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On" where he didn't just play with samples, but engaged its rhythmic and structural base. Similarly, on DSNY's *Untouchable II* there's a brief interlude with no Indian instrumentation in sight: no oscillating pluck of a single-stringed tumbi, no burbling tabla drums, no pounding dhol. Really it's just Missy Elliot's "One Minute Man" with a teasing snippet of Eve's "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" dropped on. But somewhere in the interplay is something that screams Bhangra to me. And then there's Sona Family's remix of More Fire Crew's 2-step anthem "Oi!," which simply drops some tablas below to mirror its eight-bar shuffle and replaces the acapella with one that ceases to inquire after their "money today" in order to ask after the identity of "that Punjabi girl". So y'all best remember that until they gas and fire us rhythm is the virus; when we negotiate how beats meet we're also negotiating how riddims run dem feet; and body language is the most universal, subtle, and contested of them all.

For a while I had a theory that the rhythmic signature of Bhangra was triplets against duplets (cause y'*know* raga rocks it twelve-to-the-bar), but it turned out I was just counting sloppy. Now I have a theory that the trick is in the drums anticipating the pickup of each downbeat, but that hardly covers it. What's undeniable is in the doubling of the Bhangra component to the underlying hip-hop or dancehall rhythm, fusing music of different tempos the same way jungle did with hip-hop breakbeats on top. Resultantly, it feels like the Bhangra settles on top, then works its way into the cracks of the beats below.

This is all in plenty of evidence on "Beware of The Boys," which nearly has the same relationship to Bhangra as James Brown's "I Feel Good" does to funk -- every aspect of the track so fully integrated by rhythm that it almost becomes a stylistic archetype. Bhangra is mainly a four-bar format, and that jumps out on "Beware" too. If there are two Bhangra bars to each rap breakbeat, then that means a small break every two hip-hop bars. And every four of *those* two bar units, Panjabi MC drops some other element (like the bass) in or out. The whole structure is so tight I wish I could draw you a picture.

But formulas for pretty patterns aren't just calculated. They're arrived at through the back and forth between DJs and crowds, sleepless nights fine-tuning percussive samples, so forth. Integration is a struggle accomplished by no stroke of a pen, only hard-won lessons of cultural haggling and transformation. Ethnic signifiers appropriated then stolen back again, sounds wrenched into quotation marks, then wrenching their context back with them. Noises with sidelong glances to other ones, whole lyrical complexes forced onto unwilling tracks. But like they say, close enough to fight is close enough to, well, you know. So maybe better to replace Bakhtin's awkward gem of a term in "dialogic interanimation" with a good 'merkan one like miscegenation.

Hybrid vigor may be de rigueur for Bhangra, but not in that Bill Laswell precious "look at us breaking culture boundaries for transgressive kicks" way. The sounds come together because they feel right together. And they feel right because the social mores behind the sonic signifiers are already rubbing shoulders (if not quite backs) on the streets of Oldham and Bradford. And back when those two northern British cities blew up in the summer of '01, those Asian youth weren't just asking to be tolerated but insisting they had something to offer, like it or not. Like Eve says on "Satisfaction" where she does it like it ain't done before: "Radio stations, DJ's they spin/Told y'all determined to win/You tryina enter through the back door?"

In my own personal fantasyland, the fake-Egyptology back-to-Africa future-nationalism of tracks like Nas' "I Can" will get pushed aside by the real thing. Not to dismiss the search for roots, but no matter how many kids are talking about Kush, the pharaoh won't be talking back. Which brings us to the silent partner on "Beware of The Boys": dancehall DJ KC Jockey who actually cut the track, bringing that magic Jamaican sound-bridge across the Atlantic. No accident either that the *other* place Bhangra is moving in is on the dancehall Diwali riddim underlying Sean Paul's "Get Busy," Wayne Wonder's "No Letting Go" and Lumidee's hauntingly off-kilter whisper "Never Leave You." Diwali really *is* counted in triplets and comes so strong that DJs have been dropping whole swaths of cuts from *Greensleeves Rhythm Album #27: Diwali* into their sets. And in its wake are new eastern-tinged rhythms like Snake (a lovely lift from R. Kelly's single whose own video for the Remix is all about black faces playing Lawrence of Arabia and freakin with different races also played by black faces), Bollywood (lifted from Truth Hurts' "Addictive" in turn lifted from a score from, well, Bollywood), Masterpiece, Belly Skin, Clappas, and Egyptian. As Seattle Weekly writer Jess Harvell noted, keeping on top of it all is like collecting Pokemon.

There's a faint promise here, the burnt out ends of British Empire getting together and talking about what the hell happened to them. And when people get to talking, sometimes they get to acting too. Jay cut a new verse for the official release of "Beware" that takes on the war: "We rebellious, we back home / screaming 'Leave Iraq alone," and describing how Bin Laden *and* Ronald Reagan got Manhattan to blow. What better platform than from the momentary sonic promise of a postcolonial first wives club? New York, Kingston, Delhi, London: from ghetto to ghetto, backyard to yard, taking it transglobal on the aboveground, because that's where the people are.

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