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Hyperdub Chicago Cell
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.
Hip-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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