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In the thread on "Asian" (meaning Japanese, Chinese and Korean, as per the summary and OP) music, secret goldfish posted this, which was basically ignored:
Does Nitin Sawhney count?
I love him so much. The sensitive treatments of topics like migration, identity, nationalism and war are amazing lyrically, but the melodies themselves are also so damn good.
I think this was down to US/UK language usage confusion (as far as i'm aware, when "Asian" is used as a descriptor on its own in the US, it tends to mean "East Asian" (ie Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese etc), whereas in the UK it usually means "South Asian" (ie Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan etc), which probably reflects the respective colonial and neo-colonial "enterprises" of those 2 countries) - so i thought it worth having a thread for UK-definition-of-"Asian" music...
I like a lot of this music, but i'm not an expert on it... the main genre categories i'm aware of are Bhangra, Hindi film music (aka "Bollywood", altho that's a term for the films themselves rather than the music as such IIRC, but tends to crop up a lot in compilation titles), and "Asian Underground", which is a bit of a vague term but tends to encompass UK-produced music which syncretises South Asian music with electronica and has vaguely post-colonial politics - probably including people like Nitin Sawhney, Badmarsh & Shri, (arguably) Asian Dub Foundation, etc...
Bhangra is made in both India/Pakistan/Bangladesh and the UK, IIRC, tho in the UK it's very much a "niche market", often not being found in mainstream record shops but sold in specialist shops run by and for Asians. IIRC it was originally Bangladeshi folk music, but with the growth of the South Asian communities in the UK it has been heavily cross-pollinated with hip-hop, dancehall and drum'n'bass influences, and in the latter form is extremely popular in the sort of young South-Asian-descent social scene which also takes fashion and lifestyle cues from the latter types of music (which, apart from in restaurants and corner shops, yends to be about the only place you'll hear it, despite it having been a huge scene in the UK for at least 15 years). In about 2000-2001 there was a fairly brief crossover into the mainstream thru its discovery and sampling by US hip-hop and RnB producers, producing such crossover records as Missy Elliott's "Get Your Freak On" and Truth Hurts's utterly awesome "So Addictive", as well as hip hop remixes of actual bhangra artists, such as Panjabi MC, breaking the charts.
Hindi film music has some crossovers in production style with bhangra, but in its more traditional form (the heyday of Bollywood was the 60s and 70s) is its own very distinct genre, typified by soaring string arrangements (possibly influenced by Western film music), male/female call-and-response vocals (the female singers being the biggest stars, and often having, to my ears, very beautiful and, from a Western point of view, quite unusual voices), and often some very funky drumming (I have an awesome compilation called "Bollywood Funk", of basically Hindi stuff influenced by African-American "Blaxploitation" type film music, which would make some incredible hip-hop samples). Right now i'm listening to a series of compilations called "Tips Superhits", which appears to be more recent Hindi film music, but which i have absolutely no idea of the origin of, except that the CDs were manufactured in Mumbai, and it's somewhat more electronic/dance-music oriented, but equally good...
"Asian Underground" stuff... well, Asian Dub Foundation, who definitely deserve a thread to themselves, are IMO one of the greatest ever bands, but while they've been tagged with the "Asian Underground" label, they transcend it in style by quite a long way, and don't really sound all that like any of the other artists with that label. I'm willing to talk about them here tho. Nitin Sawhney and Talvin Singh i've heard some of, and Badmarsh & Shri could probably also fit into this category, altho i think they see themselves more as simply drum'n'bass artists who use some Asian influences. I'm not really sure who else would be categorised in the genre...
There's also raga and qawwali, which are Hindu and Muslim "classical"/devotional music respectively, and neither of which i know many names in beyond the obvious crossover artists (Ravi Shankar and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan respectively)... both, however, i've had some really mystical ganja-smoking experiences to, andi'd like to know more about particularly because of the commonalities i hear in them with the more mystical end of Jamaican roots/dub music (particularly Augustus Pablo and Lee Scratch Perry)...
So, any fans or experts of any of this music who can correct my mistaken assumptions and/or fill in the gaps in knowledge, or recommend anything in particular? |
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