The Asian Overground?

    Pic 01

It’s often said that chicken tikka masala is now the most widely-eaten dish in the UK.
Traditional fish and chips are now something that our grandparents used to eat. Chicken tikka
masala is often thought to be an Indian dish, but it is not – in fact, it is a hybrid created in the
UK. It is neither Indian nor British.

Hybrids often appear in post-colonial societies, and not only with food! A similar thing has
happened to Indian and Pakistani music in the UK. In the past, as far as the UK was
concerned, traditional music from the Indian subcontinent consisted only of solemn ragas and
impassioned qawwali singing. Some people were perhaps aware of the exuberant pop of the
Bollywood film soundtracks, but little of the real richness and complexity of music from India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh reached Britain.

This changed in the mid 1990’s with the appearance of what was called the 'Asian
Underground'. Following the explosion of dance music at the beginning of the 90s, a number of
people started to mix traditional Indian and Pakistani music with house, hip hop, drum and
bass and dub beats.
 Pic 02

Fun-da-Mental were one of these original groups. They mixed samples of sitars and tablas with
heavily political rapping. They were an attempt to be a UK response to New York’s famous rap
crew, Public Enemy. Badmarsh and Shri are a duo consisting of Shri who plays tabla and bass,
while Badmarsh is a DJ. Their second CD Signs features a wide range of musicians, from folk
singer Kathryn Williams to rappers JC 001 and UK Apache. State of Bengal have worked with
70s sitar player Ananda Shankar on music that sounds like film soundtracks, while Anjali Dutt
has also played with the exotic sounds of the sitar, recontextualising them for a contemporary
audience. Their music is a comment on the way that Europe perceives sounds and music from
other cultures – as well as being enjoyable! The group Cornershop denied being part of the
Asian Underground scene, but were still an Anglo-Indian group who mixed Indian and Western
sounds, and played with ideas of ethnicity and identity. They did a version of the Beatles’
Indian song Norwegian Wood – converting the lyrics into Punjabi, and had a worldwide hit
with Brimful of Asha, their tribute to Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle.

The highpoint of the Asian underground scene may now have passed, but the musicians who
were originally involved in it are still producing exciting, creative and genre-defying music. One
of the key names of the movement, Talvin Singh, won the Mercury Music Prize for his first full-
length record, OK and has now gone on to work as a producer for other artists. Nitin Sawhney
has been the most successful of the Asian Underground artists, and on his
records Prophesy and Human has extended the typical Asian Underground sound, including
soul and Latin influences.

Panjabi MC had a worldwide hit with Mundian to Bach Ke while American rap star Missy
Elliott’s used tabla-style beats on her Get Ur Freak On, starting a massive craze for the sound.
Now that there is even a Scottish bhangra group (called Tigerstyle), it seems that
the underground has indeed become overground.