DJ Nitin Sawhney is all set to debut a musical next month. From BBC News:
The artist has been commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia to write The Classroom, which is about “expanding the imagination and exploring ideas”.
Expanding imagination and exploring ideas? What the heck does that mean? Sify.com translates for us:
an expose about his difficulties as the only Indian pupil at school, which will debut in London along with his earlier works.
Okay, that I can understand.
Guerrillas in her midst: Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A., is a 26-year-old British Asian DJ who raps in the garage/grime genre (via Tablatronic and our own Sajit). For song material, she mines her family’s flight from the Sri Lankan civil war.
The new arrivals were not exactly welcomed with open arms by London’s Sri Lankan community… “They are really obsessed with impressing the British. They want to be doctors and engineers and go to Cambridge, buy leather couches to match their encyclopedias, have a sitar in the corner and whip their saris out once a year for a wedding. They’d look at us and go, ‘We don’t want them hanging round with our kids, they’re into rap, they think they’re black.’… I’ll go to LA and be black: it’s better than being in Britain and being brown.’
Check out the video for ‘Sunshowers,’ a bouncy track which makes frequent and incongruous reference to guns, bombs and the guerrillas of Colombo.
Update: Nirali magazine has a great profile of Arulpragasam:
She never knew her father, one of the founding members of Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a militant guerrilla group formed in 1976 with the goal of gaining political independence for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil population. “We saw him once a year, for 10 minutes at a time. My mum said, ‘That’s your uncle–your dad is dead.’ It was to protect us,” she explains… “We lived in hiding for so long. We were just moving from village to village and from house to house. Nobody wanted to put us up; we were untouchable. Everybody knew about us in Sri Lanka, and nobody wanted to deal with us because we brought so much heat. The army would follow [us wherever we’d go]. We were living in big-time poverty, stealing mangoes off someone else’s tree,” she remembers.
Update: M.I.A. just spun in New York (photos) and landed on the cover of Fader magazine. Here’s the layout.
DJ Rekha calls Daler Mehndi the Punjabi Bobby McFerrin (via Tablatronic):
Mehndi was bhangra lite and a diversion, says DJ Rekha of New York’s hip Bhangra Basement club: “Even back when he was big, he was kind of like the Will Smith of bhangra. Not so respected. Now, after the scandal, his position in the scene is that he doesn’t really have one.”…
There’s a new breed of younger, tougher British bhangra kings in Rishi Rich and Panjabi MC. Rich, in particular, has taken the music to heights Mehndi never dreamed of, fusing it with hip-hop to create a more aggressive sound that has Britney Spears and Ricky Martin queuing up to ask the 26-year-old to add a global street edge to their singles… Rich’s hardening of bhangra takes it back to its roots. As the music of the dry farms of the Punjab, bhangra lyrics were often gritty, and even today Punjabi artists are the most outspoken in India, singing about sex, drugs and crime just as their hip-hop peers do in the West…
In 1999 an American critic, stunned by the ecstatic crowd at one of his New Jersey concerts, declared Mehndi “bigger than the Beatles.”… “You know, I was a very bad taxi driver,” he says. “Always looking in the mirror at myself and imagining I would be a big star in music…”
STUFF: I read that one of your musical influences is White Zombie. What part of their album Make Them Die Slowly do you most identify with?
TINA: Can I just tell you that I grew up in a heavy-metal band doing covers? My claim to fame was that I could play all the major Metallica songs. I hung out with not the greatest crowd. On prom night, everybody was on acid, but I just had a couple of beers. I grew up on Pantera and Skid Row.
I can’t BELIEVE they go here however:
STUFF: Are you well versed in the Kama Sutra?
TINA:When IÂ’m married! You donÂ’t get into that stuff till youÂ’re married.
STUFF: So, are you what Britney Spears once claimed to be?
TINA:I didnÂ’t say that, either. The Kama Sutra is about trying different things, and I just believe that if you want to go all crazy, thereÂ’s no one better to do it with than your husband. ItÂ’s a belief thing, and people have different beliefs.
I can’t beleive she even answered that question. Still, the fact that she is single gives my life hope.
With the Republican National Convention starting tomorrow, I was looking for some tunes to play loud enough so that I could drown out the spin and pandering. Luckily I found just the thing to do the trick. From the Seattle Times:
Their goal is to disrupt the status quo, and they usually do it without an invitation.
It takes mere minutes for the Infernal Noise Brigade to enliven a crowd — on the steps of the Federal Building, in the streets of Prague, or surrounding a Starbucks in Pioneer Square.
The brigade has gained a reputation for providing a soundtrack for dissent in Seattle, but many might not realize how far the music spreads.
How far does it spread exactly and what kind of music do they play?
None of the lyrics are in English. The INB does a Peruvian song about people struggling against the rule, a French freedom song, a Portuguese song about a guerrilla soldier and his lover having their last breakfast together, and a Czech folk song.
“We come from different backgrounds, and we all borrow melodies,” said Alix Chappell, a 26-year-old vocalist.
“It’s the kind of stuff you would find in a tape stall in India,” Strasser said. “A guy howling in Hindi, with rockabilly guitar and a jazz melody from the 1950s. It’s different kinds of music being misused.”
Here’s a clip you can rock to during the convention.