Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Slumgod Mandeep Sethi Drops the Boom Bap Rap

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Poor Peoples Planet.png This past Friday, Bay Area Sikh-American hip-hop lyricist Mandeep Sethi dropped his latest album Poor Peoples Planet, a concept album produced by X9 of Xitanos Matematikos that weaves in the teaching Jiddu Krishnamurti, Punjabi gypsy origins, and classical elements of hip hop. At only 22 years old, Mandeep has already developed a strong base of followers having appeared on stage with artists such as Ziggy Marley and Dead Prez and having jumped on the mic with folks I’ve written about before such as Humble the Poet, Sikh Knowledge and Ras Ceylon. You can get Poor Peoples Planet on iTunes later this week and if you visit Mandeep’s BandCamp you can download the album now. Still not sure? Check out the single below Moving Swiftly, Guerrilla Tactics.

[Moving Swiftly::][GuerillaTactics][POORPEOPLESPLANET by mandeep.sethi.music

Full disclosure, I’ve been helping get the word out for Poor Peoples Planet and am excited to support a young Desi American whose lyrics are smart, conscious, and inspired by the hyphenated identity. But in the course of hanging out with Mandeep this week, I was really impressed to find out that he is one of the co-founders of Slumgods. Based in India, Slumgods was founded in 2010 as the first B-Boy collective in India bringing together emcees, breakers, artists of India and America. The Slumgods are bringing it hard and fresh using the the five elements of hip hop as a tool of empowerment for the slum youth in the Dharavi slums with a community center called Tiny Drops Hip Hop Center.

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The coming decade for South Asians

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For the past week, in addition to creating a list of modest New Year’s resolutions (oh how I miss the days when my resolutions were wildly ambitious!), I have been thinking about how the “South Asian American experience” will change and evolve during this decade. For instance, in 2004 when we started this blog, South Asian Americans were still “outsiders” in many respects. Now, we’ve given up noting much of what was quite notable back then (e.g., every actor, politician, musicians). So here is my list of top 10 predictions involving South Asian American society for the next 10 years:

1) The United States will have its first South Asian senator

2) Entrepreneurs will be the new doctors in terms of finding a respectable marriage match (e.g., “oh you should meet their son Ravi, he is having new start-up company”)

3) South Asian reporters on the scene will replace Asian reporters on the scene

4) Every other instance of a NYTimes wedding announcement featuring a South Asian person will be in the context of an interracial couple

5) Movies directed by M. Night Shyamalan will no longer mention the director as part of the movie ad campaign.

6) All South Asian American bloggers will go the way of the Dodo.

7) Slumdog Millionaire will be derided for having won best picture (e.g., really, we thought that was best picture that year?)

8) Americans in the media will pronounce South Asian names correctly…well almost. Much much better at least.

9) Yoga will be the new Starbucks

10) A South Asian American author will write an amazing work of fiction (maybe even one that will be turned into a movie) with almost no hint of any South Asian themes

11) There will be a headline grabbing sex scandal involving a South Asian American

Ok so there are 11 not 10. But only because I believe one of these won’t happen.

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Why Desi Mothers are Superior (Or Not)

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If you haven’t already, I suggest you take a good, long look at the article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” which appeared last Sunday in the WSJ by Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor. The piece, an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, describes Chinese parenting techniques in relation to those of “Western parents.” Chua cites her personal experiences with her two daughters, Sophia and Louisa, and all the activities she doesn’t allow them to do– like “have a playdate” or “choose their own extracurricular activities.” Sound familiar? If you grew up in a desi household, it probably does. And Chua’s recollection of a particular situation, where her seven-year old daughter Lulu had trouble learning a difficult piano piece, may also strike a chord, no pun intended:

I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn’t let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

Now, I consider my own mother to be a very good mother. Edit. I consider my mother to be an excellent mother. As a childhood elementary education major, my mother could be quite rigid when it came to rules, but she gave us siblings room to pursue our own interests. As long as I pulled in semi-respectable grades, I was free to audition for the school play, write for the school paper, etc. Continue reading →

Jai Ho for Jai Paul

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Jai Paul.jpg

Is it a mohawk or a mullet? With a mo-mullet haircut like that, you can be sure that anything coming out of this 21 year old Brit is anything but average. #MusicMonday for today comes from my latest musical obsession – Jai Paul and his song BTSU (h/t Abhay).

BTSU starts with the tiny, pretty whisper of Don’t fuck with me, though it soon explodes from its small man/big mouth beginnings into a synth storm. Then the squall settles again, back to lazy snare snap and his little coo. At some point there’s smooth saxophone, just a touch. [thefader]

You can download the track here (via Abeano) and keep tabs on Jai Paul on his myspace to see what he comes out with next. Continue reading →

Top Fifteen of 2010

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F5D864A1-4E0E-D007-2655-AFBD3F49CEE8wallpaper.jpg What happened this year? Will it be known as the year that Julian Assange brought down the Western World? A year rocked by such high unemployment that it allowed “creative types” like Das Racist, The Kominas and Sunny Ali and the Kid the time to put out new albums? Will 2010 be known as the year of Sarah Palin’s Nikki Haley? Or is it the year of Joel Stein-ism? Let’s take a look. Continue reading →

Even North Koreans Bend It Like Beckham

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Korean Bend It.jpgYou have to wonder… In a country like North Korea where the nation is stuck 1950s time warp and Western influences have officially not been allowed in… Why the 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham? Why now?

The 2002 film starring Keira Knightley, Jonathan Rhys Myers and Parminder Nagra aired Dec. 26 — a break from the regular programming of news, documentaries and soap operas in North Korea, where Western films are largely off limits.

“This was the first Western film to be broadcast on North Korean TV, and as well as football covered issues such as multiculturalism, equality and tolerance,” British Ambassador Peter Hughes told The Associated Press from Pyongyang, where his embassy helped arranged the Boxing Day broadcast.

Britain has been seeking to reach out to North Koreans through football, a sport that has connected the two nations since North Korea first sent a team to the World Cup in England in 1966. [yahoo]

I get it. Soccer can unite the world, teaches sportsmanship, crosses boundaries of nation states, blah, blah, blah. I can understand why the British government would choose this movie to develop ties with North Koreans. What I’m curious about is the South Asian hyphenated identity and pop cultural references. I would think that in a nation sheltered the way North Korea is, that a lot of these subtle nuances would be totally missed. In a nation where immigration simply doesn’t exist, how much of the immigrant experience story line did the North Koreans actually understand?

But typically of the censoring Communist state, eight minutes were cut from the 112-minute show….The Boxing Day screening was a rare treat in a country whose TV normally focuses on docum­entaries about farms and others glorifying its leaders and Army. [mirror]

Of course, they had to censor something. But I wonder what exactly those eight minutes of censored scenes were in this fairly PG rated movie. Was it when the girls were at the club? Religious references? Who knows. All I can say is thank goodness they chose this movie instead of Bride and Prejudice. Continue reading →

The Absolutely Sick Sikh Knowledge

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Sikh knowledge 2.jpg

On his right forearm he has this tattoo. I didn’t recognize it at first – a four by four of solid black squares. “It’s the squares to my drum pad,” Sikh Knowledge said, pointing casually to his arm. It made sense – he was a reggae dancehall musician that loved to produce music. You may not know who he is but you will and I guarantee you’ve heard his beats. His tunes are the base music for many of the up and coming hip hop Desi artists of the day – Humble the Poet, Mandeep Sethi, and Hoodini have all used tracks produced by him.

Hailing from Montreal and well known on the Canuck Desi scene, Sikh Knowledge made his way to California for a mini-tour in December, hitting up cities all along the coast. I met him in Sacramento, where he was doing a show with his Sikh hip-hop posse at the Sol Collective. The show was live and it was intense to see a whole scene of brown underground hip hop heads. I sat down with Sikh Knowledge aka Kanwar Anit Singh Saini before he jumped on the mic at the Sacramento show. Here’s what he had to say.

Sikh Knowledge got his start young, singing at the temple when he was a child. But he got into hip-hop also at a young age. “I was one of those kids that would beat box going to school… I was the only grade 3 kid bringing mixed tapes to school. I lost Bobby Brown’s “Every Little Step” on the playground and that’s when I cried at school.” It was when he heard the Sound Bwoy Burill track in 1994 that he knew he was going to make music his life.

But what really made an impression on me was Sikh Knowledge’s confidence in pursuing his life. At the age of 20, he decided to stop being what other people wanted him to be, dropped out of engineering school and re-started honestly. “I dropped out, came out, and rearranged my whole life,” he stated. “I reapplied and did my undergraduate degree in music with a minor in linguistics. It was the happiest time of my life. I felt good about the decisions that I made.” He’s currently pursuing his Master degree in speech language pathology while having the dual career of mixing some of the ill-est beats in North America. Continue reading →

Trigger Happy Sub Swara

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A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending one of the most bass booming dance frenzy inducing parties I’ve been to since moving to the Bay area. Held at the dope new venue Public Works, it was a record release party for Trigger the latest out of the electronic/hip hop/dubstep/desi beat making duo, Sub Swara. Originating from a NYC club night, Dhruva Ganesan and Dave Sharma have turned Sub Swara into an electronic dubstep music touring machine. Performing that night were also San Francisco’s own Surya Dub DJs Kush Arora, Maneesh the Twister, Jimmy Love and DJ Amar. Almost all of these folks are tied in with the sound barrier breaking Dhamaal Soundsystem.

But enough about the party that you missed. Let me give you something to listen to on this Music Monday. Check out the Triggers Mixtape Volume 2, opening up with a track co-writ by Dead Prez. That’s right, it’s a Dead Prez meets Sub Swara – an unlikely combo but somehow it works. Also check out minute 9.00 for the Ceelo remix, my personal fave.

Sub Swara — Triggers Mixtape Vol 2 by Sub Swara

The above Mixtape is the second in what I can only imagine to be a series – bookmark the Sub Swara soundcloud page to keep track of other mixes that may be coming from their crew. Just in case you were the OG type, below you can listen to Trigger in it’s entirety and original form.

I’ve never been a huge fan of electronic music (though I did attend my fair share of raves in my college days) but I find the music coming out of Sub Swara and their associated DJ crew different. There is more bass, more beats, amazing obscure dancehall and reggae finds that blend seamlessly with bhangra and deep bass beats. I’m a big fan of dubstep and love how this team of musicians can spin to take listeners on an audio adventure.

I’m sure Sub Swara will be doing a show near you very soon (looks like CT, NY and CO are in luck). Keep your eye on their website, and their twitter to keep posted on when the bass goes boom. Continue reading →

Kids Being Kids

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For today’s Music Monday, I want you to imagine this: A big gritty cauldron. Throw in a pork eating Muzzie. A ukulele. A pair of cowboy boots. Stir in a dash of lo-fi, put in a pinch of sultry attitude, and toss in a little bit of “pew, pew.” What do you get?

Kids.jpg

You get the The Kid (of Sunny Ali and The Kid) with a new EP album aptly named Kids. Abdullah Saeed’s (aka “The Kid”) solo project and released on the Poco Party label, Kids maintains the cowboy feelings that you get when you listen to a Sunny Ali and The Kid album, it’s just now it has a Hawaiian ukulele twang. It’s complicated to describe yet oddly simple. Just listen to it below. And after you listen to it, you can download it here at Sunny Ali and the Kid’s Bandcamp site for free – consider it my Chrismahanukwanzakah present for you.

POCO-005 The Kid – Kids by POCOPARTY

From The Kid himself in an interview at Poco Party:

The songs are not really about kids, but from the perspective of a kid. “the bug” is about a school yard game, for example. The limited instrumentation, the rudimentary skill, and the rough recording are all part of this theme.[pocoparty]

So there you have it. It’s an album by The Kid named Kids written from the perspective of a kid. Don’t worry, Sunny Ali ain’t mad at The Kid for breaking off on his solo project – in fact the duo just performed this past weekend in New York City. Follow Sunny Ali and The Kid’s facebook page for their upcoming tours and albums and you can read Abdullah’s latest adventures with music over at MTV Desi.

In the meantime, I now can’t stop daydreaming about how I want this for Chrismahanukwanzakah. Thanks, Kid.

Previous Posts: Q&A with @Porkadventurer, Showdown with Sunny Ali. And the Kid. Continue reading →