Sacrificing to a year-end ritual, I’ve been compiling my “best of 2006” music lists for various outlets. It’s a cool exercise as long as you don’t take it too seriously; when you’re in the arts writing business, you have the chance to check out oodles of new releases, and you need to employ filters like genre, or label, or simply your own whimsy, just to sort through the pile let alone pick your favorites. Despite this, I get value from learning what other critics enjoyed, and I do my best to make my own picks useful and interesting, in particular by looking for sounds that folks might have missed, yet are not so obscure as to be un-findable in stores or online.

Still, they say everyone’s a critic, and (to endorse what Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd stated in the comments I quoted here) these days technology and the emergence of online communities makes everyone even more of a critic than before. It’s easy to set up your soapbox, and there’s even a chance someone will hear, maybe even respond. So since we’re all critics, and I know there’s some serious, multi-faceted, all-over-the-place music listening that goes on out there in Sepia-land, I am proud to bring you the MACACA MUSIC POLL.

Here’s how it works. I can’t be bothered to figure out how to code a poll, and besides, I have something much simpler in mind. I would like everyone to tell us five pieces of music that they would recommend to the community. Each piece can be an album or an individual song. All genres are included, and there is no desi criterion. Just as long as it came out in 2006 (or late 2005), if it moved you, grooved you, or soothed you in ’06, tell the world about it.

Email your list of 5 picks to this address. I will stop taking entries in one week, Wednesday, December 20, and I will compile the results and present them in some fun manner in the following days.

To preserve the spirit of the exercise, please don’t enter your list in the comments to this post; email it to me instead. (I will keep all addresses in confidence, of course.) More general conversation is welcome, however, about the directions music went in ’06, the value or otherwise of year-end lists, criticism and its pitfalls, or anything else that comes to mind. C’mon, let’s play! Continue reading →

One of the difficulties in being a non-Christian in a predominantly Christian country is the relentless onslaught of Christmas jingles you hear around this time of the year. The latest culprit in my mindspace is the JCPenney’s ad featuring Bing Crosby’s voice and Fatboy Slim’s beats, which makes for a ridiculously catchy breakbeat version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” (via Tamasha). Earlier, we talked about “Songs for the Sleepless”; this is more like “songs for the hyper-caffeinated.”

The “original” video to the Fatboy Slim song is here, but it’s so bad I actually prefer this Youtube-ified anime remake.

Speaking of Youtube and Fatboy Slim, I was reading a Jon Pareles article about the phenomenon over the weekend, and thinking about the possible desi connections. The paragraph that stood out to me was this one:

In the process, another thing users generate is back talk. Surfing YouTube can be a survey of individual reactions to pop culture: movie and television characters transplanted out of their original plots or synched to improbable songs, pop hits revamped as comedy or attached to new, unauthorized imagery. (Try searching for Justin Timberlake on YouTube to see all the variations, loving and snide, on his single “Sexyback.”) (link)

While Youtube has millions of teenagers doing dance karaoke with varying levels of skill, as far as I can tell the current younger generation of desis hasn’t really taken advantage of it as much as one might expect. Part of the problem, of course, is that there aren’t really very many iconic desi figures to “personalize” (or travesty) to begin with. Continue reading →

You know what the world needs more of? It needs more desi boy bands.

We have plenty of desi doctors, lawyers, engineers, I-bankers, actors, astronauts and rappers, but there’s a real deficit in the boy band category. This is why I love the idea of the Montreal based boy band JoSH (that’s a long O, like Joe, not like Joshua). [The band’s slick webpage; their myspace page]

The group is actually only the duo of Q (Qurram Hussain) and Rup (Rupinder Magon) – Q is the one who looks like Lenny Kravitz, and Rup is well, the one in the turban.

This raises an important question – can you have a boy band with less than four members? Don’t you need the cute one, the sensitive one, the goofy one, and the quiet one? I don’t really know how the band is marketed – do they double up attributes? Can one of them be cute and sensitive and the other one be goofy and quiet? I was never a teenage girl, so I don’t know how to answer such esoteric questions.

Musically, they’re also a bit different from a traditional boy band – they’re more of a desi/hip-hop fusion band that a traditional pop-ballad heavy quartet. This makes sense since their fan base is largely in the subcontinent:

While largely unknown in their home country of Canada, JoSH is extremely popular in South Asia, particularly in India and Pakistan. Their sophomore album, Kabhi, as well as its title track, remained in both Indian and MTV World Top 20 lists for 26 weeks from October 2004 to January 2005. Additionally, JoSH was awarded MTV India’s 2004 “Immie” award for Best New Non-Film Artist. [Link]

They may be getting their biggest break ever when they open for Nelly Furtado in Bombay New Years Eve as part of a 5 city tour. This is probably an outgrowth of their remix of Furtado’s Powerless that seems to have boosted their profile:

They come from Canada and their bhangra mix of Nelly Furtado’s “Powerless” has made them powerful. Soon after radio’s all over the planet started flooding the airwaves with Josh’s version of “Powerless,” the duo from Montreal started receiving offers from various artistes and labels. [Link]

I’m not crazy about most of their music – I like the idea of an Indo-Pakistani-Canadian boyband more than I like their execution. I like Mahi Ve, a song from their new album, better than some of their other material:

Continue reading →