The Muslim News

Toronto Star:

Antoinette Whitby unfurls her long legs from under her chair and settles into lounge mode, head bobbing to hip-hop-tinged bhangra as her lips part and smoke snakes upward. The breeze on the College St. patio stirs, carrying the smoke past her sleek blond hair and up into the night sky. Inside Wild Indigo, Panjabi MC's "Mundian To Bach Ke" competes with conversation among a yuppie clientele, who may never know they are moving to Punjabi folk music, its signature heavy dhol (drum) overlaid with the stylish syllables of rap.

Several blocks over, at Fly on Gloucester St., feet slam the dance floor in an all-out appreciation of insistent, infectious drumbeats, the bed of any decent bhangra track. Dancers' shoulders jerk back and forth, arms flying into the air, eyes half-closed in immersion. This is Toronto's South Asian diaspora devouring the sounds of the sub-continent at FunkAsia night. Women are on the floor, full throttle, long, dark hair twirling as they twist, forward and backward, in their spot, their tresses getting terribly tangled in their abandon.

But then, there is nothing traditional about the bhangra that moves Canadian clubbers.

"Bhangra had to get some hip-hop in there to appeal to us. It's our reality, and bhangra from my parent's time is still good stuff to dance to at weddings, but ripping it up with rhymes has really brought it home to us," says Ahmed Sabawalla, 22, who grew up on diet of hip-hop until "Mundian" brought him into the bhangra scene.

The music is now blaring out of cars at College and Bathurst, floating out of uptown bistros, where listeners listen to lyrics they cannot hope to understand. It's bhangra, the South Asian sound that "Mundia To Bach Ke" and Jay-Z's "Beware Of The Boys" has shoved into venues where it plays out to a mainstream clientele.

Traditionally, bhangra is folk music, characterized by a distinctive dhol beat from Punjab, a region straddling both Pakistan and India. Originally, bhangra music and dance celebrated the harvest; some say the name is derived from bhang, a rural brew made from milk and purified marijuana, indicating the level of intoxication the music inspires. Later, India's Bollywood film industry borrowed bhangra sounds to add energy to wedding-dance sequences.

But in more recent years, in Europe and North America, DJs, clubbers and other connoisseurs will tell you that jubilant bhangra has brought together South Asia's diaspora, giving them a sense of unity their own fractured societies in the subcontinent failed to provide. In high schools across the GTA, there were day jams where South Asian kids, bound by curfews imposed by conservative parents, partied to their music by day and were good Indian, Pakistani kids by night. For them, bhangra evolved to include drum'n'bass, soul and hip-hop.

Incorporating rap into Indian music is a natural transition for DJs and producers, says Rosina Kazi, vocalist for Toronto-based band Lal, which fuses soul, funk and South Asian sounds. "Minorities identify more easily with music that comes out of struggle, and the African-American music industry was all about that until it went mainstream very recently," says Kazi, who hosted a South Asian hip-hop showcase at Harbourfront earlier this month.

"Now, Toronto is very diverse. But there was a time when, if you weren't black or white, you were invisible," says DJ Zahra Dhanani, who hosts FunkAsia. "Many Asians sought refuge in black culture, and hip-hop is a big part of that."

Toronto musician Gurpreet Channa, who returned from performing with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra in Quebec City just in time to perform with beat-boxer Jugular at the Harbourfront hip-hop showcase, can see why the convergence of hip-hop and bhangra connects the dots for South Asians who call North America home.

"Now, there is something to fill that gap between what your parents call culture and what you relate to. But really, it's the beat that is so overpowering, so raw and so similar to hip-hop, (the) same four-beat structure that you lay under every track," says Channa. "The beats make it so easy to move to. Your head knows how to bob to the beat just like with hip-hop, so it just makes sense that the two should borrow from each other."

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`Behind the chai lattes ... and Jay-Z remixes, there is a 5,000-year-old culture'

DJ Zahra Dhanani

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To Channa, music is the perfect forum through which to explore cultural identity. "Think about it. If you are a South Asian Canadian, you could live immersed in Indian culture, or you could defy your heritage, or you could hate both the mainstream and your ethnic background for not letting you be either, or you could chose to enjoy a dual perspective by balancing the two." Often, finding and maintaining that balance is tricky, but bhangra and hip-hop have helped. "There is no easier way to explore identity so freely, to experiment by dropping dhol beats over hip-hop tracks and vice versa. It's perfect."

Perfect enough that bhangra has spread beyond its roots, and can be heard everywhere — blaring out of car stereos, riding the airwaves. At HMV on Yonge St., a guy with dreadlocks listening to Panjabi MC says, shrugging, "It's dope, that's all I care." On College, Wild Indigo co-owner George Keroglidis, who came upon the sound thanks to a friend who DJs in Greece, says, "Even the word out of Paris is that this is the new sound."

There is no denying bhangra's move to the mainstream owes something to clean-cut British artist Panjabi MC, who in turn owes something to Jay-Z.

Panjabi MC sampled the Knight Rider theme, laid thundering dholak beats accompanied by the tumbi (a single-string guitar) and had Bollywood singer Labh Janjua do the vocals, creating "Mundian To Bach Ke," an instant hit in Britian's South Asian community in 1998.

DJs at mainstream dance clubs started to throw the song into their mix, but it took till 2003 for "Mundian" to infiltrate the inner circles of the arbiters of cool.

It was at a Swiss club that Jay-Z first heard "Mundian," and the underground hit that had been lying latent for so long swelled to the surface when he rapped over its bhangra beats in his hit song "Beware of the Boys," meaning ridiculous air-time for both himself and Panjabi MC.

Jay-Z isn't the only artist to sample South Asian folk music: Timbaland put down tabla and tumbi beats under Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On," DJ Quik turned out Truth Hurts' hit "Addictive" by sampling the lilting lyrics from an old Bollywood hit, "Thoda Resham Lagta Hai." But "Mundian" was the biggest: local event promoter Manjot Hundal remembers how thrilled he was to hear Panjabi MC being played on KISS 92.5 as he drove to work.

"As a Canadian with an Indian background, I was so proud," he says. "I killed my phone battery calling everyone I knew.

"It's a great feeling, hearing your mother tongue on a mainstream radio station," says Hundal, who hosted a bhangra CD release party at Una Mas Friday night.

But bhangra's move to the mainstream bothers some.

Dhanani enjoys seeing Indian music take centre stage, but hopes it will lead to greater appreciation for the people of the region the music comes from. "Behind the chai lattes, the ethnic cushions and Jay-Z remixes, there is a 5,000-year-old culture," she says. "And I hope we get to see how it's evolving, instead of seeing exotic stereotypes being played out, over and over."

But such concerns may not have to last for long, at least according to promoter Hundal, who can't help but be skeptical of the fast-moving music industry.

"Hip-hop rotates through all the genres, looking for that new sound, the new hook, and for now it's bhangra," he says. "It'll probably last another year, and then they'll look for the next big thing."

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