by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Okay, class, raise your hand if you’re down with the bhangra sound. Better yet, throw both your hands in the air and give ’em a slick flick at the wrist, in your best approximation of the Punjabi party-down style. If you’re digging the North Indian dancefloor thunder of bhangra—the Desi club sound that takes the big boom of the dhol drum and the needling treble riffs of the stringed tumbi, then amps them up electronically into a ferocious frenzy of fun—you can thank New York’s pioneering, politically astute DJ Rekha as much as anyone.

For close to a decade, Rekha Malhotra’s been rocking her Basement Bhangra nights in the Big Apple. In 2002, she branched out with the Bollywood Disco nights, dishing out funky, funny filmi tracks, and then with the late, lamented catch-all Mutiny soirees, where grooves from across the globe, already peppering her theoretically Desi-centric nights, took precedence.

Were that not enough, she also does music production, conducts panels and workshops, encourages young women DJs with useful advice and sits on the boards of organizations that wield pop culture for political purposes. Given a choice between one good night’s sleep and the chance to get Montreal on its feet, Rekha chose the latter, so the Mirror rang her up for some insight into the realm of funk and flicks from the subcontinent.

Mirror: You’ve been doing Basement Bhangra nights for almost a decade now. How has bhangra music evolved in that time, in your perception?

DJ Rekha: It’s more savvy, more dance-friendly. The production quality has gone up a lot. The stuff I was playing when I first started used a lot more synthesizers, the drums weren’t as loud. Somewhere in the middle of those nine years, there was a nostalgic looking-back, a more folky sound that emerged, using more traditional instrumentation but in a really bright way. I think a lot of that was pioneered by Panjabi MC, some of his music. When we first started, the music was trying to fit more into a Western aesthetic. Then, at some point in the middle, it sort of embraced where it came from—the traditional elements, vocally and in the instrumentation, became more prominent, but at the same time, the music felt more integrated with hip hop, which gives a more danceable feeling to it.

Bollywood busts out

M: On to the Bollywood Disco nights. It seems to me that filmi is a pretty vast field of music. At that night, do you focus on the late-’70s stuff, or do you branch out to earlier and later material?

DJR: If it was up to me, that’s all I’d play (laughs). We’ve been doing that one for four years, and when I first started, I did play a lot more of the nostalgic stuff, the ’70s and ’80s music that has more of a disco groove to it. I was DJing with my buddy Darshan Jesrani, who’s a dance-music producer. But the night has definitely evolved into a more all-purpose, wider-bannered Bollywood night. I do play a lot more contemporary stuff, partly because that stuff is a lot more dance-friendly in some way. What I find hardest is shifts between sets. You play a lot of newer music, it’s really punchy and bright, and the older stuff, the sound isn’t as good. It’s hard to mix and match, but I try to get it all in there.

M: Bollywood’s never had a higher profile in the West, in Europe and North America. Do you feel filmi is at an equally high point, creatively?

DJR: No (laughs). I think the buzz is preceding the content. There’s this anticipation that Bollywood is gonna be massive, and culturally, it’s had some impact on music and film, but it’s not there yet. The quality of Bollywood production has gone up, but I think that’s a function of better media technology, bigger budgets and also globalization at large. The storylines have shifted—when I was growing up, watching them, the archetypal stories were more like Horatio Alger stories, a poor boy growing up and making it. Now, they’re about rich NRIs [Non-Resident Indians], people living outside in the West—they’re the figures of the stories, and I think a lot of that is a function of globalization, wealth and money and Paris Hilton and all that. It’s this whole other aesthetic. In that regard, Bollywood has caught up in some way. There are attempts to vary storylines, but I still think we have a long way to go. People may know the word, it might be written about in trade magazines, but I don’t think people have an understanding of it, in a real way. And I don’t think they will, unless the movies get shorter (laughs).

With DJs Adam Gollner and Shaktiman at Wunderbar tonight, Thursday, May 18, 9 p.m., free

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