The new eastern standard

<<Post-bhangra hits big in the U.K.? Will it do the same in Canada?

by MIREILLE SILCOTT

In the late '80s, there were two kinds of dance music sharing the title of the "next big thing" in western clubs. There was hip house, a style which never broke for the sole reason that it was a parti-cularly bad sonic idea. And there was bhangra-fusion, the traditional music of South Asia spruced up with dancehall, house or breakbeats. It kept the "next" title for so long that it eventually became detrimental to the genre's western credibility.

So in the past couple of years, bhangra-fusion artists have been more or less ignored outside Southern Asia. "Open-minded" non-Asian clubbers dropped the case altogether, often getting their fill of "Indianism" through European takes on Eastern ideas: music like Goa trance, which claims to encase an Eastern spiritualism, but is made largely by Europeans who left white-bread Christianity for "Indian vibes" through acid tabs.

Tony Singh is the frontman for Toronto's bhangra-fusion outfit Punjabi by Nature, a small-venue band who mix bhangra with beats and dancehall and have been on the verge of making it here for some years now. Singh says the difficulty bhangra-fusion has faced in Canada may have something to do with lack of interest from the Asian community itself. "If you go to an Asian dance in Toronto, you'll see that the kids go much more bananas for traditional bhangra over anything we've done or any of the more modern stuff," says Singh. "It's because they know that music--it's what their parents listen to."

Which is interesting, given the current situation of Asian youth in England. Sparked largely by a club night called Anokha, launched by drum & bass producer and tabla-ist Talvin Singh at London's trendy Blue Note club, the most cutting-edge sort of Eastern uprising has occurred. A spate of diverse, often highly electronic artists (Cornershop, Earth Tribe, Nitin Sawheny, Black Star Liner) and labels (Outcaste, Nation) have created a fresh scene for London's Asian youth, one they are rebelliously calling "post-bhangra."

The music at places like Anokha is years beyond the type of '80s dancehall-ish fusion PBN still adheres to. It is a sound coming directly out of London's Asian youth community, made expressly for its contemporary tastes. Whether the movement crosses to the seemingly conservative South Asian kids in Canada, (still resistant even to modernized bhangra like PBN's) remains questionable, if not unlikely. Because, as Anokha regular Nitin Sawheny has remarked, "this is music far ahead of bhangra-fusion. It's music which uses its roots to focus on everything BUT tradition--Indian music that doesn't necessarily need Indian lyrics in it to know that it's Indian."

Punjabi By Nature at Club Soda, Friday, Oct. 31, 8pm, $10. Nitin Sawheny's Displacing the Priest is available on Outcaste records