|
Lamb curry dubplate >> For Asian Dub Foundation the sound is the message by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
My friend, Neel, merely pulled a sour face, whined about how his parents played the stuff incessantly, and scurried upstairs for his Jimi Hendrix platters. Heartbreaking, no? "Well, no, I think that's quite cool," says Chandrasonic, guitarist of London, England's Asian Dub Foundation (Asian, in this context, means specifically--but not exclusively--people from the Indian subcontinent). "I went through a period of rejecting anything to do with being Indian at all, as a lot of people in this country did, when faced with some of the attitudes that were around when you grew up in the '70s. It was a grim time for Asian people in this country. You're always the butt of humour. Everywhere, it was a joke to be Asian. The music and food were laughed at, we were told we smelled, and all this kind of stuff. "We wanted to reject that side, but in the end, you see, the mainstream culture won't let you do that! I was lucky, when I went to college finally, that there's a sort of exotic curiosity about that side. So that's when I went back to my dad's records. Because I thought it would impress the girls--especially the hippie ones, even though I was more of a punk. "But you soon of grow out of that stage, as well, and you start thinking, 'This is a load of bollocks.' I'd like to have my own version of what's going on, make my own statement about how I view this. I don't want to be considered a bloody hippie." Panning the paisley pack Chandrasonic is rather nonplussed with the pot-puffin', patchouli-soaked, paisley-stained "Om-shanti-Rama-Rum-Raisin" take that's commonly attached to the subcontinent. "I hate that view of India," he says. "I don't think it's an accurate one, I think it's a comfortable one. The problem with what's happened in this country, the past few years, as with what happened in the hippie era, is that people become attached to certain symbols, rather than the actual sound and the vibe. So it becomes, 'Oh, yeah, we're Asian-influenced, we have sitar samples and wear bindis on our heads.' This is the attitude that's been prevalent in this country, and we kinda want to kick that one in the dustbin." One way to do that is to turn the idea on its head. Whereas hippies used to jam out Doors covers on sitars they could barely handle, Chandrasonic tears through Indian scales on an electric guitar. The next step is to meld those neo-classical stylings with modern elements of hard-assed hip hop, dub, dancehall, punk and techno. ADF began as a sound system, and never really ditched that aspect. "The demarcation between formats, as far as we're concerned, is not as great as people seem to think it is between the club, the sound system and the band. All ADF is is a mixture of the main ways that you can express music in performance. You can have live musicians on stage, actually making personality, getting the audience involved. Sequences, running the drum machines, the DJ side of it, you know, it's all in there. Within one organization, the whole span of the ways you can experience music in this era. We like aspects of all three, the reggae sound system, the rave and the live gig. We don't really see any difference." And the Jamaican thing? What's up with that? "A lot of Asian people in this country are just naturally influenced by reggae, ragga, right up to jungle. It just goes without saying. I think it's to do with similar experiences. Reggae does speak for a ghettoized community, in an international way, and that's a lot of its power." Satpal's story Therein lies the essence of ADF. The band is far more than a Hindi-tronic party band, even if they did get their start, circa '93, at social centre basement blowouts. Those blowouts were tied in with grassroots anti-racist groups like CAPA, from whom the angry young men of ADF take their cues. "My view has always been that we shouldn't get too hung up on a few idiot Nazi skinheads. The real problem is when people start talking the language from within the establishment, that actually reflects certain racist, nationalistic ideas." Case in point, that of Satpal Ram, about whom ADF have a tune... hell, no, an anthem. Ram was minding his own business one night, about 12 years ago, having a quick meal at a restaurant in Birmingham. Six white racist thugs figured that was as good a reason as any to attack him. After having a broken glass ground into his face, Ram chose to defend himself with a table knife. One of the attackers (who refused medical treatment) later died, and Ram found himself in the Kafkaesque nightmare of the English legal system. Thanks to a treacherous barrister, a pigheaded judge and an all-white jury, Ram is still serving a life sentence for having a bite in Birmingham. Unity is two-thirds of community Now you know why ADF come on so pissed off. Street-level activism is their root, be it politically or musically. The genesis of the group took place at Community Music, a nonprofit centre dedicated to schooling folks in the musical arts. "It's about using music, encouraging people to express themselves through music, and certain methods designed to bring out that expression," is how Chandrasonic sums it up. Feeding on scraps from the London Arts Board and other grants, you have to wonder how such an outfit survives. "Very cleverly, actually," laughs Chandrasonic. "The hope is that it will eventually become self-financing. That would be the best thing, really. In a way, what we're trying to do is allow a springboard for people to become self-financing. Like ourselves, ADF, we're completely self-financing, now. We're actually at a point where we're funding other projects. Obviously, we don't have time to run workshops, but we're employing people to run them." They're gonna have to, as the ADF umbrella now covers a far larger territory than just the East Indian neighbourhoods of London. "We've made links with all kinds of people," says Chandrasonic, "and we've taken the model of Community Music and ADF over to other countries. CM and ADF have links with the Disabled Peoples' Direct Action Network, Asian Action Group in North London, Campaign Against Racism and Fascism. We've done workshops with gypsy youth in Budapest and disadvantaged black youth in Lisbon." So ADF are a concretely political group, in their actions, their words, even their music. "I don't have much patience with people who say that what they play is political, but they sound like music stopped evolving in 1968," gripes Chandrasonic. "There's nothing revolutionary about that. Some of our most political songs are instrumentals. For us, the sound is the message." :
With DJ Ram at Cabaret, Tuesday,
|
It was a bit of a shock, truth be told. A young, 16-year-old me had just begun discovering Indian sounds--sitars, tablas, bansuris--care of some old Stones records I was picking apart. I was at the home of an Indian-Canadian friend of mine, and found his rec room littered with his dad's dusty discs, Ravi Shankar and whatnot. "Groovy!" I exclaimed. "Let's slap these suckers on!"