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The visionary musician Brian Eno long ago
predicted that pop will eat itself - that the relentless appetite
for new expressions of the old emotional themes demand that pop
will regurgitate every sound, signature and hook in its 50-year-old
repertoire. Yet Eno failed to spot that pop would spend the new
millennium dining out on an broadening international cuisine with
a distinctly Eastern flavour (by which we don’t mean the
Spice Girls).
Consider the cultural and semiotic blur at work in the following
vignette: in 2004 Virginian hip hop producer Tim ‘Timbaland’ Mosely – widely
regarded as the world’s most influential hitmaker alongside
LA’s Dr Dre and Pharrell Williams of N*E*R*D – visited
London on a promo tour. At his request he was escorted round Southall,
the principally Anglo-Indian borough at London’s western
edge, by Jay Sean, Rishi Rich and Juggy D, local heroes whose fusion
of transatlantic R&B and subcontinental Indian sounds have
made them MTV stars in both the UK and India. Tim flexed £3,000-worth
of plastic on CDs of Indian desi and bhangra recommended by the
trio of crisply-attired rude-bhoys, with a view to widening his
palette of sample material.
Resembling absolutely nothing from pop’s back catalogue,
Timbaland’s 2001 production ‘Get UR Freek On’ for
Missy Elliot blew pop apart. Its ruthlessly spare combination of
sitar, dhol and rap sounded unnervingly, futuristic and alien,
yet simultaneously ancient. ‘Get UR Freek On’ duly
left critics open-mouthed, searching ineffectually for comparatives.
Meanwhile, precisely no-one in the vicinity of a dancefloor experienced
any uncertainty: it rocked.
The Virginian producer wasn’t working in isolation. In 2002,
Dr Dre delivered a global smash with Truth Hurts’ ‘Addictive’ featuring
a sample of the deified Bollywood singer Lata Nangeshkar. In the
depths of New York’s hip hop underground, Erick Sermon’s
club banger ‘React’ lifted liberally from an unnamed
Bollywood sample, both tracks resulting not just in dancefloor
meltdown but also in costly legal settlements.
But après Tim, le déluge, because where hip hop
producers now lead, pop inevitably follows. Continuing the music
business’s standard practice of blanding-out and repackaging
the innovations of marginal, generally black musicians, we channel-hop
MTV to see pop attempting the dance of the seven veils in a variety
of jiggy modes.
This is often a clear case of stylistic tourism conceptualised
in the laboratory of pop demographics – in particular Britney
Spears sexless belly dance to ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’,
or Holly Valance’s borrowing of the Turkish snake-charm melody
of ‘Simarik’ with her ‘Kiss Kiss’. More
marketing manoeuvres than a genuine fusions, it’s a safe
bet Britney’s next outing will have precisely nothing to
do with middle-Eastern culture, and it also speaks volumes that
the latter singer’s career has petered out into obsolescence.
Other instances, like Shakira’s ‘Eyes Like Yours’,
reveal greater depth and substance to the Orientalist flirtation.
The singer’s own background - she was born half-Lebanese
and grew up in Colombia – describes Latin culture’s
ancient proximity to the Moorish Maghreb. It’s ultimately
far more rewarding to look at the more marginal ‘weathervane’ artists
to see where pop’s New Orientalism ultimately derives from
and what it signifies. The Chemical Brothers, for example, returned
to critical favour with a sample from Casablanca berber singer
Najat Aatabou’s ‘Just Tell Me The Truth’ oin
their ‘Galvanise’ single. What’s clear is that
following the flirtation with Indian sounds, the New Orientalism
is leading producers further afield, to North Africa and the middle
East, unlocking new thrills from ‘world music’, the
formerly vogue category rendered meaninglessly obsolete in the
age of global connectivity.
In one sense, pop is merely a way of reading the oft-cited 2,000-year
east-west collision of civilisations. We know how West African
spirituals and swamp blues eventually morphed into Led Zeppelin,
Chic and The Strokes once Elvis, Eddie Cochrane and The Beatles
had translated it for the benefit of a white western market. Britney’s
bellydance is latest chapter in rock ‘n’ roll’s
primordial but ongoing fusion of western lyrical melody and the
African narrative rhythm. It is a signifier of the times. As Led
Zep’s Jimmy Page (on ‘Kashmir’) and George Harrison
(‘Within You, Without You’) proved long ago, whenever
rock & pop run out of ideas the instinct is to turn east towards
rhythmic mystique and deeply-veiled exoticism.
In 2005 here are other reasons for pop’s widening scope
of acquisitive vision. Principally, sample sources for contemporary
hip hop and R&B – James Brown, Funkadelic and Rick James
- have long since run dry. Popular music is an industry that manufacturers
novelty, and the clever producer is less concerned with tapping
into new markets than forging sounds that distinguish his from
his competitors.
Secondly, the dominant music-biz powerbases of New York, London
and LA - vanguards of new music precisely because they’re
home to sharply contrasting cultural and ethnic mixes - are being
challenged by other centres. In particular the dancehall infrastructure
of Kingston, JA, where ferocious inter-studio competition to create
the hypest ‘riddim’ (instrumental track) ensures that
at any moment up to 100 version of what’s effectively the
same song by different singers are doing the rounds.
Kingston’s recent breakout success was producer Steven ‘Lenky’ Marsden’s ‘Diwali’ riddim:
a loop from an obscure desi record that formed the basis of Lumidee’s ‘Never
Leave’, Sean Paul’s ‘Get Busy’ and Wayne
Wonder’s ‘No Letting Go’ – all major international
hits. Kingston’s affection for the middle-eastern sounds
is abundantly apparent in current ‘hero riddims’ like ‘Egyptian’, ‘Kasablanca’, ‘Middle
East’, ‘Bollywood’ and ‘Coolie Dance’,
the latter being the basis for Nina Sky’s UK hit ‘Move
Ya Body’. And while there’s no doubting veteran R&B
dude R Kelly’s understanding of the appeal of the ‘Baghdad’ riddim
he used on ‘Snake’, there’s also the suspicion
his affinity with the middle east is roughly as well developed
and his sense of sexual etiquette.
Nevertheless, the east-west trade in sounds signature also works
both ways, opening up new markets, fusions and scenes. Would ‘Mundian
Te Bach Ke’ – the Euro-wide desi/hip hop hit sampling
the theme from ‘Knight Rider’ – have been such
a smash if its author, Punjabi MC, had named himself ‘Coventry
MC’ in honour of his UK home, rather than his cultural rooting? ‘We
try to make our music more appealing to non-Asians,’ says
British born Juggy ‘Jagwinder Dhaliwal’ D. ‘Punjabi
music has been around for years, but it took Dre and Timbaland
to use influences before it became cool. That gave us the opportunity
to say, “we’ve been doing this for years’. Hence
a number 12 last year, a crossover Punjabi/R&B track. And people
loved it.’
‘People from Persia spread through to north India and there’s
a degree of spread in the music,’ adds DJ Nihal, the host
or BBC Radio 1’s groundbreaking evening show with a wide-open
brief to cover the best in Anglo-Asian and Middle eastern fusions. ‘We
will play Arabic beats on our show, and we were approached recently
to do Anglo-Asian mixes of Rachid Taha. There are very close ties
between Rai and Bhangra – they’re both folk music which
deal with very similar themes.’
Other outposts beneath the global pop radar continue to innovate,
and the ‘Diwali’ experience reveals how fusions of
Rai and hip hop in France, such as Cheb Mami’s ‘Parisien
Du Nord’ , or traditional Turkish music and house in Germany
like MC Sultan’s ‘Der Bauch’, have the potential
to hit big.
Being cyclical, faddish and disposable is a necessary element
of pop’s appeal, and it’s arguably a matter of time
before not just big, but also credible hits with a Middle Eastern
root enter the MTV pop stratosphere. In London today, the smart
money is on Rouge - an all-girl trio with Arabic, Persian and Anglo-Indian
membership – and on MIA: 23-year-old Sri Lanka Mia Arulpragasm
whose fusion of breakbeats, dancehall, desi, hip hop and Brazilian ‘baile
funk’ could only have happened in London, but equally could
not exist without a cross-cultural mishmash between New, Rio and
Colombo.
It may ultimately be pointless attaching any kind of Orientalist
dialetic to pop music. Unlike literature or concepetual art, pop
music is meant to be danced to rather than deconstructed. It really
is that simple. All it asks you to do is leave your mind on the
bookshelf for three minutes and believe. For now, in 2005, a music’s
tectconic plates shift and grind into new shapes and sounds, it
is succeeding spectacularly.
© Kevin Braddock, 2005
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