It’s a scene straight out of a cheesy “Saturday Night Live” skit, the Bronx and Bombay meeting at the musical crossroads of hip-hop. On the stage at the Park West, turbanned Sikhs, clad in the inner-city b-boy’s baggy uniform, are rocking the microphone like seasoned rappers, while a gaggle of Asian-Indian youths, some clad in saris, bounce to the beat, sweating and colliding.
“Punjabis in the house, say, `Owwww!’ ” a turbanned emcee shouts. “Bengalis! Pakistanis!”
Each exhortation is met with a fevered response. The music is called bhangra beat, a bumping blend of Punjabi folk music from India, reggae from Jamaica, and hip-hop and house from America, mixed by Bally Sagoo, a 32-year-old native of Delhi, India.
Sagoo doesn’t sing or rap; he’s not a musician in the traditional sense, but a musical synthesist, a cultural blender whose instruments are turntables, samplers and drum machines. He’s become wildly popular in his adopted England and native India for the way he has blended Asian tradition — everything from movie soundtracks to the sacred music of Nustrat Fateh Ali Khan — with the hippest Western grooves.
More Top Picks Best String Trimmers
“My music represents bringing different worlds together and uniting them as one,” Sagoo says — as pithy a summation as any of what’s happening in popular music as the millennium approaches.
Wander into a cutting-edge record store like Fat Beats in New York’s Greenwich Village, and it’s possible to see how hip-hop has been transformed into a global village. Customers from Finland to China crowd the tiny store. Japanese kids clutch 12-inch vinyl singles to their chests, their dreadlocked heads nodding to the beat as the store’s deejay spins the latest inner-city jam.
And now records providing a crash course in international mix-and-match are flooding the market, among them Sagoo’s remix EP “Tum Bin Jiya” (TriStar), Transglobal Underground’s Middle Eastern-flavored “Psychic Karaoke” (MCA), Russian-born DJ Vadim’s “U.S.S.R. Repertoire: The Theory of Verticality” (Ninja Tune) and “3rd Perspective” (Antilles), by the Japanese deejay collective United Future Organization. For all their sprawling diversity, these discs and countless others from around the world share a common language. Twenty years ago, that language might have been rock. But today it is hip-hop and the urban electronic music that first emerged in the mid-’70s.
Hip-hop’s pioneers were deejays in the South Bronx of New York who took the Jamaican tradition of toasting (rapping) over rhythm tracks and applied it to funk. Using turntables and microphones, they created an avant-garde form of party music by scratching and manipulating vinyl records to emphasize, obliterate or transform certain beats, and to meld others into alluring hybrids.
Their source material was the history of recorded music, and they cut and pasted these sounds into ever more intricate collages, a process accelerated by the introduction of the digital sampler in the mid-’80s.
Technology has made it possible for any imaginative artist to make a record in his or her bedroom. What began as primarily a party soundtrack created by African Americans in a New York City ghetto has become the urban folk music of the world, the multi-cultural musical gateway to the next century.
“My band doesn’t even play hip-hop, but I listen to a lot of it,” says Billy Spunke, 29, singer of Chicago ska-punkers the Blue Meanies. “I feel as though it’s something my generation invented and it’s a part of who I am.”
Dan “the Automator” Nakamura, producer of Dr. Octagon’s brilliant hip-hop opus, “Dr. Octagonecologyst” (DreamWorks), says, “I’m Japanese ethnically, but culturally I’m an American. Hip-hop is an urban thing as opposed to a black or Latin thing. The main unifying factor was the beat and the urban-ness. It is a lifestyle, and it was a lifestyle that fit closest to what I was when I was growing up.”
In Dr. Octagon, Nakamura collaborates with a black emcee, Keith Thornton, a k a Cool Keith, and a deejay of Filipino descent, Q-Bert.
“The hip-hop community is pretty open,” Nakamura says. “No one has said to me, `But . . . you’re not black.’ Except for A&R guys (talent scouts at record labels). They don’t come right out and say it necessarily, but they question, `Is this guy really street?’ Most rappers, they might look at you funny for a second, but they do that to all the new guys. It’s more about, `Well, show me what you got, sucker.’ It’s not a race thing. What it comes down to is the music, and if they like what you do, it’s cool, you’re cool.”
Rising underground
As hip-hop began to flourish in the 1980s, it was adopted by youth from all ethnic groups, who often turned out imitation versions of groundbreaking New York hip-hop such as Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” and Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock.” But increasingly, hip-hop has filtered into cultures around the world and given rise to original music that is wholly credible.
A burgeoning underground in Japan has spawned groups such as Ground Zero, with its screaming, high-decibel attack and pit-bull rhythms anchored by the crazed turntable scratching of deejay Otomo Yoshihide. At the other extreme is United Future Organization, which draws on the silkier dance grooves of acid-jazz.
“Japanese hip-hop is very underground, but it’s getting popular and groups are now getting signed to major labels,” says Yasuko Ito, a New York-based journalist who writes for Front, a Japanese hip-hop magazine. “Buddha Brand is a group that started out as an imitation of American hip-hop; that’s how it all started. Now they add their own style, rapping in Japanese.”
A distinct form of Latin hip-hop began to emerge with the bilingual rapping of Kid Frost on “La Raza,” a 1990 track about ethnic pride. Since then, “a lot of the younger generation has been getting into merengue and salsa, going back to their roots,” says Lisa Rodriguez, a deejay with Latin hip-hop station WNYU in New York. “They’re like, `We’re listening to merengue, we’re listening to salsa, we’re listening to rap and we’re listening to R&B. What happens if we combine all four?’ “
Rodriguez says relatively popular North American hip-hop groups such as Reign and Cypress Hill are “English hip-hop with Latin artists,” whereas South American groups such as Proyecto Uno and Sandy & Papo are forging a distinctive ethnic style by blending meringue horns and maracas with hip-hop beats and native lyrics.
Musical playground
Although these sounds aren’t as popular in North America as the hip-hop made in major urban centers such as New York and Los Angeles, Nakamura of Dr. Octagon says that situation may not last. A major theme of “Dr. Octagonecologyst” is that hip-hop needs a fresh shot of inspiration, something the record tries to provide with its diverse backing tracks.
“We wanted to take a broader view on our record than most hip-hop records made in New York or Los Angeles,” Nakamura says. “Everything is out there for us; the palette is the world.”
That observation came to life a few weeks ago at Wetlands, a graffiti-strewn bar in the bowels of lower Manhattan, where Latins, blacks and whites were mixing it up to the schizoid stylings of Todos Tus Muertos (All Your Dead), a multiracial band fronted by two dreadlocked Argentinians of African descent who rap and sing in Spanish and English.
A tangle of timbales, congas and bongos mixed it up with a rock trap kit. A buttery reggae bass line oozed under a song for Nelson Mandela as the audience did a collective slo-mo head nod. Then, suddenly, the volume and the beat were cranked way up, and Pablito Molina performed a series of airborne splits while spitting out raps. The audience was transformed into a frothing mosh pit.
The scene would have seemed chaotic 20 years ago, but in 1997 it’s a logical extension of the hip-hop esthetic as the band and the audience snap from style to style and shift moods as though controlled by a channel-changer button or the click of a computer mouse. To artists of the hip-hop generation such as Todos Tus Muertos, the world is increasingly becoming one big multicultural musical playground.
More Top Picks Best Smart Rings