In my last year of high school a heartthrobby brown-eyed boy named Nil took the stage at the student-run after-hours talent show — a notoriously tough venue — and performed a dance routine which had won him the Mr. India California title that year. The moves looked like exaggerated hip hop about eight years out of date — lots of big footwork and I’m-so-smooth, look-at-my-hair gestures — but Nil pulled it all off with energy and a rascal look meant to seduce the whole audience, so by the end even the hyaenas of popularity were cheering. I later saw Nil’s dance echoed in Fire, an lesbian Indian film produced in Canada. At the time I had no idea what it was called, or even that it was part of a larger phenomenon. Bhangra, as I recently learned the style involved is called, is a traditional Punjabi form of music which, through the more pleasant vagaries of globalization, has become fused with rap, hip hop, and Caribbean forms like soca and reggae.
Two weekends ago I went to a bhangra dance in Chelsea put on by the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association. Bhangra was spun with various of its fellow travellers — standard dance music, hip hop, and Bollywood tunes, music from Indian movies. The room was crowded, seeded with gluey pairs of gay men, plowed here and there with queens in brilliant saris, heavy eye makeup, bindi jewels. I was looking for my friend Eileen, who had invited me. I scoped a few crewcuts and eventually made my way to the one that was hers.
A rotund queen with a bare midriff took the stage, pulling strands of a wig out of her face. In round subcontinental vowels she introduced a dancer in magenta. The tablas began. (I have only come to like tablas recently, despite my parents’ copy of the Concert for Bangladesh; I think it took more exposure to salsa polyrhythms to make me appreciate the unique loopiness of Indian drums’ tones.)
Behind some tall gentlemen I could only see the dancer’s hands and face, and when I bounced on my toes, some belly ripples. It briefly irritated me that a man was co-opting belly dancing (which I am told was developed to help women strengthen birthing muscles), until I thought that it probably wasn’t my place to be offended on behalf of women from the other side of the globe. And here — Eileen, craning her neck to see past the tall men as the dancer pulled off some stop-motion grinding, was telling me that there is a thriving bhangra competition culture at a number of American universities.
The dancer’s hands were all flirtation — coquette around her ears, startled freezes. My impression is that old American dramatic conventions for heroines were adopted by the Indian cinema and added to the stylized gestures of traditional Indian dance (but then my exposure to the latter mostly consists of the one dance my friend Pia brought back from India when we were eight). The result is fascinating to watch, especially when juxtaposed with the squarer, more macho moves of the men’s dances — which it soon was in this case, as a number of men took turns dancing with the magenta queen.
The stage filled with queens and men in tight shirts as the number ended. I turned my attention to Eileen and a group of her friends we had joined. In a room full of gyrators, Eileen maintained a vertical, Elvis Costello-esque groove. I tried out the hands and the hip isolations I saw onstage. (I think I’ll take some lessons in Indian dance; it occurred to me that the stylized gestures, shoulder isolations, and dramatic pauses would give me a repertoire for parts of my body I’m uncomfortable with. Plus the cross-pollination of styles would be wicked cool.) A tall thin man grinned at me, mirrored me, drew me into the range of his skeleton. We danced a few measures, and he returned to his partner.
The music slid through some hip hop and suddenly got more rhythmically complex. I recognized a salsa riff. Salsa in bhangra! I nearly jumped through the ceiling in my excitement. Why? The revelation: It is possible to completely sidestep American popular music. Rock is unnecessary. It doesn’t have to be the common meeting ground.
I worry a lot that American mainstream monoculture is seeping into cultures around the world through the pipes of the increasingly amalgamated media corporations. I have hardly travelled at all, so I am a poor authority on how other cultures end up taking it in, but it still worries me. I don’t want all music to be in thrall to N’Sync, or even to draw on the traditions of Bob Dylan.
Later that night, still sweaty from the crowded floor, I ran back to a video production studio in Gramercy where a producer from the IMC was editing our video from the DC protests. The boy is from Los Angeles, model-cheeked and slim, blue hooded sweatshirt — so popular right now — and fashionably ugly pants. Smokes and smokes. A few days before I had asked him if he knew how to swing dance, because I still have the urge to go. He gave me a silent, appraising look. I knew the answer was yes.
But not yes, I will not go dance with you. Swing is dead, he says. Pulls at his Cosmo Kramer hair. I had the whole thing going in college, the swinger pad, the martinis, he says. But it got kind of tiring. It’s an old fad.
I want to hide bhangra under a big pile of American flags so it does not get “discovered,” enfaddened, and chucked the way of the Lindy Hop revival. Makes for less dancers.
You listen to the same kind of music all the time, you start hallucinating that you’re hearing a variety. I swear, I have no idea what kind of glue some of my friends are using on their ears. They know I like some outer-reaches-of-popularity band like the Squirrel Nut Zippers and try to make recommendations for other things I should listen to, usually on the order of, “Hey, there’s this band that sounds just like them…” And I listen to the selected band… RUNH RUNH RUNH RUNH runh runh runh runh. You couldn’t point out a single similarity between my band and the suggested group, except that they tend to avoid the ranges of pitch more easily heard by bloodhounds and bottlenose dolphins.
Until my dance floor epiphany, I wondered what was wrong with me that I didn’t find anything striking or appealing in the bands my friends seemed to like, even my smart fringes-of-society friends. I was consistently disappointed by American rock of all persuasions. I would rattle through the racks of CDs at the flea market and the albums would always look promising. Musicians choose names full of all sorts of intriguing connotations — Belle and Sebastian, Heavy Vegetable, the Breeders, Camper Van Beethoven, Meat Puppets, Better Than Ezra — and then somehow they all end up sounding the same. RUNH RUNH RUNH RUNH runh runh runh runh. Distorted major or minor chords played with no finesse. Pop is even more boring, but it’s punctuated by flash-in-the-pan fads, at least. (Hey! Macarena!)
I’m not alone. David Byrne says rock in America is dead too, so there. ok, maybe that was Sting I’m thinking of, and Byrne just said Ozomatli was the future of American music, which essentially means the same thing. We can’t go on living like this, with disposable genres and creeping monoculture. I don’t know about you, but I’m’a shed that dead skin and move on.
(Need I even mention that Napster has, like, something to do with this?)
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