I swear I’m kicking myself for not catching Singh is King in theaters, because apparently I missed this collaboration between two great cultural traditions.
Back when I was buying random CDs from the Indian grocery, I noticed that there were typically two kinds of music available. The bulk of course was soundtrack music, but there were also quite a lot of Bollywood remixes, incorporating drum and bass dancetracks, or electronic bhangra beats, as often as it used samples from Bollywood songs.
Invariably these remixes totally rocked. I interpreted the occasional hip-hop sound samples as a cultural novelty. In the same way that American hip-hop sometimes uses "world music" samples because they seem weird and exotic, I thought that Indian DJs added western samples because they seemed weird and exotic.
Now, I’m not so sure. From listening to the BBC Asian Network, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s an incredibly rich culture of Indian hip-hop that jet-sets between London and Mumbai. Take a look at this music festival page on the BBC Asian Network.
These aren’t provincial imitators of American culture. These are people who are cooler than us, who are merging the classic elements of Indian music with a global culture.
Once again, Snoop Dogg shows that he knows what side of the bread his awesome is on.