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  • Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene
  • David Beard
Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene. By Rehan Hyder. pp. viii + 200. Popular and Folk Music Series. (Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2004, £49.95/ £17.99. ISBN 0-7546-0677-5/-4064-7.)

In Brimful of Asia, the term 'Asian' embraces a variety of musicians with ethnic roots in the Indian subcontinent who grew up in Britain and whose music appeared in the UK popular music scene in the early 1990s. Britain had witnessed such artists before. Farrokh Bulsara, born in Zanzibar and brought up in India until the age of 16, became lead singer of one of the UK's most commercially successful bands. But Freddie Mercury, the pseudonym and public persona of the lead singer of Queen, made little or no reference to his ethnic origins. In the early 1990s, however, this situation changed as increasing numbers of Asian artists in Britain drew on their sense of ethnic identity, allowing it to inform their music in more direct ways. Indian sounds appeared alongside hip-hop, rock, and electronic dance, in some cases as a metaphor for displacement, while lyrics became more politically charged. When Apache Indian, Bally Sagoo, Fun^Da^Mental, Hustlers HC, the Voodoo Queens, Asian Dub Foundation, Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh, Echobelly, Black Star Liner, and Cornershop appeared a number of them were greeted by the media as a sign of disaffection among British Asian youth. Even academics, encouraged by the overtly political stance of Fun^Da^Mental, whose first album Seize the Time (1994) sampled the voice of the black rights activist Malcolm X, pursued the line that this emerging musical trend constituted a collective form of Asian resistance. In Brimful of Asia, Rehan Hyder questions this assumption by asking musicians, from four of the bands listed above, what their intentions actually had been.

As a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies the author is not particularly concerned with the sound of the music. As he opines in his introduction, 'the actual music itself is not of primary importance; how it is used, interpreted and reported is the real source of interest' ( p. 5). Hyder's motivating concern is to reveal the effect an over-emphasis on ethnic identity has had, not only on Asian artists but also on bands whose musicians have diverse ethnic backgrounds. He illustrates this with reference to Cornershop, who were hailed in 1993 as '"the voice of disaffected Asian youth" despite the fact that three of the band [sic] were white and that they tried to distance themselves from any organized political agenda' (p. 43). In this sense, he is perhaps rightly critical of Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (ed. Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk, and Ashwani Sharma (London and Atlantic Heights, NJ, 1996)) for its 'simplistic stereotyping of Asian bands as essentially exotic and political' (loc. cit.)—although this key text deserves broader critical engagement than is afforded it here.

Hyder is at pains to correct the idea of a fixed, homogeneous Asian identity, reminding us instead that the British-Asian community has 'varying historical, religious, regional and linguistic identities' (p. 144) and that one of the ways of resisting racial or ethnic essentialism is through a critical insistence on the different perspectives that individual Asian musicians bring to their performances in order to 'recognize the multi-accented and shifting character of youthful identities' (p. 37). Consequently, to Hyder, homogeneous terms such as 'Asian Kool' and 'New Asian underground' are fallacious. But this argument stems both from his focus on independent rock bands rarely written about in the mid-1990s and from his avoidance of musicians who were embraced by a community, such as Joi Bangla Soundsystem, linked to the east London Bengali youth movement in the 1980s, or Asian Dub Foundation, which emerged from a youth community music project in Brent in the early 1990s. Hyder is also unconcerned with the 1995 Outcaste club nights in central London, or Talvin Singh's Anokha sessions in east London, which directly led to the 'New Asian Underground' label, and he fails to mention Najma Akhtar...

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