CULTURE
India Rocks!: The Rishi Rich Project
By Scott Jacobs
You learn something new every day, sometimes in the strangest places.
My latest discovery came in the middle of a mosh pit at a concert in Seattle where I was one in a sea of 6,000 bodies, all facing the stage to catch a glimpse of a three Bhangra Rap imports from England - JuggyD, Jay Sean and Veronica -- collectively known as the Rishi Rich Project.
Rishi Rich (born Rishpal Rekhi) is a London music producer at the white-hot center of a South Asian music scene that is exploding across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. All three performers on stage have platinum or double-platinum album hits in England. They also regularly top the charts on MTV Desi, the fast-growing satellite TV network that serves the 1.4 billion people of the Indian diaspora.
“Desi” is a Sikh word for “people of India.” When MTV first started exploring the territory, its offerings were the usual fare of American and British rock. But in the last few years, local artists – and particularly Pakistani and Indian exiles living in the Desi communities of England – began to create their own hip hop and rap rhythms based on the Punjab folk music prevalent in the northern region shared by India and Pakistan.
Standard rap lyrics, like JuggyD’s “Push it Up”, incorporate the beat of the dolh drum, a lyric string instrument called an iktar and something that looks like a large pair of tongs called a chimta. Between the verses, the music often will also bridge across Hindu and Punjabi chants before returning to English rap lyrics.
What’s most phenomenal about this trend toward Indian music is not that rap or hip hop have transformed into a global medium; but that these Indian and Pakistani iterations are now coming back into the music of western pop stars, giving them a Punjabi twist.
Britney Spears was the first American pop artist to ask Rishi Rich to re-mix one of her songs. Since then, he has also collaborated with Ricky Martin, Craig David, Mary J Blige, Madonna and Missy Elliott on albums that are currently selling on top of the American charts.
It's not just the occasional song that is making it back into the United States. Last year in July, MTV Desi - and MTV Chi (Chinese) and MTV K (Korea) -- became available on United States cable systems under the banner of MTV world.
The introduction of MTV Desi to America is all part of MTV’s attempt to recognize that, even within different country borders, there are “trans-national” identities that grow stronger through globalization, not weaker.
"This country has had the African-American experience, the Hispanic-American experience, and now it is the time for the third-largest group, the Asian-Americans," MTV exec Nusrat Durrani explained.
Watching the Rishi Rich Project perform at Bumbershoot in Seattle, I was surprised to see the first 15 rows in front of the stage mobbed with teenage Indian girls.
Before the concert started, they snuck backstage to get their pictures taken with Jay Sean and JuggyD, who appeared in a retro tracksuit from the Run-DMC 80’s. When the duo took the stage, the girls lurched and swooned every time they stepped close to the edge.
“Where’d these people all come from?” I asked the local promoter Jane Cordrey.
“Microsoft,” she said nonchalantly.
And, of course, it all makes sense. We aren’t just trading business and software acumen with our new third-world partners. We’re trading cultures and, inevitably, merging cultures. And what's the point of going global if we're not willing and able to admit we have something to gain from their cultures?
Cordrey said she had never heard of Rishi Rich until earlier this year she at tended an eighth grade birthday party thrown by one of her friends.' daughters. The whole time the girls played and danced to Bhangra rap. The notion a grandmaster rapster like Rishi Rich could be enticed to come over and play in their hometown had all the girls shreiking.
The word Pakistani on a passport these days has the same impact as the word Saudi as far as the Department of Homeland Security can see. So it was not easy to get these artists into our closed-border country.
But once they got here, the Rishi Rich Project left Seattle last month with 5,000 new fans.
Justin Timberlake, get out the chimta!
