The Internet can be a very dangerous place. Any of you who suffer – as I do – from the probably incurable malady known as Wikiphilia will know what I mean. You find an interesting video, article, or some other piece of pop cultural flotsam & jetsam, and before you know it, several hours are gone, and you know a lot about something that probably matters very little. This happened to me recently when I ran across the video Horizons by the Bay Area desi act Karmacy. The clip itself is – like a lot of desi songs and videos – a peculiar mix of brilliant and cheesy, at least when viewed with a more western eye. Yes, the guys in the video look sort of like they took a long lunch hour from their ad agency or tech startup jobs to do the shoot, but they’re rapping in five languages: English, Spanish, Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi, and the song is actually is kind of hooky. In any case, the tune gave me flashbacks of 90′s club bhangra, and got me wondering if any kind of durable genre evolved out of it. The only artists I could remember by name from the era were Apache Indian, Diamond & Simon, and Bally Sagoo; a LOT of the music was remixes and mashups of traditional Indian music or Bollywood tunes, and kind of blurred together in the techno/rave haze of my memory. So my search was on, and… it was mind-numbingly frustrating! There’s an INCREDIBLE amount of desi pop music out there, but there are a few obstacles to finding the good stuff. First of all, there’s just SO MUCH to sift through. If you take all the style fusions that are possible with just the sources available on the Indian sub-continent, and combine that with the fact that the people from the area have moved all over the world, you begin to get the picture. There are two other obstacles to finding the best material; one is that the bulk of the niche content is posted online by desis themselves, so a lot of the text isn’t in English, and the other is that Google search results for Indian pop and desi-related terms are utterly “spammed out” by really pointless popup-infested sites with lots of content that just lists artists and songs, with no reviews. So I’ll be doing a part two (and maybe three!), but thought I’d get started with a couple of vids and useful links. First of all though, if you’ve never followed these genres in general, read up on Bollywood; it colors the background of almost all of the modern/urban pop variants. Then maybe take some time to read up on 80′s/90′s bhangra and other related genres. Then get up to speed with the last few years with articles like NPR’s Urban Desi: A Genre On The Rise, or the New York Times’ India’s New Partnership: Bollywood and Hip-Hop. If you’ve had your ears open the last few years, you’ve also probably heard of M.I.A., she definitely qualifies as a desi artist, but in my opinion is such a UK pop product like Robyn that I never thought of her plinky sample-based material as particularly representative. In any case, we’ll be back in part two with more artists and videos, but for now, below are a couple that struck my fancy for different reasons. If you have some suggestions for material to check out, please pass on the wisdom!

Panjabi MC – Mundian To Bach Ke
This tune has been resampled a LOT by other artists, and should sound a little familiar…

AR Rahman

One artist I was getting into a bit while I searched was AR Rahman. I think the two clips below are from the same movie from 1995 called Humse Hai Muqabala. This first one, Urvasi Urvasi, is actually a pretty cool tune. The video is a bit nutty, but has some great dancing in it, if you can blast through your assumption that all Bollywood dancing is the same. Some of the moves are downright Michael Jackson, but cooler.

Urvasi Urvasi By AR Rahman

Another one by AR Rhaman. I don’t even know what this one is called; it seems to be from the same film as the clip above, but it takes the nutty quotient to the next level. Fun.

Some of these videos feature the colorful costuming and dance moves of Bollywood, but with a saucier hip-hop/rap flavored vibe…