Making Diaspora in a Global City

South Asian Youth Cultures in London

Helen Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415793049
• eBook ISBN: 9781134757633
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

The exciting diasporic sounds of the London Asian urban music scene are a cross-section of the various genres of urban music that include bhangra "remix," R&B and hip hop styles, as well as dubstep and other "urban" sample-oriented electronic music. This book brings together a unique analysis of urban underground music cultures in exploring just how members of this "scene" take up space in "super-diverse" London. It provides a fresh perspective on the creativity of British South Asian youth culture, and makes a significant sociological intervention into this area by bringing the focus back onto urgent issues of "race" ethnicity alongside class and gender within youth cultural studies.

1
Introduction

Setting the ‘Scene’

I read about a large Asian music university tour being held across campuses across the UK. I showed up early (thank goodness) to the Kings College student union venue on a Tuesday evening, where it felt like a Friday night out. The venue was packed with laughter, drinking, and people milling around waiting for the acts to begin. It looked like it was going to be an action-packed show with a very young, excited crowd to cheer on the artists in the showcase. The BBC Asian Network, as the official sponsors of the tour, had its logo emblazoned everywhere. Representatives were giving away pink BBC Asian Network whistles that brought the noise level to just above deafening. Jay Sean was meant to be the headlining act, and by the time he went on the student union bar was absolutely full of people. There was even a smoke machine going, with everyone swaying, clapping, and jumping to the music. DJ Bobby Friction was hyping up the young London student crowd. It was a sight to see.

I’m standing outside VIP Ramp, the new club night that DJ Kolective, a producer, has started in the West End. Along with a close-knit group of friends, Kolective¹ started promoting this night as a way of getting their friends and networks together under one roof. The ‘contemporary urban’ décor that is consumed reflects a particular, West End aspirational version of urban sophistication. The club’s drinks list consists of wine, cocktails, champagne, and even bottle service. The club also offers sushi as party food. Club 49 is always busy on weekend nights despite the row of identical-looking clubs dotting the same street. The night’s central location and weekday slot means that it also draws in a regular crowd of nonscene members who want to party. Downstairs, moving to popular hip hop floor fillers, people are dancing, drinking, and forgetting their worries. But upstairs, a privileged inner circle of people who are friends with the DJs and promoters are networking at this once-monthly event.

I see a video for Jay Sean’s new single ‘Down’, from his new album, All or Nothing; the single features Lil Wayne, a successful US Grammy Award–winning urban artist. It was a huge accomplishment for a British Asian artist coming out of this small, underground urban scene to have been signed to a major US urban and hip hop label (CashMoney Records). The single was on the US Billboard charts for six weeks. The BBC called him the most successful UK male urban artist in US chart history (2009). Jay Sean has succeeded as an Asian R&B artist where many other UK artists looking to cross over into the US music market have failed. His ethnic background served to make him someone more noticeable within a field that is dominated by African-American artists. Interestingly, Jay Sean has become a crossover star in America without first achieving mainstream success in the UK. Within the UK music industry, configured very differently to that in the United States, Asian cultural production has either been ignored and rendered as the invisible ‘other’ or made spectacularly exotic and orientalized.

A brief search for Asian music on Google directs me to a site called DesiHits.com, a London-based Internet radio station. It features the latest hits from styles as diverse as Bollywood, bhangra, and what the station dubbed ‘urban desi’ songs, in a mixture of US, British, and emerging Asian diasporic hip hop and urban genres. You can listen to various weekly radio shows with a set playlist either by streaming it on a media player or as a pod-cast. The opportunity to access and listen to new music through new modes of communication provided by the Internet and digital music technology has provided unprecedented access to underground music cultures.

Despite the turn toward a celebration of creative output of diasporic youth cultures, coverage and interest have been unevenly distributed so as to heavily emphasize and center on Black cultural production at the expense of other forms of cultural production and consumption. Stuart Hall writes that construction of the political category of ‘Black’ in the UK often privileged the Afro-Caribbean experience over that of Asians (Hall 2000). Thus, in many public arenas, Asian presence and key contributions have often been marginalized or rendered invisible within the larger framework of Black/White ‘race’ relations. Through ethnographic research, I considered it necessary to both challenge and widen our existing knowledge of Asian diasporic cultural production in the UK beyond the established textual and theoretical understandings of diasporic popular music cultures.

All the accounts given so far outline the many different spaces of contemporary urban South Asian cultural production that became the focus of my ethnographic project and this book. The book highlights the creation of diasporic Asian identities as cultural and social projects where Asians are fighting to make themselves visible in ways that actively challenge the official constructions of Asians circulated within media, political, and popular discourses. However, while these identities are indeed projects in that they are constructed and grafted, the book also focuses on the ways in which these young people² are also shaped and constrained by the intersections of ‘race’, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.

In the wake of the 2001 riots and the 7/7 bombings, the accusations that certain communities were living parallel lives have led to the creation of an official discourse that stated the ‘death of multiculturalism’ (Cantle 2001; Phillips 2005). Related issues around citizenship, immigration, and border security dominate political debate, where one’s culture (code for ‘race’ and ethnicity) has (again) become the ultimate signifier of difference—signaling oppression, backwardness, and, more important, an assumed ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) with Western, liberal democratic values. Within political debates culture has become the primary means through which conservatives and liberals racialize immigrants and non-Whites.

The rise of violence, harassment, and xenophobia targeted at Asians in the UK post-9/11 and post-7/7 has led me to ask how contemporary forms of racism are constructed and how they are being negotiated within everyday spaces of young people in London. Relatedly, in this book I focus on the lived experience of diaspora and its connection to forms of popular culture and urban spaces in order to better understand how forms of solidarity and ways of belonging are being constructed and contested post-7/7. Thus, a study of these spaces and identity projects offers a look at what it means to be young, Asian cultural producers in Britain and beyond at a particular point and place in time that speak to the wider concerns of ‘race’, nation, and belonging, as they are articulated, negotiated, and conceived and enacted through the cultural politics of this London ‘desi’ urban music scene.

Music Scenes and Cultural Production

Contemporary scholars of youth studies have acknowledged that young people and youth cultures do not correspond to traditional class identities that, according to youth culture studies within the classic Birmingham ‘subcultures’ school, formed the basis of collective youth identities. More recently, scholars have introduced spatial dimensions to the study of music cultures, recognizing the importance of spatial interaction of music and social practices (Kahn-Harris 2006; Connell and Gibson 2003; Bennett and Peterson 2004).

A music ‘scene’ can be understood to be inclusive of all ‘music making, production, circulation, discussion and texts’ (Kahn-Harris 2006, 15). In this sense, the Asian musical community that has become the subject of this book operates as a ‘scene’. Moreover, the concept of ‘scenes’ has now become the way in which scholars, as well as scene members and music journalists, have conceptualized contemporary musical communities. ‘Scenes’ connote a wide variety of music-related activities using more spatially oriented perspectives. Bennett and Peterson (2004) write that scenes provide the spaces where the production, performance, and consumption of music and identity come together.

Will Straw (1991) and Barry Shank (1994) use the term ‘scene’ to mean a geographically based music scene, which resonates with how the Asian urban scene operates. Cities such as Birmingham and London boast their own Asian music scenes, and while there are some similarities, there are also many differences. This is because the scene is extraordinarily diverse in its musical styles and genres and the members are diffuse. However, Bennett and Peterson (2004) outline that the scene can also be conceptualized not just in the common sense definition of a local, geographically bounded site of production and consumption; it can also be extended to a global or transnational context so that local scenes are also part of a larger scenic network extending to more than one city or place. Thus, while the London Asian scene operates primarily in London, it also maintains close links to other scenes in cities like New York. Other major cities include Toronto and Delhi. Thus, these scenes are appropriated and remade for a local context, but they allow scene members to recognize and actively link their local scene to the wider networks of South Asian diasporic cultural production.

Furthermore, Lee and Peterson (2004) suggest that scenes can occupy virtual spaces that have become increasingly relevant because local scenes are scattered across great physical distances. The Asian scene is also constructed through the Internet in the form of blogs, forums, Internet radio stations, and podcasts. These spaces have also become widely accessible spaces for music and popular culture. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace are often the first stops where fans can browse and listen to music and watch music videos, where artists will use as a small repertory of their songs on their individual page. Options to embed these songs onto other sites to share them and forward them to other people are available through Facebook pages. Further, instant communication sites such as Twitter are used by fans; people can sign up to ‘follow’ an artist’s Twitter account and receive short messages or ‘tweets’. Thus, the Internet has fundamentally altered and widened people’s relationships to listening to and consuming music, increasingly allowing multiple ways of sharing and engaging socially with music, despite the fact that music through Internet technology has become increasingly ‘disembodied’ (Peterson and Ryan 2003; Miller and Slater 2000), changing our perceptions of what music is and should be. Moreover, the Internet has allowed the creation of spaces where consumers and fans of music can set up blogs and forums to share new music, discuss issues, post interviews and information about bands, and so on.

The sounds of the London Asian urban music scene are a complex cross section of various genres, including bhangra ‘remix’, R&B and hip hop styles, as well as dubstep and other ‘urban’ sample–oriented electronic music. Thus, the scene is not limited to a single musical genre but consists of loose groupings of musical styles. Other distinguishing factors include the fusing of traditional South Asian instruments like the tabla player or the dhol drum, along with vocal samples and/or a South Asian language, to a Western song structure and beats.

Because the Asian urban music community cannot be reduced to a genre or distinctive sound, the scene can be identified by various names, which also suggests the existence of scenes within a scene. Some refer to it as the ‘desi beats’ scene, or the ‘urban desi’ scene, or, as it is most commonly referred to, the ‘Asian’ or ‘desi’ music scene. The use of different terms indicates that there is a certain amount of ambiguity and conflict over what sounds and people are representative of or even part of the scene. Yet, a ‘scene’ must draw some boundaries to make itself distinctive from some other community. They are, however, fluid in order to accommodate the shifting loyalties, friendships, and networks that make up the scene. Thus, a key area of interest is how and where those within the ‘Asian’ scene draw those boundaries. Boundaries not only are maintained, regulated, and shaped by individual interests but also reflect wider social norms and expectations that are racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized. Therefore, the mapping of these boundaries highlights the significant relationship from scenic practices to the everyday ‘making’ of ‘race’, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.

For example, even if there is no recognizable South Asian sound, the term ‘Asian music’ can include music made by South Asian artists. Deborah Wong (2004) makes a very useful distinction when she clarifies that she studies Asian-Americans making music rather than focusing on ‘Asian American music’ (4). A similar distinction can be established between the idea of there being a British Asian music and British Asians making music; in other words, the Asian music scene cuts across a wide range of music genres, defying prescriptive expectations of sounds and styles. Therefore, my project on the British Asian urban music ‘scene’ challenges and redirects the construction of a ‘scene’ away from strictly genre-based musical communities and instead focuses on the possibility of alternative groupings.

The inclusion of artists such as Jay Sean exemplifies the fluid boundaries around what counts as Asian music. Despite his R&B sound he is considered to be an exemplary figure of the Asian scene and a positive role model for aspiring Asian singers. Yet Jay Sean is not without his critics. He debuted with a single produced by Rishi Rich in 2003 and helped to popularize a South Asian R&B fusion style. As his career developed he moved toward a smoother, more generic R&B, soul, and ‘urban’ sound and moved away from ‘Asian’ instrumentation and vocals. As is often the case with artists who develop other styles and sounds, people accused him of selling out his original Asian fan base in order to achieve greater commercial success.

Earlier in his career, Jay Sean would have performed in smaller club venues. There are often many Asian club nights hosted by these venues throughout the city on any given night. These nights demonstrate how the scene takes up various and diverse spaces across the city. These Asian club nights are a crucial element of the music scene because they often locate the scene in a particular place so the cultural producers, consumers and everyone in between (e.g., media figures, promoters and events people) can go to meet one another, talk business, and just socialize together. This coming together demonstrates how close these networks operating within the scene are to be able to establish nights where people can and do get together. Birthday parties and get-togethers are often held at certain club nights, whereas other club nights serve as informal gathering centers for the Asian music industry.

However, there are other club nights that function as party and dance spaces that feature British Asian music such as bhangra and ‘desi’ hip hop music. These numerous bhangra nights can be seen as occupying a sphere that overlaps with but is still distinct from the Asian urban ‘scene’ of music makers. Therefore, not all Asian club nights are directly connected to the Asian music scene. Yet, networks of promoters are also connected to one another in different ways, so that sometimes a venue that hosts an Asian night is also used to launch music events. For instance, Voodoo Entertainment is a party promotion and events company that throws Bollywoodthemed parties. Many of these promoters know artists and producers within the scene and host record and artist launch parties in addition to their own nights. Thus,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Don’t Talk, Just Dance: Fieldwork in the Club and Elsewhere
• 3 How ‘Desi’ Is ‘Desi’?: The Making of London’s ‘Desi’ Diasporic Identities
• 4 ‘Brown Boys Doing It Like This’? The Neoliberal Politics of the Asian Scene
• 5 Bombay Bronx: Space, Capital, and Cultural Production and the Asian Urban Scene
• 6 “No Caps, No All-Male Groups!”: The Regulation of Asians in London Clubs
• Conclusion: The Threat of the ‘Other’
• Index