Remixes
Punjabi folk remixed with hip hop, known lovingly as folkhop, is most often produced when folk vocals are purchased online to be remixed in a studio. Folk vocals are usually sung out to traditional melodies, that are often repeated with new lyrics. This genre is considered a sub genre of Punjabi folk and not accepted as bhangra music.
Many South Asian DJs, especially in America, have mixed Punjabi folk music with house, reggae, and hip-hop to add a different flavor to Punjabi folk. These remixes continued to gain popularity as the nineties came to an end.
Of particular note among remix artists is Bally Sagoo, a Punjabi-Sikh, Anglo-Indian raised in Birmingham, England. Sagoo described his music as "a bit of tablas, a bit of the Indian sound. But bring on the bass lines, bring on the funky-drummer beat, bring on the James Brown samples", to Time magazine in 1997. He was recently signed by Sony as the flagship artist for a new sound. The most popular of these is Daler Mehndi, a Punjabi singer from India, and his music, known as "folk Pop". Mehndi has become a major name not just in Punjab, but also all over India, with tracks such as "Bolo Ta Ra Ra" and "Ho Jayegee Balle Balle". He has made the sound of Bhangra-pop a craze amongst many non-Punjabis in India, selling many millions of albums. Perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is the selling of 250,000 albums in Kerala, a state in the South of India where Punjabi is not spoken.
Toward the end of the decade, Bhangra continued to die out, with folkhop artists like Bally Sagoo and Apache Indian signing with international recording labels Sony and Island. Moreover, Multitone Records, one of the major recording labels associated with Bhangra in Britain in the eighties and nineties, was bought by BMG. Finally, a recent Pepsi commercial launched in Britain featured South Asian actors and Punjabi folk music. This, perhaps more than anything else, is a true sign of the emergence of Punjabi folk into popular culture.
Post-Bhangra continues to gain popularity in both the UK and US after the death of bhangra in mid 90s. As mentioned above, artists such as Bally Sagoo offer what was referred to as "Bollywood remixes". This is just one result of the fusion the traditional folk beats and South Asian instruments with that of other contemporary music genres. Other lesser popular offshoots include "Bhangramuffin" and Acid Bhangra. Bhangramuffin mixes traditional Bhangra backgrounds are combined with Ragga; one famous band from this genre is Apache Indian. As the title suggests, Acid Bhangra combines acid music with Bhangra. An interesting result of its popularity was that post-Bhangra gave rise to a new wave of club culture (ie. Hot 'n Spicy at London's Limelight nightclub and Manchester's Shankeys Soap). Although much of the popularity was centered around South Asian participation, post-Bhangra expressed a "process of musical cultural hybridization and syncretism that moved beyond a straightforward juxtaposition of dance music genres."[16]
Although it sounds like a musical form that would follow the original Bhangra, post-Bhangra most specifically refers to a similar musical form with a greater emphasis on inter-dance-genre dialogues. In this way, post-Bhangra has an element of remixing and fusing Black and Asian styles of dance that is not as prevalent in traditional Bhangra. According to Sanjay Sharma, "just as Bhangra has been in constant dialogue with other (black) dance genres, post-Bhangra carries this through more incisively and intentionally."[17] At the same time though, post-Bhangra contains the same components of racial and cultural affirmation that have been seen in Bhangra before it. In fact, with a larger focus on the dance fusion style and post-Bhangra "[operating] musically more in terms of other genres, of Ragga, Rap or Jungle music,"[17] it is very easy to see how this music attacks the essentialism that lay at the heart of the British Empire. Indeed, by fusing such starkly contrasting dance genres, post-Bhangra artists subject racial signifiers such as "Asianness" or "Blackness" to immense scrutiny. While these notions of racial and cultural essentialism can produce national pride and a finite sense of identity, they can also be highly detrimental to society at large. Since essentialism claims that people can be categorized according to some definite essence, it often leads to civil disputes and factionalism and places social boundaries between different groups of people, preventing cultural diffusion. On the flip side, post-Bhangra offers these displaced Asians in the UK an avenue for expressing their condemnation of the rigid essentialism which questions their participation in a black-dominated music scene in the first place. Not only this, but Asian artists address the issue that they too have faced social difficulties in the UK and that their music is truly authentic.
Post-bhangra has been described as a tool for strategic identity politics, presenting itself as a medium for protest against colonialism and racism. By raising awareness to problems of racism within Asian contexts, post-bhangra ventures to model movements created by organizations that have engendered a sense of unique identity for their constituents, such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. Furthermore, it allows for the expression of frustration related to racial tension that has been blanketed by social apathy. Post-bhangra music has created "new ethnicities" that are pertinent to the historical ties of the Indian subcontinent whilst remaining independent of the region itself. The formation of this new sense of Asian identity has been a leading proponent of post-bhangra, providing Asian youth with a feeling of belonging despite having to struggle to identify with a new culture that is not confined to the cultural norms of their roots nor completely assimilated with any existing culture [16].
Somewhere between mimicry and appropriation, post-Bhangra manages to feed off of mainstream black dance genres and then flourish in a more localized context, giving it the local importance it has to Asian and Black Britons. Rupa Huq says with respect to post-Bhangra's mainstream popularity that "spring 1998 saw the number one hit 'Brimful of Asha' from Cornershop,"[18] indicating that post-Bhangra is gaining the global attention it needs. As this musical form finds its way into mainstream styles and media, the British faces behind it hope to endorse the fight against "white racial terror, neo-colonialism/ imperialism and global racial subjugation."[17] Therefore, post-Bhangra is an important musical form both because it defies essentialism by mixing and clashing seemingly incommensurbale sounds and cultures and because it provides Asian youth in the UK with a vehicle for self-expression as part of a musical scene with which they would otherwise be discouraged from associating.