Middle Class Mentality
Our parents didn’t come to the US to create new cuyltural forms. They came so that we could get educated, become doctors, engineers, middle managers and maybe get it all lined up and become uniquely rich. No judgement: can’t blame people for wanting to not reproduce poverty. The way they mostly got on was to create the culture from “home” here in the new world. The language, the cuisine, the religion, the social norms. Everyone knew, I would hope, that they would be living in a different culture, a culture that would constantly threaten the bubble culture created by these diaspora communities. The idea goes that good kids will stick close to home and the ways of life from back home would persist.
In college they had these cultural clubs. Indian Student Union, Sikh Student Association. Ways to maintain the bubble while the kids were living away from their parent’s gaze. A way to reproduce social surveilling I suppose. Besides, the kids didn’t need to explore the greater social scene of campus life, not in any serious way. You were there to get a degree, and preferably one that would lead to at least a solid upper-middle class lifestyle. You wanted to have some fun while you were there? Indian Student Union. And why not? Its just like home, right?
The two cultural and social spheres cannot remain pure. Everyone basically knows that, and some even say it out loud. But there were/are ways to police behavior. Calling someone “whitewashed,” or “confused.” IT was a popular film in the late 90s, “ABCD,” American Born Confused Desi, which told the story of a young man coming “back to his roots.”
I wasn’t a Student Union kid. I suppose I was the confused desi. But I didn’t feel confused. It was obvious to me that I lived in a culture that wasn’t the bubble culture. I was a brown kid who went to punk rock shows in Orange County, and who went to multiethnic, queer-affirming and drug-induced raves in the California desert. The bubble culture was bland. It reeked of a lost opportunity. The lost opportunity to discover and create culture and to challenge the idea of identity all-together.
The Asian Underground
“To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernability, or indifferentation . . .
Gilles Deleuze
I wasn’t there. I saw it from a far, wished I could be a part of it, and tried my best to drink in its energy.
Jungle, Jamaican sound system, South Asian instrumentation, and Bollywood samples. Mongrelized and concatenated into hyperreal bangers sometimes brutal and sometimes sublime. This is England, the tracks scream between the acid bass and dhol collisions. Identity as essential lays eviscerated under the material forces of cultiural decoding and recoding. A becoming emerges from a zone of proximity that can only dance under the weight of colonial history and the capitalist ever-present.
That UK’s immigration patterns and policies differed greatly from those in the US is significant. A key ingredient in the Bhangramuffin posture and aesthetic is UK council culture. No such analogue in the middle-class mentality of US desis. In the US, South Asian kids performed culture because they believed it was “authentic.” When you explicitly are trying to recapture the thing, you know it is already lost. The Asian underground didn’t attempt to perform an expression of authentic culture, it simply built a new form that dialectically pursued an opening beyond the borders of cultural authenticity. Asian Underground tacitly acknowledged its historical and material situation, with no illusions about “inner” or “outer” culture. Asian-ness was not fixed, just as English-ness was and is not. Contemporary modes of production do not allow for such fixedness, only flows. And it is the great – and truly silly – mistake of those who wish to conserve culture while also conserving the capitalist mode of production. There is no greater source of mongrelization than the free market.
One review of Talvin Singh’s OK, the Mercury Prize-winning masterpiece, intones: contains music for an airport at the centre of the world, where dub rhythms interface with smouldering New York jazz (‘Mombasstic’), where geisha choirs skat over cut-up beats (‘OK’), where the crisp urban breaks of Hoxton Square marinade in plaintive orchestral soups (‘Traveller’).
The allusion to airport music is instructive. At once, we are confronted with the possible comparison to Eno’s Music for Airports, those defining explorations of ambience, technology and immersion. Of course, the airport is also the post-modern liminal space par-excellence; a station in-between worlds, a place whose concrete stillness is to facilitate flows of people and commerce. It is also a “no-lace” of hard borders, a neither here nor there where passports pass for identity validation and the right to enter into the actual country the airport sits in. Singh explores and explores these liminal contradictions in the tension and release between breakbeats and lilting bansuri lines, between geisha choruses and sound-system sub-bass. The nowhere of contemporary cultural hyper-hybridity is best available palette to aetheticize the historical moment.
It lacks chauvinism, there is no attempt to either assimilate or to redraw the moral landscape in some attempt to “provincialize Europe.” I was just a kid from LA trying figure out where I belonged, and the neither this nor that, but something new, spoke loudly – and suggested new weapons. An escape from the weaksauce middle-classism and tired performativity of “authenticity.”