Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gci223
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Asian Culture and Media Studies
ResumoIn Brimful of Asia, the term ‘Asian’ embraces a variety of musicians with ethnic roots in the Indian subcontinent who grew up in Britain and whose music appeared in the UK popular music scene in the early 1990s. Britain had witnessed such artists before. Farrokh Bulsara, born in Zanzibar and brought up in India until the age of 16, became lead singer of one of the UK’s most commercially successful bands. But Freddie Mercury, the pseudonym and public persona of the lead singer of Queen, made little or no reference to his ethnic origins. In the early 1990s, however, this situation changed as increasing numbers of Asian artists in Britain drew on their sense of ethnic identity, allowing it to inform their music in more direct ways. Indian sounds appeared alongside hip-hop, rock, and electronic dance, in some cases as a metaphor for displacement, while lyrics became more politically charged. When Apache Indian, Bally Sagoo, Fun^Da^Mental, Hustlers HC, the Voodoo Queens, Asian Dub Foundation, Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh, Echobelly, Black Star Liner, and Cornershop appeared a number of them were greeted by the media as a sign of disaffection among British Asian youth. Even academics, encouraged by the overtly political stance of Fun^Da^Mental, whose first album Seize the Time (1994) sampled the voice of the black rights activist Malcolm X, pursued the line that this emerging musical trend constituted a collective form of Asian resistance. In Brimful of Asia, Rehan Hyder questions this assumption by asking musicians, from four of the bands listed above, what their intentions actually had been.
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