42. Punjabi MC feat. Jay-Z - Beware of the Boys (2002)

This decade, as mentioned, was characterized by a heightened dialogue between musical cultures that were almost deaf to each other in the past. For a productive dialogue to emerge, two preconditions are required: first, there has to be a common ground, on which the connection can be formed; second, every side has to have something to bring into it, something that can be understood by the other side and enrich its world. When we talk of Indian music vs. Western pop, it is still hard to form that connection.

The first contact was established in the sixties. Western youngsters traveled to India and sampled (most of them superficially) Eastern spiritual doctrines, and were also taken by the mystical sound of classic sitar music. This sound became one of the cornerstones of psychedelia, but actually, this connection was not with Indian culture itself, but with some idea that these youngsters formed in their mind of India. The things that rock bands did with sitars did not create common grounds for conversing with Indian music and culture, and did not give anything back to the Indians. The psychedelic era came and went, and the cultures remained alien to each other.

Indian culture, in the meantime, began to be increasingly influenced by Western pop, with the main perpetrators being the Indian immigrants to Britain. The common ground that Indian youngsters eventually found with their Western peers was of course rhythm and dancing, things that are understood by any human (except those who were corrupted by classic European or classic Indian music). In the eighties, Indian musicians started to merge Western pop with bhangra, a traditional Punjabi dance, and found success among the Indian crowds. And in the nineties, with the coming of the dance era, bhangra found a wider audience, and became part of the decade's tapestry of sounds and rhythms. This helped to spark a renewed interest in the West in contemporary Indian culture, and contributed to the attempts to marry Western cinema to the Indian cinema, known as Bollywood. It seemed we were heading towards a new age of dialogue between the cultures.

But it isn't that simple, and in the current decade, things just plodded along. The connections between Hollywood and Bollywood happened mainly in the field of comedy, and made fun of the misunderstanding that result from the clash of cultures, and in music, now dominated by hip-hop, there were additional attempts at making connections, but without much success. In 2002, Jay-Z took 'Mundian To Bach Ke', the classic 1998 hip-hop-bhangra record by Punjabi MC, and remixed it along with his own vocal track. Jay-Z does his best, and his best is a lot, to match his flow to the different rhythm, and the result is a very fun record. But still, there is no sense of true dialogue.

Hope for the opening of a new era came in 2008, with the Massive success of Slumdog Millionaire, which presented a deeper cinematic connection with a more universal message. I still await the musical equivalent, and I'm sure it will come. In the meantime, let's have fun one more time with Punjabi MC and Jay-Z.