EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 13 - Bhangra
Genre of the Day - Bhangra
Album of the Day - Ho Jayegi Balle Balle by Daler Mehndi (1997)
June 13, 2024
The hallowed halls of dance classes are a mysterious thing to me. Last summer, I was lucky to find out about ClassPass, a subscription service that gives you credits that allow you to go to a variety of exercise or dance classes. In one free month trial, I squeezed in Barry’s Boot Camp, some strange new-fangled climber machine workout, a trampoline moment, and one dance exercise class. I’ve never taken a true dance class, though. Today’s genre is on the one hand surefire dance class hit, though a revealing look at how diasporas change music on the other.
The folk dancers who joyfully performed bhangra in its original form as a traditional Punjabi harvest dance would probably be shocked seeing peoples of all creeds in Toronto, Los Angeles, and London be shown its ropes, with some hip-hop beats and modern electronic flair added to the music. The ritualized folk dance has become a transnational music genre and arguably India’s most visible musical export in the past couple of decades other than Bollywood. Bhangra as we know it in today’s scene grew out of a meticulously stylized performance. It was a circular dance performed traditionally by men to the beat of the bhol drum, with a constant rotation of one dancer moving to the center and a shift in rhythm with each dancer. Lyrical content is minimal, and singers fill pauses between dancer shifts with bolian, improvised nonsense syllables that suit the transitional moment. It’s reminiscent of another South Asian vocal tradition, konnakol, demonstrating overlaps even while these genres lie worlds away from each other within India.
How did this transformation from storied folk ritual to globalization phenomenon happen? It reminds us that a particular genre’s popularity can in some ways be explained by the base characteristics of the music being able to adapt to modern, constantly shifting pop sounds, but at the same time you never know what’s going to grow roots internationally and proceed to take off. It’s an unpredictable lottery.
Bhangra represents the complex network of musical dissemination and reformulation that takes place across diasporas. Anjali Gera explains in the book Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond that it was the Punjabi community in Britain who carved out a visible space for bhangra music by integrating the dance and the percussive force of the dhol drums with Western dance and hip-hop music. Ah, the UK, the land of some successful and some vehemently panned folk-music-meets-pop-sensibilities label experiments. Bhangra lies much more at the former end of the spectrum, though, having arrived like a rocket ship back home in India where it has put folk genres on the map that typically get popularly shut out by the hierarchical, established Hindi musical institutions of Bollywood. Punjab, after all, belongs in full to neither Pakistan nor India, falling between both. Bhangra’s presence on the global stage resists divisions based on vast ideas of nation-states that obscures the regional diversity within.
It’s a lofty load to thrust upon a genre that is chock full of joy and a deep-rooted sense of celebration from its harvest-festivity origins, but one that it bears well thanks to its deft blend of American and British pop influences with the firecracker energy driven by the rapid dhol drums and Indian instrumentation. Today’s singer Daler Mehndi follows the Sikh faith that developed in Punjab, but hails from India’s eastern state of Bihar, a demonstration of the genre’s additional significance to the cross-regional and international Sikh community. Though this set does not include his instantaneous supernova-like earworm “Tunak Tunak Tun”, it’s still a worthy dose of bhangra’s charismatic energy. He delivers songs with a vocal smile that shines through on the euphoric drama of “Dilruba O Ruba” while entrenching bhangra in the late ‘90s global pop conversation with the snare buildups and synth bass of “Ho Jayegi Balle Balle.” Many songs feature instantly memorable call-and-responses and emphasize the genre’s collectivist undertones. Like the original dance folding people in and out of the constantly shifting circle and never leaves a moment of silence by filling the gaps with vocal nothings, it’s an energy-fest that makes it a standout dance listen. No wonder American producers started getting their bhangra on in the early 2000s, from Missy getting her freak on to remixers injecting Britney hits with bhangra’s rhythmic caffeine pill. It’s one of the best testaments to a spotlight successfully shone thanks to the power of diasporas’ musical passion.