130: The Rough Guide to Asian Underground, by Various Artists

Various Artists (United Kingdom/South Asia)
The Rough Guide to Asian Underground (2003)
15 tracks, 78 minutes
Another one that can’t be listened to or downloaded online for some reason. Here’s a Spotify playlist I made, but it is missing a few tracks, unfortunately. You can still buy the CD at the World Music Network, or even more cheaply second-hand on Amazon.

For a really long time, the Rough Guide series from the World Music Network was one of the most valuable resources in world music, providing impressively in-depth and well-rounded introductions to music scenes by region, culture or genre in the space of a single CD each, often with short but informative essays and track breakdowns in the sleeves. There were so many excellent Rough Guide compilations that I had to be careful not to fill this blog up with them. It’s a shame that lately, although WMN still puts out Rough Guides, they are nowhere near the standard they once were – nowadays they seem to mostly be excuses to repackage material from their sister label Riverboat Records, and there’s not a sleeve note in sight. Ah well. This is a blog for Good Albums, so let’s look at one of them, then.

The Asian Underground scene was quite a big deal in the UK of the 1990s, and must surely have been one of the most exciting musical movements to be a part of (although I cannot speak from experience – I was a little kid growing up in the middle of nowhere in the north-west, but still). UK-based musicians and producers with backgrounds from all over South Asia were diving into the latest styles of electronica and dance music, as well as hip-hop, jungle, new age, dub and punk, and bringing along a unique Asian spin on things by introducing elements from what they heard at home: Indian classical music, Bollywood songs, qawwali, bhangra and all sorts.

The Rough Guide to Asian Underground has all of the factors that made the Rough Guide series so essential for listeners of good music from anywhere. For starters, it was compiled by DJ Ritu, who was one of the key players in the scene herself and responsible for a lot of the attention that came its way – who better suited to give the most succinct yet detailed introduction to it?

All the obvious and most well-known names of the scene are here of course, such as Asian Dub Foundation, Black Star Liner, the State of Bengal and Fun^da^Mental (whose track ‘Ja Sha Taan’ is probably the best on here, making excellent use of samples from the qawwali of Nawazish Ali Khan and the 1940s jazz-blues of Hot Lips Page). But there’s also some interesting and unexpected entries here. The album starts with ‘Streets of Calcutta’, a great track from sitarist Ananda Shankar from all the way back in 1975 that shows how deep the roots of Asian Underground go; there’s also some of Talvin Singh’s earliest work under the moniker Mahatma T with the track ‘Jihad’ from the 80s – he would later go on to be one of the biggest names in the Asian Underground scene, even making it overground as the first (and so far only) British-Asian winner of the Mercury Prize in 1999. And then there’s also a handful of tracks that were as-then unreleased, including one by another big name, Joi.

Now that is how you introduce a musical scene in a way that can get newcomers hooked and show them what they need to know while also including new bits and pieces to interest those already familiar with it. Bravo, DJ Ritu; World Music Network, take note.