From “Rebel Warrior”- Asian Dub Foundation.

Introduction.
Discussions of the syncretic cultural forms that have emerged from urban nodes of transmigration have revolved around “hybridity”. Problematised through postmodernist conceptions of the nature of culture, hybridity has been critiqued as a notion that serves to obscure, rather than highlight, the political context that these activities are situated within. This paper will address hybridity in relation to the Asian Underground, Kassovitz’s La Haine and Kipling’s Kim. It is intended to operate as a means to redefine the meaning of the concept in order to specify the contextualising political forces of colonialism, migration and racism.

The paper will begin with a section on the analysis of hybridity theory in the literature that concludes with a refining of the concept along etymological lines. Caught between the pitfalls of essentialism and multiculturalism, it will then be necessary to outline the “third space” of cultural expression. This section will be extended in order to ground the linguistic metaphor of “code switching” in specific social contexts. A running concern will be the accusations of the cultural theft of AfroDiasporic street modes and the central musical focus will therefore be the hip hop genre. Code switching will be displayed as a political act when it concerns the transgression, fusion, or routine switch between the coloniser and the colonised or the diasporic and the diasporic.

This will lay the ground for the ethnographic examples under consideration. Firstly, Indo-British fusion music is analysed in respect to community based anti-racist political activity. Secondly, the performance of hybridity is discussed around a syncretically contrived screening of La Haine. Thirdly, this links into a reading of Kim as a corrupt ethnographic text in order to tease out the implications and techniques of ethnically charged code switching. These are deployed as a means to discuss the relationship between youth, music and the construction of hybridity through consumption and performance in order to conclude that there is a definite political dimension to these activities.

Phrases or words that have been underlined indicate background information in the appendix. A cassette tape of music featured in the paper has also been included.

The Scene.
Bhangra music emerged in the UK out of the Southall scene of daytime dances for young Asians (Banerji and Baumann, pg 142). This scene, and the music it produced, entailed a fusion of Punjabi folk music and the reggae dance-hall style (Gilroy, pg 226).

As a consequence of the ethnic diversity of their surroundings, the Southall “daytimers” shared an Afro-Caribbean influence with the early punk scene. For the DJs who played in-between bands at late 70s punk gigs, reggae and dub were the only tolerated alternative sounds (Jones pg 96). These aurally diverse influences converged in the charged reggae-punk of ska bands like The Specials, Selector and Madness.

This same Afro-Caribbean influence was present in bhangra (Banerji and Baumann, pg 146). It led eventually to the hip-hop/bhangra fusion of self-styled “bhangramuffins ” like Apache Indian (Taylor, pg 155, Back, pg 221) and the “northern rock” bhangra/house styles of the Midlands (Back, pg 219). After a brief flurry of media interest, which all but extinguished the scene , these sounds re-emerged into the national media consciousness with the Asian Underground (or New Asian Dance Music) explosion, and successive Mercury awards (Asian Dub Foundation in 1998 and Talvin Singh in 1999). The two genres continue to coexist and develop, with bhangra now incorporating “as many dhols and tablas as James Brown samples, R&B choruses, funk basslines, house meltdowns, and programmed hip hop beats” (Gonzalves et al, pg 2).

Hybridity.
Attempts to analyse these new musical forms, and the social changes (transmigration, post-colonialism etc) that have created them, have been problematic. The literature employs the category of “hybridity” in an attempt to explain the apparently syncretic union of East and West. The theory of hybridity has its origins in structuralist thought, in Levi-Strauss’ “ambiguous tricksters” and Turner’s “anti-structural liminality” (Werbner, pg 2), indicating spaces of inversion.

Its usage in the contemporary literature is similar to that of Strathern’s postmodern cyborg (Papastergiadis, pg 258) in that it indicates a transgressive position. It has two main applications in theory. Firstly, it denotes an ongoing process of cultural exchange between “East and West” or “centre and periphery” (Hall, in Papastergiardis, pg 274). Secondly, it operates as a metaphor for the form of syncretic cultural identity produced through this exchange (Spivak in Papastergiardis, pg 274). Another rendering of the term posits it as a new model in the vein of cosmopolitans (the “gorgeous butterflies”, urbane sophisticates with a taste for the exotic) and transnationals (the “worker bees”, migrant populations with unidirectional loyalties) as an additional category (from Hannerz and Freidman, quoted in Werbener pg 12).

Put simply, the hybrid is the syncretic product of two cultures, but manages to move between both. Both Fisher (quoted in Papastergiadis, pg 258) and Grillo (Grillo, pg 231-2) find the presence of a biological metaphor disquieting in the discussion of post-colonialism. The implied notion of the “hybrid” as the result of cross-breeding suggests an unsettlingly racialised conception of the two productive cultures and yet the term is used to designate a postmodern phenomenon of cultural identity construction. This odd choice of terms is never fully explicated in the literature. However, there is a deeper historical etymology to the word that reveals a deeper meaning. It derives from the Latin “hybrida” which signifies the cross-breeding of a wild boar with a tame mate. Further meanings are more pertinent still- it can also designate “one born of a Roman father and a foreign mother or of a freeman and a slave” (Onions, pg 454). Taken as a metaphor to describe the unequal power relations attendant in the shaping of the migrant’s “British Identity”, the term may well serve some purpose, if only as a rejoinder to those who decry that its usage prevents the political (e.g. Hutnyk, pg 128-131). The notion of hybrida can be used to describe processes of cultural fusion that directly acknowledge political realities, and that operate to corrupt the essentialist binary of the tame/wild, Roman/foreign, freeman/slave dichotomy. These structural binaries are present in the dominant discourses that frame the context of structural inequality within which the hybrida takes shape, for example in the Imperialist discourses of colonialism, the Great Game and Kipling’s “ethnography” as discussed below.

Controversy in the Third Space.
Hutnyk’s greatest assault on the use of “hybridity” in the literature is that it seems to imply a notion of pre-hybrid cultures (Hutnyk, pg 119). Notions of hybridity are points of debate between essentialist and multiculturalist positions. Hybridity can be said to contain a “running subtext” of essentialism in the same way that terms like “fluid” often mean little more than “not stable” (Amit-Talai, pg 225).

An essentialist perspective on culture would assert that hybridised cultural forms such as bhangra are the product of an intermixture of two discrete cultural communities. Gilroy rejects this as a crude and reductive notion of culture (Gilroy, pg 7). This rejection is an example of what has been termed the “redemptive anthropological mantra, a mea culpa for the sins of our functionalist forefathers” (Amil-Talai, pg 223), and comes as no surprise. Yet Gilroy fends accusations of embracing any anti-essentialist dogma by also rejecting the pseudo-pluralism of multiculturalism (Gilroy, pg 36). A similar tactic is employed by Bhabha to get into the “third space”- “a liminal passage between fixed identifications” (Grillo, pg 230-232) but Gilroy only acts so as to manoeuvre himself, via the mobility of music, into a position of asserting a coherent Afro-diasporic identity (Gilroy, 102). The cultural “raw materials” of Gilroy’s black Atlantic are primarily musical (ibid, pg 81-2). He acknowledges that, through new cultural poses such as the bhangramuffin, British Asians too have an involvement in these materials, but he asserts that it is in terms of “borrowing” and “appropriation” to form a “self-consciously synthetic culture” (ibid). Hutnyk is justifiably indignant about the damage done to Asians in this assertation (Hutynk, pg 125). It is reminiscent of Rose’s accusations of white hip hop fans imitating and stealing black music (Rose, pg 5). To paraphrase Hutnyk, it is time to unpack Gilroy’s ship . If whites and/or Asians are only capable of imitating or stealing hip hop then it has to be presumed that black antennae (after Gilbert Gil, quoted in Back, pg 218) have a unique mode of authentic cultural (racial?) diffusion. The ethnomusicologist Steven Feld rejects these ideas “of ‘racial’ cultures of musics” as racist (quoted in Garofalo, pg 235). The line between imitation and legitimate transmission of cultural forms cannot be found- it is merely a matter of prejudicing certain actions and actors that involves an endless rehashing of the crossover debates. Accusations of theft on the basis of structural privilege, i.e. that white “imitators” have more resources than black “innovators” (Rose, pg 6) must be confounded by the presence of Asian rappers from similarly ghettoised urban areas. Therefore, notions of shared culturally productive forces such as migration, racism, diaspora etc, can and will be made on the basis of mutual structural inequality.

In “Puerto Rican and Proud Boyee”, Juan Flares describes the origin of hip hop culture as a co-creation of black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers, particularly the contingent arts of breakdancing and graffiti. It is a ‘street thing’, rather than a ‘black thing’, “not racially marked off but in terms of class, geography, age and gender” (Flares, pg 97). The Puerto Rican presence was erased through the mass commercial distribution of rap, which was rendered as either an Afro-Caribbean form that can only be mimicked (for the essentialised black target audience), or as a multicultural, all-purpose form (for the multicultural market) of relevance to anyone who was sufficiently “with it” (Flares, pg 95). Dumped into a depressed version of Gilroy’s “anti-anti-essentialism”, the Puerto Rocks had no place in either version of the story. They were not black nor were they grateful multicultural receivers of the form. Neither position reflected their “intricate cultural conjunction with AfroAmericans in the very formation of rap” and the eventual media creation of Latino-rap was a Pyrrhic victory at best (ibid, pg 96).

The hybridised rap of banlieue syncreticism marks a similar rejection of the essentialist/multicultural binary. Multi-ethnic rap outfits like Supreme NTM and the street culture of the bandes posses enable Franco-Maghrebis to “carve out a space for themselves where they can identify simultaneously with French and Arab cultures while rejecting both French ethnocentrism and Algerian conservatism” (Gross, pg 146). This space is perhaps most usefully understood as the Intermezzo culture (Back, pg 226). The term is a metaphor derived from musical terminology to describe the smaller piece connecting the larger movements (from Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, quoted in Back, ibid). This space would traditionally be understood as a liminal area, inhabited as it is by a musically determined adolescence. Its constituent youth regard themselves as part of “an oppositional youth movement whose sonic expression is rap” (Gross, pg 142). In an environment where vinyl records are used as instruments and where the DJ is a cultural bricoleur- the “mutually exclusive subcultures” of musical/cultural forms are really just a variety of tools and resources with varying degrees of socio-political meaning (Back, pg 217). Music is the key cultural code to fusion, syncreticism and cross-fertilisation because “it is relatively unconstrained by the generic rules of traditional/elite genres” (Gross, pg 145).

Code Switching.
If the musical youth of the Intermezzo culture are not the offspring of essentialised cultures or the inhabitants of a weakly globalised multicultural groove then why attempt to retain the concept of “hybridity”? Exactly what are they hybrids of? One stance holds that all cultures are hybrid (Grillo, pg 230). However, as part of an attempt to accuse theorists of depoliticising the terrain, Hutnyk opines that this analysis is inadequate (Hutnyk, pg 119). While the quest for political contextualisation is laudable, Hutnyk’s complaint is unjustified. All cultures are hybrid. The point to be raised here, though, is that all human beings are multicultural (Amit-Talai, pg 231). Socially effective behaviour involves endless code-switching between different situations (ibid, pg 223). In dispelling the myth of the immigrant’s identity crisis or crippling “double-consciousness”, Ballard describes the skilled cultural navigations of young Anglo-Asian youth. They are able to switch between culturally appropriate behaviour at home with the family to behaviour in the yard with school friends as easily as the polyglot switches linguistic codes (Ballard, pg 31). Although valid, this point must be extended. Everybody switches these kinds of codes on a daily basis, not just the children of migrants. Central to these arguments is the separation of “culture” from being directly equivalent with individual societies, and its relocation into the sphere of activities. Different situations, organisations and settings demand “different cultural strategies and no one activity exhausts the range of cultural frames or possibilities which a person handles” (Amit-Talai, pg 228). Hybridity, in the etymologically-informed redefinition as hybrida, has relevance when making particular, politically loaded, switches. Certain activities and cultures have a greater significance when navigated as part of a daily experience, for example the switch between the coloniser and the colonised or the migrant and the host culture, or, as in the case of Bhangra, the diasporic and the diasporic in the frame of the postcolonial. To illustrate the politicised notion of the hybrida, this paper will now consider a postcolonial example of the Asian Underground in comparison to the colonial code-switching of Kipling’s Kim.

Asian Dub Foundation.
Asian Dub Foundation formed in 1993, a mixture of teachers and students from Community Music House, (Singer, pg 1) a radical college on the Farringdon Road that provides workshops and classes in musical technology (Rocket, pg 7) such as sampling, sequencing, turntable (DJing) and microphone techniques (Lisa Das, ADFED coordinator, via e-mail). ADF began life as a sound system and, although this cultural form was introduced as part of the AfroCarribean music scene (Back, pg 188), it has to be noted that sound system culture has been a part of the general underground youth music experience since the explosion of House and Techno in the late 80s.

With the addition of extra musicians, ADF evolved into a live act that fused the sounds of junglist rhythms, dub basslines, hip hop vocals, punk guitars and samples of traditional Asian and Bollywood music. Originally signed to Aki Nawaz’s Nation Records label, they shared the anti-racist political commitments of stablemates Fun^Da^Mental. Their activism is so well noted that it has prompted journalists to make comments such as “they are musicians as well as political commentators” (Le Gendre, pg 2), rather than the standard rock credentials of being “political as well as musical”. The appreciation of ADF as being primarily political is something that the band has worked hard to cultivate. This lies, perhaps, in the pedagogical intentions of Community Music’s founder, John Stevens, who modelled the initiative as a tool to promote a “collective” (post-socialist) society (Rockets, pg 7). There is a definite air of Paulo Freire about the intentions of ADFED, the “educational wing of ADF” (Freire, 1970). ADFED has largely superseded Community Music and has received funding from the London Arts Board and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (Lisa Das, via email). The new programme has also forged links with the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, a joint scheme with the Institute of Race Relations, for whom ADF created the soundtrack to the HomeBeats CD-ROM (Gupta, pg 1). The first CD-ROM on racism and the black presence in Britain, it is an educational resource targeted at 13 to 16 year olds. It “meets requirements for key stages 3 and 4 of the national curriculum and has won awards such as the 1998 British Interactive Multimedia Award for education” (www.homebeats.co.uk). Projects like this demonstrate a commitment to the strategy of anti-racist didacticism through music.

The Ritual Performance of Hybridity.
On a Saturday evening at the end of March 2001, I attended an event at the Barbican Centre. It was scheduled as part of the “Only Connect” season, which featured selected musicians playing live and original soundtracks alongside thematically linked films. Other evenings included Ornette Coleman playing to David Cronenburg’s flawed realisation of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch and a session by Ennio Morricone, famous for his soundtracks to the hybrid “Spaghetti” Westerns . The evening involved a screening of La Haine, during which ADF performed live, improvising a new soundtrack to the film as it played on screen behind them. The Barbican’s flyer set out to deliberately frame (Goffman, pg xiii) the event as multicultural- name-checking the North African rap scene, the French underground, London, India, and the Parisian Banliues as signifiers of the meaning inherent in combining this particular band and this particular film. The (somewhat pretentious) programme for the event attempted to deepen the connection- “La Haine portrays a marginalized section of society, ADF has created work around and campaigned for those on the receiving end of rough justice” (Le Gendre, pg 2), i.e. Satpal Ram . In 1997, ADF released the protest single “Free Satpal Ram” to highlight the case (Singer, pg1), and their 2000 album “Community Music” contained a postcard addressed to the Parole Board to petition for his release. In the basement foyer of the Barbican, two activists stood over a giant petition spread out on the floor, urging people to sign their names in marker pens. Opposite the petition, a group of young French activists were distributing information about the Mouvement de l’Immigration et des Banlieues that highlighted police brutality and racist immigration policies. The MIB member I spoke to informed me that they had travelled to London specifically to operate a stall at this event.

The central political concerns associated with ADF are therefore the right to self defence against racist/police violence and the need for collective action among the urban, primarily immigrant, poor. Through strategies such as the pedagogical ADFED, networking with official and unofficial campaigns, dissemination of underground literature, protest singles and “conscious lyrics”, ADF actively promote these concerns. Their particular mode of deliberate fusion also involves the rejection of essentialism (“psychological prisons”) and multiculturalism (“You’re multicultural/ But we’re anti-racist”- from “Jericho”, also quoted in Hutnyk, pg 131) and the laudation of “Outernationalism”. Further to this, part of the logic behind an instrumental accompaniment to La Haine is that these concerns are equally articulated by the music itself. As a site of pro-active hybridity, the music is used as a powerful sonic text, the fusion of different genres a deliberate metaphor for multi-ethnic unity- “What we sound like is as important as what we say” (ADF’s Chandrasonic, quoted in Le Gendre, pg 2).

La Haine.
In La Haine, these same political concerns are narratively and thematically central. Set in the aftermath of destructive rioting, the plot revolves around police brutality and the revenge killing of either a “pig” or a “skin”. The three protagonists reflect the ethnic diversity of the banlieue and French colonial history . Each character is introduced by cinematic devices reminiscent of Will Eisner’s technically innovative comics where the text is woven into the landscape- Jewish Vincent via a chunky gold ring carved with his name, Algerian Hubert via a promotional boxing poster and Said by a graffiti tag. The triumvirate cultural forms of hip hop are all present in the film- Said’s graffiti, the breakdancing scene and Supreme NTM’s seminal rap-anthem “Nik ta Police” blasting across the estate from a bedroom DJ. At issue is not the “improper appropriations” (Hutnyk, pg 110) of AfroDiasporic cultural tools, but the fragile unity of the trio and, by analogy, the various post-colonial immigrant “characters” of the banlieue in the face of violent physical rejection by the dominant and reactionary French culture. The shared hybrid street culture of ganga and hip hop is the negotiated site of their unity and they exhibit, throughout the film, a refusal to switch codes. Their performance of “street” is as problematic in family situations, the hospital and the police station, as it is at the elitist gallery that they gatecrash. The banlieue street culture presented is hybrida in its charged awareness of being simultaneously tame/wild, Roman/foreign and free/slave. Civilised treatment by the authorities is demanded, but if it is not met then it will be answered with violence rather than democratic appeals.

A key factor of social dominance is the ability to set codes, to demand that interactions are ordered on your own terms (Ballard, pg 32). Ethnicity is context dependent (Gardener, pg 159), and therefore certain contexts specify certain ethnically coded performances. The bandes exist in a postindustrial context dominated by the syncretic codes of the “inter system” (from Drummond, a theory based on Creole languages to explain the nature of multicultural settlements, quoted in Vertovec, pg 268). Their refusal to switch into appropriate hegemonic codes when confronted with authoritative institutions, like ADF’s proactive fusion, signifies a strategic performance of hybridised ethnicity. This performance of style as an oppositional stance to the inequities of contemporary, street-level, power relations is precisely what is meant by hybrida. The three protagonists of La Haine, as archetypes of their respective diasporas, are entirely unwilling/unable to comply.

Kim.
The case of ADF/La Haine is an example of a diaspora to disapora switch in the postcolonial environment that intimately bound with an expression of the political through the performance of hybrida. In the context of the colonial to colonised switch, Kim “the fabulous interloper, teaser of social boundaries and tester of taboos” (Randall, pg 118) has to be the master navigator. Kim is one of Rudyard Kipling’s most complex boy heroes- the orphaned child of colonial parents, he survives in the bazaar through his uncanny ability to disguise himself as a Muslim or Hindu child of any caste, thus embodying a specific form of hybridity (Kipling, 1901). Bhabha held that the critical examination of hybridity challenges the discourse of Imperialism as “dominance” in that the hybrid is produced by Imperial power, thus recasting dominance as a form of “subject formation” (quoted in Randall, pg 6). The cultural ambivalence of Kim envisions the unwarranted productive forces of the colonial encounter in human form. Furthermore, the hybrid subverts the oppositional dualisms central to the tenets of colonialism (Nandy, quoted in Papastergiardis, pg 264-5). Kim is unique in that his hybridity is approached as a potential tool of the administration, rather than a complete rejection of its ideologies. Unlike Kurtz , Kim has not “gone native” (Randall, pg 145-6). He is, like Mowgli, pre-human and pre-European, and can be “rescued” through discipline and education (ibid). Yet, throughout the text and also at its conclusion, his cultural identity remains ambivalent and his hybridity confounds the colonial ideology of cultural/racial difference (ibid, 167).

The novel links the practice of ethnography to that of the Great Game through several mechanisms. The two main spies, Creighton and Huree Babu are both amateur ethnologists and the story begins in the ethnological museum of Lahore. Not only was the practise “central to British Intelligence”, but the novel itself can be viewed as an attempted, although deeply flawed, ethnographic rendering of India as a manageable text (Randall, pg 141-3). The hybrid boy of Kipling’s fiction is an instrument of this process, and Kim’s cross-cultural impersonations signify his enactment of an “ethnography in person” (ibid, pg 130). The importance of these observations lies in the nature of the “culture” produced. To facilitate successful operations within the Great Game, Indian culture has to be experienced as a distinguishable series of temporally and spatially compartmentalised fragments (as in Lurgan Sahib’s ordeal of the jar, Kipling pg 204-206). This creates what Clifford has referred to as the “synchronic suspension” that enables Kipling’s rendering of India as an immutable text (quoted in Randall, pg 142). The removal of temporality from the ethnography depoliticises the cultural crossings that are inherent in the colonial process. The reintroduction of time (specifically the “Mutiny”) would point to the productive forces of colonialism that act towards the construction and maintenance of these cultural fragments that Kim navigates. A hybridity based on depoliticised atemporal fragments is exactly what Hutnyk finds at WOMAD, but it is not what is discovered “in the street”.

Liminal Youth.
A keen parallel between Kim and the other agents of hybridity considered above is that of adolescence and youth. In the study of multi-ethnic street fusion, Wulff notes that youth is a “momentous phase of physical and psychological development” (Wulff, pg 74). Within this significant point of an individual’s social development, there is an experience that has been denoted as singularly postmodern. The world of modern urban youth is one in which “one wanders within and between multiple borders and spaces marked by excess, otherness and difference... a shared postmodern space in which cultural representations merge into new hybridised forms of cultural performance, identity and political agency” (Giroux, pg 31). In Kipling’s work, this manifests as the hypnotically chanted “Who is Kim? Who is Kim?” which works less as a symbol of identity crisis and more as hallucinogenic mantra (e.g. Kipling, pg 158-159, 248). Adolescence, as a primary site of hybridity, has therefore been theorised as a liminal space. However, the characteristic liminality does not automatically denote transience, despite the limits on the duration of some inter-ethnic friendships (Hewitt and Back, quoted in Grillo, pg 235). Bhabha’s “third space” is not a temporary construction, “humans live in them and collect or musealise them all the time” (Agamben quoted in Sydnor, pg 236). This liminal space is a point of mutual, though uneven, cultural production between dynamic forces whose internal discourses may conversely emphasise mutual opposition and suspended fragmentation. This space is not essentially marginal, although its population may be marginalized by structural biases against age, class, etc. It enables the construction of Intermezzo cultures that corrupt the integrity of the dominant boundaries. In this sense, the hybrid is the production of modernist discourses but precedes and gives weight to, rather than confounding, postmodern perspectives on culture.

Black Youth.
What does this tell us about the concrete nature of the hybrida Intermezzo street culture and its relationship to wider post-colonial flows? Initially, the most obvious “ethnic” signifier of these cultures is the grounding in what are commonly understood as AfroCarribean forms- music, linguistic codes, fashions etc. Hewitt observed the “hegemonic authority” of black language and music on the estates of South London (quoted in Grillo, pg 234). Gross considers the banlieue rap scene as an ensemble that is weighted towards the “diasporic African cultural matrix” (Gross, pg 150) while Sharma worries, bluntly, about the “hegemony of black” (quoted in Singh, pg 3) creating unidirectional cultural flows. Les Back is more specific in his discussion of the Riverview Estate when he notes that, among a masculine working class culture of toughness, black kids get respect because they are considered “hard” (Back, 1996). An example of how the reality of this situation becomes encoded as a central refrain in youth culture fusions can be found in the Bhangramuffin. Apache Indian states that, when he was growing up he had no Asian street heroes to draw from, unlike his black friends (Taylor, pg 157) - that is, AfroDiasporic forms directly addressed the postindustrial urban environment that he attempted to navigate while the IndoDiasporic forms of his parent’s generation were more readily addressed to nostalgic traditionalism (Gardener, pg 159). The syncretic forms of his Ragga-Bhangra, like the South London dancehall scene, plotted “cultural connections with African Americans while at the same time reconstituting local aesthetics… laced with symbols and cultural fragments from urban America and the Caribbean that are rearranged in a unique way” (Back, pg 209). Sampling and scratching techniques, “embodied” in the sound system, create a digital tabula rasa within which connections can be made with the black diaspora that transform “local aesthetics” into something new, something that has to be recognised as hybrid but which is, more importantly, hybrida. The reason for this is that intimate categorical connections are constructed between “AfroCaribbean” and “Asian” by British racist (and also the radical socialist) ideologies, which reconstitute both typologies as, in the end “black” (Gardener, pg 160).

Wulff’s study of “inter-racial friendship” in South London explained how posses of teenage girls created new youth cultural styles that befitted their ideas of ethnic equality through the selective consumption of commodities (such as fashion, music, food etc) (Wulff, pg 64). But this navigation of cultural multiplicity through commodity consumption is not the simple fluidity of “multiculturalism”. Just as the hybrida form is created by structural inequalities, the youth styles that it enables are open/closed to participants on the basis on similar inequalities such as gender, class, geographical location etc (Flares, pg 97). Inherent in this selective closure is the desire to operate containment and control over the process of diffusion, for example in the case of a Bengali schoolgirl keeping up traditional appearances at home (Amit-Talai, pg 229). What this reveals is that, rather than Indo-British or Franco-Maghrebi youth operating a policy of imitation or theft of black cultural forms, they are in fact policing the boundaries of its diffusion. Through a shared experience of being “structurally fucked” (Bowman, quoted in Donnand and Wilson, pg 146), they have no qualms about ownership but do acknowledge the limits of fusion (or, as in the case of La Haine, the power in refusing these limits). As Aki Nawaz says “the problem with the older generation is that we understand them, they don’t understand us” (Dev, pg 2).

One of the few definitions of culture that is accepted by the majority of thinkers is that it is learned through social interaction (Harris, pg 19), rather than being inherited genetically (Garofalo, pg 234). Given this understanding, the colouring of the hybrid inter-system can be regarded as having elements of a black cultural concept that is separate from a black racial concept (ibid, pg 426) . Despite Friedman’s conservative notion that cosmopolitanism is higher in frequency among the sophisticated elites as opposed to the “tribal” working classes (quoted in Grillo, pg 235), this “Outernational” culture has specific roots in working class street-based attitudes towards leisure (Brake, pg 61). Through events such as the Barbican gig, the Asian Underground has attempted to present these concerns to the (mainly) white middle class majority. Aki Nawaz (AKA Propa-Ghandi- musician and “organic intellectual” Back, pg 194) has been quoted as saying “If you want to create rebellion and subversion it’s the elitist classes that you target because the poor people don’t have the time” (Dev, pg 4). Double Negative, another Community Music rap-fusion band, took the stage after the screening of La Haine. A somewhat startled audience of “alternative” but affluent punters were urged by MC RebelBase to “Big up yourselves Barbican posse”. It wasn’t necessarily the first time that they had seen a rap band before, but it was the first time they’d been called a posse.

Musical Youth.
There has been some questioning of the effect that hybridity has on the host culture. While Back would suggest a Utopian vision of interracial harmony in the playgrounds were it not for the fear of romanticising youth culture (Grillo, pg 234), Papastergiardis sneers at the reception of syncretic cultures as a form of narcissistic inclusion (Papastergiardis, pg 264). Nevertheless, what is important is that this hybridity reflects the appearance of a heterogeneous ensemble of new cultural modes (Gross, pg 148). The youth involved in these new urban collectives (such as the Southall Black Sisters posse checked on the sleevenotes of ADF’s 1995 LP “Facts and Fictions”, or the Midlands Bangla massive) are not mentally trapped between two cultures, between “East and West”, they have fashioned their own culture (Gardener, pg 164) and this is, after all, what matters. They are the host culture.

Conclusion.
Focusing on youth-music street styles of the Intermezzo culture as hybrida assists in highlighting the concrete political context of the postcolonial, postindustrial, multi-ethnic reality of “The Real Great Britain” (ADF, track one on the “Community Music” album).

Discussing cross-cultural fusion in the context of postmodern discomfort with essentialising narratives, whilst attempting to avoid “multicultural” generalisations involves dealing with linguistic metaphors such as code-switching. What becomes apparent is that the switches between particular codes such as coloniser to colonised or diasporic to diasporic involve politically charged movements. In the case of the deliberate fusion policies of the Asian Underground, these switches are undertaken with conscious political intent to thwart the binaric oppositions of the dominant discourses, which, through their inadvertently productive effects, create the subjective identity formation of the hybrida.

Not limited to the “texts” of the lyrics, these political concerns are also present in the music itself as well as attempts at permanently collective community action. Acknowledging the hybridity of these forms in this way serves to highlight, rather than obscure, the political context. These fusions are analogous to the navigational strategies of Kipling’s hybrid boy hero Kim in that they involve loaded performances of ethnicity in inter-system situations.

The politics of hybridity are most effectively enacted through music (because of its inherent syncreticism) and youth (because of their inherent liminality). That these forms are communicated through styles that are apparently AfroDiasporic signifies the relevance of the “culturally black” expression of post-industrial reality, rather than the “imitation” of essentialised or “racial” black forms. The musical youth are an outernational massive (or posse). Whether the skilfully navigated third space of the Intermezzo culture will truly result in a Utopian alignment of collectivised minorities is not for theory to decide. However, what this re-politicised analysis of hybridity does provide is the ability to acknowledge the political consciousness of past, present and future that its navigation entails and performs.
5476.

Bibliography.

ADFED information- www.asiandubfoundation.com

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Appendix.
The cassette tape included with this paper features some examples of music from the Asian Underground. The first track “Taa Deem”, by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, precludes the Asian Dub Foundation remix on track two. This has been included for comparative purposes.

Definition of terms.
The information provided is mainly unreferenced as it is based on personal experience. These notes are not intended to claim authoritative knowledge of these genres and should be regarded as rough subjective guides.

Bhangra.
Previous attempts to fuse Indian music with Western beat music had primarily involved instruments such as the sitar, for example in the crossover work of Ravi Shankar. This narrative generalisation obscures the work of 1970s Indian funk pioneers like Ananda Shankar- the “original innovator” (sleeve notes to the Indestructible Asian Beats compilation). Although ahead of the scene in terms of musical fusion, Shankar’s work was mostly limited to a sub-continental fanbase and was not part of a multidirectional cultural movement in the same way as Bhangra. However, the central ingredient of the Southall Beat was the dholak drum, an instrument that was far more representative of Indian music in general and far more accessible to the British ear than the “elite and tonally complex” sitar (Banerji and Baumann, pg 142). Due to socio-historical forces (such as Partition), the Punjab has been described as one of the most “multicultural” regions of the sub-continent. Its relationship to the production of Bhangra is similar to that of New York and the rap scene in that it demonstrates a syncretic attitude in conception and also in response to the multidirectional chain of response to wider international innovations of the form.

Asian Underground.

This essay does a partial disservice to the Asian Underground scene in its almost exclusive treatment of ADF and subsequent neglect of other artists. I have been in contact with Aki Nawaz, owner of Nation Records (one of the scene’s premiere, although commercially unsuccessful) and Fun^Da^Mental frontman but, at the time of writing, have been unable to include the completed interview. Other prominent artists of this ilk include the mellower Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney but there are a range of outfits producing Indo-British fusion including Badmarsh, Juttla, Calcutta Cyber Café, The Dub Factory, Panjabi/Punjabi MC, 2nd Gen, Jolly Mukherjee, Tabla Beat Science, Joi/Joy, TJ Remmy, Hustlers, and Los Chicharrons (Spanish for “pork scratchings”). There are two weekly club nights in London- Talvin Singh’s Anokha and Club Kali. Swaraj used to be a regular event at Blue Note but this has since closed.

Hip Hop.

In this essay, “Hip Hop” will be used as an inclusive term to signify a range of cultural practices including music, breakdancing, and graffiti. Musically, Hip Hop is defined by rap but also encompasses the art of scratching (see under Sampling, below). Breakdancing and body-popping are regarded as “Old School” in contemporary American rap circles, but they still have currency elsewhere (the banlieues for example)- witness the popularity of the video for the remixed Run DMC track “It’s like Dat”. Graffiti involves the twin practices of “pieces” (large cartoonish murals spray painted on derelict buildings and New York subway trains etc) and “tags” (hastily scrawled mini-pieces featuring the artist’s nickname).

Ska.

The term “ska” originally denoted a briefly popular form of Jamaican pop that became the precursor to Rock Steady, and consequently reggae. In the late 70s and early 80s it became synonymous with the Two Tone label whose distinctive sound formed the first serious post-punk musical movement. Its stylistic sensibility was closely akin to the Jamaican rude-boy and pre-facist apolitical skinhead fashions. The Two Tone label was a chessboard design of black and white checks, an early symbol of proto-hyrbidity. Ska was the “first indigenous pop form in the UK to mediate a direct relation to the reggae tradition and the black experience” (Jones, pg 105). Multi-ethnic bands such as the Specials and Selector defined the sound- a fusion of fast paced reggae, proletarian punk concerns and hard edged beats- which was more commercially promoted by all-white outfits such as The Beat, Madness and Bad Manners. Some of these later bands attracted an unsure neo-Nazi following that was not of their own design but has dogged them ever since.

The Crossover Debates.

In musical terms, “crossover” comes from the American system of charting record sales. Unlike the British system (i.e. there’s only one “top 40”), American unit sales are calculated on the basis of genre, with a separate chart for sub-genre of music and a top 40 pop chart based on radio playlisting. A “crossover” denotes a single that achieves multiple chart listings, for example a fusion of R&B, Dance and Pop will appear in all three charts. Black nationalists such as Nelson George have long held that crossovers by AfroAmerican artists constitute a sellout, but his comments must be situated in the context of his economic motivations as a promoter on the “black music” market (Garofalo, pg 232). The opposite position is argued by liberals such as journalist Steve Perry who champion crossovers as examples of change in social relations (ibid). These debates are mostly associated with the Farakhan-influenced politics of the 1980s and it is unfortunate to see a writer of Rose’s calibre rehashing them in a style that Harris has branded “ethnomaniacal” (Harris, pg 111). The final word on the crossover debate is that, if culture is about socialisation and is learned through social integration, then anyone can become a member in some sense (Garofalo, pg 234) and that, although integration does not equal equality, diffusion between the chart genres is inevitable.

Outernationalism.

Outernationalism is the phrase of choice in terms of “indigenous knowledge” to denote what may otherwise be described as a transnational globalised mindset. As far as it has been possible to ascertain, the phrase seems to have originated through Sir Coxone’s Outernational Sound System (Back, pg 190). An example of its usage can be found in the lyric booklet accompanying ADF’s “Community Music” CD in the section that gives thanks and respect to family, friends, fellow musicians etc. The section is divided into “Familes”, “Shouts” (mainly a role call of posses, or “massives”), “Outernational Music Community”, “Respect To” and “Also”. The Outernational section checks (meaning naming in order to show respect) bands, DJs and sound systems such as State of Bengal, X-Terminator, Chittagong Drummers, Mutiny DJs, Primal Scream, Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, 2nd Gen, Public Enemy, Punjabi MC, Cornershop, Massiliia Sound System, Made In Britain, Nitin Sawney, Fugazi, Black Star Liner, Chumbawumba, Talvin Singh, Misty in Roots and Adrian Sherwood. All of these various, and varied, artists are addressed to issues at both the local and international level, either musically, lyrically, politically or combinations of all three. Via the work of Paul Gilroy, Back defines Outernationalism through a narrative of migrant black workers in London establishing autonomous leisure forms in reaction to their rejection at the hands of white institutions (Back, pg 185). Young working class whites negotiated access to these forms (such as the sound system) to form a recomposition of working class leisure (ibid). The “triple consciousness” produced is the product of African, Asian and European influences and is “Outernational” in that it exists “simultaneously inside and beyond the nations through which it passes” (ibid). It can be understood to refer in some sense to the transcultural flows of culture in the form of multidirectional musical exchanges.

House and Techno.

House music was developed in the discos of Chicago (although this is disputed by New Yorkers) in the mid-80s as a fusion of disco, “Hi-NRG”, and Eurobeat basslines. It was the original sound of the “Acid House” warehouse raves, and required a rig, or PA, of huge bass bins and amplifiers to carry the sound. Despite the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 and its attempts to outlaw this culture via the criminalization of trespass and music characterised by “repetitive beats”, the rave scene continues to this day, albeit in an overly-policed environment. House gave way to Acid (essentially House with analogue bleeps and psychedelic effects) and Hardcore Techno (a pared down assault of heavy beat and bass) and to the inevitable profusion of a million sub-genres such as Gabba, Speedcore, Trance, Handbag-House, Cheesecore, Garage etc. The biggest innovation to date, Jungle, came out of London pirate radio stations such as Cool FM. The bass of Jungle was essentially the product of the same 808, 303 sound that had created House. The 808 and the 303 are drum machines and digital bassline sequencers that replicate the earlier analogue sounds in a more controlled interface. It was the drum patterns of Jungle, however, that set it aside as unique. The rhythms are dense and complex, scattered with machine-gun beats overlaid at impossible speeds that no human drummer could emulate. Impossible, that is, until, in a strange reply to digital music’s sampling of live instruments, Roni Size put together a band that simulates these electronic sounds on live instruments. Jungle was also characterised by the Ragga-style toasters that rapped over the beats. Toasters are part of the symbiosis of Selector (DJ) and MC (Master of Ceremonies or Mike Controller). When studio engineers cut the original reggae A-sides, they would also make a re-mix of the instrumental tracks to create a “dub” version on the B-side which could be rapped over at live soundclash events. This technique eventually led to records being cut with pre-recorded toasting, from the dub to Ragga. The vocal delivery of Ragga is a deep, rumbling throaty style that emerged from the post-reggae soundclashes in Jamaica. Too hardcore for mass media consumption, Jungle was supplanted by Drum n’ Bass- a musical mutation that was ultimately Jungle but without the toasters. This, again, brought a proliferation of musical subsets in the UK such as “intelligent Drum n’ Bass”, “Ketamin Dub” and “ambient Drum n’ Bass”. Bands like ADF sit awkwardly alongside outfits such as the Prodigy and Atari Teenage Riot in their fusion of Drum n’ Bass with the distorted rhythm guitars and vocal anger of punk.

Sampling.

Sampling is a process whereby snatches of music are digitally recorded and then programmed into a sequencer. The sequencer is a user-friendly interface that aids musical composition in a manner similar to traditional notation on manuscript. Samples and drum patterns are represented as coloured blocks running horizontally on a grid to correspond with their relative durations against the bars of the music. These can then be rearranged or edited at will, and the individual sample can be shifted to a higher or lower pitch, slowed down or sped up and generally manipulated out of recognition. Although the digital sampled environment sounds like a postmodern paradise of pastiche and simulation, it must be noted that it has an analogue precedent. According to the creation myth of hip hop, DJ Kool Herc (recently arrived in New York from Jamaica) was performing with two turntables. Playing a funky beat record on the first turntable, he began mixing in the sound from the other record (bizarrely, legend holds that the other record was Apache by Cliff Richard’s backing band The Shadows), “scratching”, rewinding and dropping the needle back to the start of the guitar solo, he created a melodic loop over the original beat. As electronic keyboard synthesisers were designed to replicate the sounds of live instruments, sampling/sequencing technology developed to mimic the scratching of the “live instrument” of the DJ’s turntable.

Nik Ta Police.
Perhaps the greatest example of this particular form of hybrida- the lyrics of the song are a mixture of French, English and Arabic, reflecting the postcolonial migrant flows, the linguistic hegemonical authority of (American) English and the contemporary situation- “acknowledging history, addressing the present, and constantly looking to the future” as the sleeve note to the Indestructible Asian Beats sampler words it. The melodic refrain is a parody of the police siren, signifying a unity based on anarchistic oppositional street codes. The title itself is a reference to NWA’s (Niggaz With Attitude) anti-authoritarian classic “Fuk tha Police”, a slogan transferred into the heavy metal cannon by Ice-T’s crossover outfit Body Count, whose notorious track “Cop Killer” managed to get not only banned but publicly condemned by the US president himself.

Copyright SteveCake 2005