I finally got to see Spike Lee’s Inside Man the other night. I had been dying to see it after reading about the fantastic use of A.R Rahman’s Bollywood tune Chaiyya Chaiyya in the opening and closing credits - some were comparing it to the use of PE’s Fight The Power in the opening of Do The Right Thing in terms of impact and sly appropriation. Well, sorry people… it’s just not the case. The song bears no relationship to the film, and while it certainly creates an energetic and fun opening to a very enjoyable film, the song is better in it’s original context. Dil Se, Mani Ratnam’s 1998 film that the song comes from, is a better flick than Inside Man, and features one of the most devastating endings of any film I’ve ever seen. And the turgid noodlings of Terence Blanchard and Punjabi MC don’t add anything to the song either - I prefer the original version posted here.

You can see the song in its original stunning context — a huge dance number on top of a moving train — in a YouTube clip here. The Dil Se soundtrack CD is here. The DVD of Dil Se is here.

The Year of The Dog is almost two weeks old, but the celebrations continue.

I picked up this CD in a shopping mall in Phnom Penh in 2003 - I should say “the” shopping mall, because there is only one mall in Phnom Penh. They had just installed Cambodia’s very first escalator in the mall, and there was a young woman in a flight attendant’s uniform instructing people in how to use the escalator. The teenagers were way into it, but I saw several older people consider escalating and then move on; it was simply too fast, and too technically challenging. On the third floor of the mall there were many small shops apparently leased by independent vendors with more the feel of an open air market, although the space was typical of shopping malls worldwide - marble floors, glass and steel storefronts etc. In one small shop a man had made a fire out of sticks placed directly on the marble floor and was roasting meat, oblivious to the need for ventilation in an enclosed space.

I’m telling you all of this not as an exotic travelogue, or as a patronizing “look how primitive the Cambodians are” sort of thing. I’m telling you this as an example of how ubiquitous hip-hop has become worldwide. Hip-hop is now a universal pop culture. Consider this: in a country which has only one escalator, there are kids with recording studios, wearing baggy pants and bandanas, rapping over sampled beats, burning CDs of their work, and selling them in the mall.

Anyway, two doors down from the meat roasting man was a music shop, not unlike a music shop in any mall worldwide. Chrome racks of CDs, mirrored walls, Madonna blaring, sales clerks who look like moonlighting high school students. I bought a stack of CDs, including Cream Remixes of Khmer Hip Hop, which this track comes from. The CD also features tracks from The Phnom Penh Bad Boyz and DJ Sope.

I’ve reprinted a fascinating article about the Cambodian hip-hop scene from The Phnom Penh Post here. Miraculously, you can actually purchase Cream Remixes of Khmer Hip Hop for $5 here.

Happy Year of The Dog!

Finally. Just when we might have given up hope of ever hearing it, The Earl has dropped his Summer Mix 2005. It seems to include the following artists, all at the same time:

Dr Alimantado / David Byrne / Zion y Lennox / The Clash / Ini Kamoze / Mashonda / Damien Marley / Leslie Winer / Erika Badu / Faye Wong / Jay-Z / Brian Eno / Massive Attack / Wong Kar Wai / Mad Professor / 50 Cent / Angelique Kijdo / Gwen Stefani / Miles Davis / Usher / M.I.A. / Robert Fripp

We featured a couple of excerpts from this mix recently, but this is the first time the whole thing has shown up anywhere. The last section which combines The Clash’s Magnificent Seven with Usher’s Burn and some M.I.A. is particularly spinworthy. This is only available right here for the time being, although it will probably show up on some torrents soon. Enjoy.

In February this year I was lucky to attend the Sherpa Association New Year Losar celebration here in New York, which was a fantastic evening of great food, dancing, celebrating and wildy varied music. There were groups of young girls in traditional dress dancing with Sherpa men in cowboy hats. There were Sherpa rappers with gold chains and backwards baseball caps. There were emotional crooners practically swallowing their radio mics. I had to stumble home around 1 am leaving my hosts who were just getting going and usually dance until dawn on such occasions. This track comes from a CDR given to me by a Nepali friend after I asked her for some music like what we had heard at the New Year event. I don’t know the name of the artist, or the song, or what it’s about.

You can find the United Sherpa Association here. They are also hosting an entire album of mp3s from Mingma Sherpa here, and a selection of more great songs here, including Ma Sherpa Ko Chhoro by Nhyu Bajracharya which features sound FX of an avalanche and yaks in the intro. And don’t miss the first Nepali hip-hop record recorded in the U.S., Nurbu Sherpa Representin’ K.T.M.C., available as a free download here.

Apache Indian is the guy who grew up in Birmingham, England, surrounded by both Jamaican and East Indian influences and combined the two to become the most successful artist mining the rich vein between Raggamuffin and Bhangra known as Bhangramuffin. After doing a lot of toasting in U.K. dancehalls, Apache Indian released two very succesful albums, 1993’s No Reservations and 1995’s Make Way For The Indian.

This new version of The Israelites (released on July 4th in the U.K.) is the first single from the forthcoming album Time For Change, which drops on July 18th. You can see the video for this song, which features a spry Desmond Dekker, here.

Apache Indian has a site here. The new album doesn’t seem to have a US release scheduled yet, but you can get a copy of the great compilation The Best of Apache Indian here, which includes his planetary hit Boom-Shack-A-Lack and an inspired cover of Willie Williams’ Armagideon Time.

Marking yesterday’s exoneration of The Gloved One, today we’re featuring the Hindi version of Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough. Unfortunately I don’t have much info on this track, but it pretty much speaks for itself. Vocals are by Usha Uthup, this is from 2003. If anybody knows more about the Bollywood Freaks, please share in the comments.

You can buy this as a 7″ vinyl single with a track called Bombay Gangstarr on the other side here or perhaps here.

If you hadn’t come across the genre “Asian R&B” before, you might be forgiven if the name conjured up images of a Japanese guy in a kimono singing Get on the Good Foot, but you’d be way, way off. Asian R&B comes out of the UK, the land which births micro-genres like a dog sheds hair.

Notorious J.A.T.T. sings in Hindi but also raps in English, about many of the usual subjects and some new ones, spitting rhymes like

“I’m half black half white like Newcastle United
When I step in the club the girls get excited
they dance round the prince cause they know he’s the nicest
doggy style split cheese box with preciseness”

The auto-tuned-within-an-inch-of-its-life shouting vocal style and sing-song melody to my ear recalls nothing more than Baile Funk. This comes from the recently released compilation Essential Asian R&B, which seems to be a pretty good survey of the current scene. There’s a range of stuff, some more bhangra influenced, and some sounding almost just like straight-up US “urban” radio material.

Dholaholic seems like a good place to keep tabs on the Asian R&B scene. You can find the Essential Asian R&B compilation from the UK at the Outcaste Records site here. Notorious J.A.T.T.’s record All Due Respect, which includes this song, can be found here. Oh, and don’t forget the Notorious Jatt ringtones.

Before M.I.A., before Talvin Singh, even ten years before Asian Dub Foundation, there was diva Sheila Chandra. An extraordinary voice, coupled with some Indian music chops and a willingness to push the envelope of tradition, gave us an artist who has made some great music over the years, who has always been somewhat underrated, and must surely be about to finally receive the recognition she deserves.

Sheila Chandra’s most known album is probably Weaving My Ancestors Voices, which came out on the Real World label in 1992. In that incarnation, Chandra was packaged as a more serious artist, with a spiritual component and deep cultural roots. That CD contained an exquisite version of this song, basically acapella with some droning synth tamburas. This is another thing altogether: delightful, fluffy, Indian pop fusion, recorded when Chandra was only 16, for the 1983 release Third Eye, by the band Monsoon, which was Chandra’s first recording project with husband/producer Steve Coe. The English language recording of this pop version of the song was a huge international hit single in 1982, even earning Shandra the dubious honor of being the first ever Asian singer to appear on the BBC show Top Of The Pops.

The CD was re-released in 1995 with a couple of additional versions of this song, and re-titled Monsoon… That version is still available. Weaving My Ancestors Voices is here. Sheila Chandra has a deep Web site here, which includes fascinating information about this release.

If you only buy one record this century, it should probably be Maarifa Street. This is an exceptional project. One of our era’s most original composers, at the top of his game, has independently released his first solo work in five years, and the music is as good as anything he’s ever done. Maarifa Street arrives in the US today, on Hassell’s brand new self-owned NYEN label.

This music hangs in the perfect balance between: improvised/composed ~ sacred/profane ~ Europe/Africa ~ America/Islam ~ ancient/modern ~ slow/fast ~ empty/full ~ accessible/refined ~ night/day ~ dirty/clean. Maarifa Street sounds like the Jon Hassell record I have been listening to in my mind’s ear for the last 25 years, now finally incarnated. You get it instantly, but it feels like you could keep listening for the rest of your life and learn something new each time.

There’s a great Web site accompanying the release, crammed full of background information, with exclusive remixes and special editions coming soon. NPR had a ten-minute interview with Hassell on Sunday, and you can hear the archive here. The NPR page also includes three entire tracks from the record as streaming audio - well worth a visit. You can buy the new CD here, among other places.

One of Hassell’s teachers, the great Kirana style vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, has said:

“It is necessary to remain one hundred years with the guru, then practice for one hundred years, and then you can sing for one hundred years.”

Maarifa Street feels like the magnificent beginning of the next hundred years after that; may Jon Hassell have a good 4th century.

Some of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s film scores feel like they were created in typical rock-star fashion: he hums a few bars of a catchy melody and gets a stable of assistants to flesh it out into a full score with orchestrations and violins and everything. This has yielded some impressive results - witness his Academy Award for The Last Emperor.

But he’s also made some beautiful, dark, cheap, personal music for other films, and this track comes from one of those projects. Gohatto is Nagisa Oshima’s eye-popping 1999 film about love and transgression in an 1865 Samurai school, and Sakamoto’s ear-popping electronic score is perfectly suited to the film’s lush mood and themes of obsession. It also turns out to be great music to just listen to, out of context.

Gohatto is unfortunately only available on CD in the US as an expensive import. Love Is The Devil is another very good score from 1998 in a similar vein. Ryuichi Sakamoto also has a great Web site, complete with personal diary, anti-war messages, and more interesting music.