Bhangra and Hip Hop — Sagoo to Saperra
This is a love letter to a particular sound. It’s about how Bally Sagoo (early 1990s) and Raf-Saperra (2020 –) synthesise US Hip Hop, Caribbean sounds and Bhangra in a bricolage (Lévi-Strauss, 2021) that resonates with me deeper than most other sensory experiences. Owing to living in London, Leeds and The Bahamas, I find myself similarly connected to aspects of Panjabi, as well as Afro-Caribbean, music cultures.
Pump up the Bhangra
To better understand the context of this contribution, I recommend viewing Bobby Friction’s (2018) Pump up the Bhangra: the sound of Asian Britain (if you haven’t already). It’s a moving account of how Panjabi immigrants created a fusion between Panjabi folk music from their homeland and Pop music in Britain. Doing so, these groups cultivated a sense of belonging in the face of an often racist and violent British society.
Bhangra: a dance Panjabi farmers (Jats) would enact to celebrate harvest time.
Pop music: harmonies utilising often the latest technologies that appeal to a mainstream audience.
Bhangra + Pop = a sound that enthuses the diasporic British Panjabi community.
The Crazy Indian
What Sagoo did that was cutting edge in the early 90s was to go beyond Pop sounds, and merge Bhangra with sounds predominantly from the Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities: Reggae, Dancehall and Hip Hop. Lovingly dubbed the ‘crazy Indian’ by these communities in Birmingham, Sagoo would sell mixtapes of his unique fusions outside nightclubs (Friction, 2018).
I was 6 the first time I heard Sagoo’s Star Crazy (1991) album. The sounds enraptured me. My late cousin Pappeh would blast Sagoo’s remix of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jewel, on repeat in my mum’s car. The opening beats still give me goosebumps, and bring Pappeh to mind every time.
But I hadn’t heard anything yet. In 1994, Sagoo dropped Bollywood Flashback, a brave/foolish undertaking that remixed classic, long beloved, Indian cinema classics. The bassline to the opening track, Churaliya, in my dad’s rented Ford Escort quite literally blew me away, like the g-force in an F1 racer. As Sagoo provocatively put it in the liner notes: ‘To all the posers who reckon their sound system can handle the B line on Churaliya… Bullshit!’ It’s easily the most played album in my collection, and Churaliya comfortably makes it onto my Desert Island Disc. The fusion of toasting (shout out to Cheshire Cat), Reggae inspired rhythm, and melodic Hindi singing was intoxicatingly overwhelming for my 9-nine-year old mind.
Sagoo continues to this day, predominantly making dance music with Panjabi lyrics for nightclubs in the Mumbai scene. He’s had a hugely successful career, and cracked both the British and Indian markets. But it’s the Hip Hop and Reggae soaked fusions in his early works that have stuck with me.
Word is Born
Sagoo paved the way for numerous artists and DJ collectives who did incredible remix work using Hip Hop samples throughout the 90s: most notably Death Jamm Productions (inspired by the West Coast ‘Death Row Records’), and Panjabi MC.
Into the late 90s and early 00s the sound changed and became much more Garage influenced. Again, following the practice of merging Bhangra with the Pop of the time, Hip Hop and Reggae gave way to 2-step garage.
In 2004, a Derby based Hip Hop DJ, Tru Skool, was, alongside collaborator Specialist, on a crusade to redress this 2-step trend. Specialist and Tru-Skool’s debut LP, Word is Born (NY slang vernacular taken from the New Testament, meaning ‘truth be told’) presented a paradoxically polished, yet rugged, sound. Tru Skool continues to produce, and has consistently maintained a Hip Hop sound in his work (a Das EFX and/or Pete Rock sample is never too far away!).
Raw as Folk
In 2020, amidst the COVID-19 lockdown, a new young South London based artist emerged: Raf-Saperra (Adeel Kureshii). Inspired by Tru Skool’s (2007) album, Raw as Folk, Adeel created his moniker as an homage and acronym of that title, along with ‘Saperra’ (snake charmer). As stated in an interview, Saperra continues in the lineage of a particular British Bhangra — Hip Hop sound from Sagoo — Death Jamm Productions — Tru Skool. Upon hearing his debut track, similar to Sagoo, either a brave/foolish move insofar as it wasn’t a club banger, but a Sikhi spiritual, Moath Nu Nachaaveh Khalsa, I found myself exclaiming: ‘YES’! With production courtesy of Birmingham based G-Funk, it was unlike anything I’d heard in the British Panjabi music scene since early Tru Skool. The Hip Hop and Trap inspired beats juxtaposed with the religiosity of the lyrical content (shout out to G. S. Nawepindiya), and Saperra’s powerful Panjabi vocal style blew me away in a manner similar to Sagoo’s Churaliya.
Discovering more about Saperra, I find him to be important in this music scene for numerous reasons. Formally educated in film production, he took up singing as a side pursuit. He trained partly under Tru Skool, and seems equally on a mission to push back against any ‘watering down’ of a particular type of British Bhangra — Hip Hop sound. He’s winning that battle. Sonically, but also ideologically, Saperra is important.
Panjabiyat
Under Narendra Modi, India has been ruled by an increasingly emboldened right wing, Hindutva led, BJP government since 2014. The waves of his jingoism and vilification of non-Hindu groups has trickled across the globe amongst diasporic Indian communities. Relationships between Sikhs and Muslims in Britain have been tense since the early 90s at least. This is owing to legacies of the havoc wreaked upon Panjab by partition, as well as historical tensions between Sikhs and Muslims under Moghul rule in India between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Saperra comes from a West Panjabi, a.k.a Pakistani, Muslim, family. His emergence, and first track being a Sikhi spiritual, is thus highly significant. In a majority Sikh, East Panjabi led industry, Saperra is unique through:
1. Merging a hardcore lyrical style (going back to Kuldip Manak, born Latif Mohammed Khan, and thereby a fellow Panjabi Muslim, albeit from the East side), with a…
2. … predominantly Hip Hop sound (producers G Funk and Bobby Kang, in particular), as well as drawing upon a…
3. … West Panjabi, Muslim, heritage, as well as hailing from South London, as opposed to typical Bhangra strongholds like West London, or Birmingham.
I find Saperra to be a highly engaging bricolage of a unique socio-political positionality, powerful voice and well-considered thematic range of lyrical content aligned with punchy production. Sagoo to Saperra? That’s a lineage worth listening to.
Bibliography
Dudrah, R. (2007). Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond. Birmingham: Birmingham City Council Library & Archive Service.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (2021). Wild Thought: A New Translation of “La Pensée sauvage”. (Trans. J. Mehlmann & J. Leavitt). Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
