Kate Hutchinson

If you live in the West, the answer is likely to be “sitars, flying carpets and yogis on retreats,” musician Sarathy Korwar said.

He wants to challenge that narrow view.

The London-based multi-instrumentalist’s latest album, “More Arriving,” is a vibrant cacophony of Indian classical music, jazz and hip-hop that takes aim at cultural stereotypes and negative attitudes to immigration. It’s definitely not a soundtrack for meditation.

Korwar moved to Britain from India a decade ago and found a following on the London jazz scene with smart, political concept albums that effortlessly splice genres together.

“More Arriving,” which features rappers from Mumbai and New Delhi, as well as skronking sax, “shows you what contemporary India sounds like, but it also shows you what contemporary London sounds like,” Korwar, 31, said.

Since arriving in Britain, Korwar has experienced “everyday racism and prejudice,” he said. With “More Arriving,” he wanted to confront the negative rhetoric about immigration that has become common in the West, he added.

The title was a provocation, he said: To him, it meant, “Yeah, we’re coming.”

People in Britain didn’t understand how diverse life on the Indian subcontinent and in its diaspora were, Korwar said. “What ends up happening, especially in the U.K.,” he added, “is you get stereotyped into this idea of ‘South Asian-ness’ that is very homogeneous.”

You can hear some of those stereotypes on Korwar’s song “Bol,” which stacks up the generalizations. On vocals, poet Zia Ahmed intones about “Karma” and “Kama Sutra,” “Ali Baba,” and “snake charmers,” adding, with a nod to typecasting in film and television: “I am auditioning for the role of Terrorist 1 — yeah, I can do that in an Arabic accent.”

Ahmed is just one of the guest voices on “More Arriving”: The album connects the dots between myriad collaborators to “prove that there is no one voice that represents the community,” Korwar said. Some songs feature rappers from India’s burgeoning hip-hop scene; another uses the words of author Deepak Unnikrishnan, who was born in Kerala, India, and is based in the United Arab Emirates.

“We’re in a revolutionary period for South Asian music,” said Bobby Friction, a broadcaster with a long-running show on the BBC Asian Network radio station. “It’s being made all over the world. There’s South Asians all over Canada, two generations in, all over the USA, three generations in — and over here,” he said, meaning in Britain, “we’re four generations in.”

What Korwar was doing was interesting because it was “multiregional,” Friction added: “He’s working with Marathi-speaking rappers in Mumbai, and then some guy from the East End of London.” These were people who would probably have difficulty communicating with each other, he said. And yet, he added, on “More Arriving” they were “essentially talking about the same things.”

The last time a collision of South Asian traditional and contemporary music came to prominence in Britain was during the 1990s, with a group of artists collectively known as the Asian Underground, including Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney and Asian Dub Foundation. Many of them paired the sounds of Indian instruments with electronic beats.

Singh won the Mercury Music Prize, a prestigious British award, in 1999 — but then “the door closed again,” Friction said. Very few South Asian musicians have managed to puncture the mainstream here since.

Korwar’s own musical influences came together in the Indian cities of Ahmadabad and Chennai, where he spent his childhood. He came from “a very privileged background,” he said, and grew up listening to jazz, blues and also bands like The Beatles and The Doors.

At age 10, he started playing tabla, a pair of tuned hand drums that are a cornerstone of Indian classical music. At 23, he moved to London, and two years later began studying the instrument at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Even though Korwar’s music incorporates elements of Indian classical music, he said he was frustrated that it was this element that the music industry focused on. Many people, Korwar said, “whether it’s venue promoters, journalists, or peers” wanted to paint him as “exotic” or box him in with terms like “world music.”

“I often get picked out as this ‘virtuoso tabla wizard’ who is flirting with jazz,” he said.

Nabihah Iqbal, a musician and DJ whose parents moved to Britain from Pakistan, said that there was “an idea that if you’re South Asian, your music has to be a bit South Asian.” She had been asked, “Why don’t you put sitar in your music?” she said.

In a 2017 review of Iqbal’s guitar-led album “Weighing of the Heart,” which has since been deleted from the music website XLR8R, the critic was perplexed by how “white” the record sounded. “I think people still harbor those ideas and those notions without even realizing it,” Iqbal said.

Korwar’s work highlights other double standards when it comes to Western perspectives on Eastern music. In an ironic reversal of cultural appropriation, his 2018 live album “My East Is Your West,” recorded with the UPAJ collective, reimagined standards by American jazz musicians of the 1960s and ’70s whose heady style was known as “spiritual jazz,” but using Indian classical instruments.

Many of these spiritual jazz artists — including some of Korwar’s favorites like Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Don Cherry — borrowed liberally from Eastern musical traditions, he said, but often it was the case that their bands had just “learned a couple of basic beats on the tabla.”

“To anybody who understands tabla,” he said, these interpretations sounded like “a baby mucking about on a drum kit.”

Korwar added that the idea of “the East being a repository of knowledge that you can dip into every now and again when you’re having a creative block” was “deeply offensive because you’re not thinking about the fact that these traditions are equally as old, and deep, as your own.”

But while his previous album was about the West looking east, “More Arriving” underlines how imported genres are thriving in India. “How many people think of hip-hop as Indian music?” said Korwar. “No one. But right now, it’s largest independent genre of music in India. It’s battling Bollywood for the first time in terms of sales, corporate sponsorships, sheer numbers. ”

On the track “City Of Words,” on “More Arriving,” for example, Mumbai-based M.C. Trap Poju raps over a 12-minute spiritual jazz odyssey, and “Coolie,” featuring rappers Delhi Sultanate and Prabh Deep, nods to reggae.

Korwar said he hopes that the unique combination of genres in his music will help widen perceptions.

“If you listen to my music and you’re disappointed because it doesn’t sound Indian enough,” he added, “then you should be questioning what you think Indian music is.”

This article originally appeared in

Beyond the Stereotypes, a New View of Indian Music

LONDON — Think of Indian music, and what springs to mind?

“You can ask for them in a hair salon,” Madjozi said, with casual self-assurance. “They’ll know what you’re talking about.”

Madjozi, 27, whose real name is Maya Wegerif, is one of South Africa’s biggest breakthrough stars. She was in Barcelona in July to perform at Sónar, one of several dance music-focused European festivals she played in the past 12 months, along with CTM in Berlin and Unsound in Krakow, Poland.

She performed at the Global Citizen Festival last year, sharing a bill with Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran, and won Best New International Act at the BET Awards in New York last month. On Aug. 17, she is to perform in Warm Up, the respected concert series at MoMA PS1 in New York City that spotlights rising international artists.

Madjozi is a new kind of global pop star, much like the Spanish flamenco-pop innovator Rosalía: She pays homage to her heritage while updating it for the moment, cutting across continents and genres.

Born in a village in Limpopo province, north of Johannesburg, Madjozi’s formative years were mostly spent outside South Africa: Her Swedish father worked for an international development nonprofit, and his work took the family to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. After high school, Madjozi attended college in Massachusetts.

This globe-trotting youth exposed her to cultural influences from around Africa and the world. Yet it’s the Tsonga heritage of her birthplace that she is best known for celebrating.

The Tsonga are a distinct ethnic group with their own language and culture, and many Tsonga people in South Africa arrived as refugees from Mozambique in the 19th century, Madjozi said. They faced discrimination and xenophobia that still persists, she said.

Being Tsonga “wasn’t cool,” Madjozi said, and she wanted to change that. One of her signature looks involves a “xibelani” skirt, which is worn by Tsonga women for dancing. (Madjozi pairs hers with Nike Air Max sneakers.)

Her lyrics mix it up, too. She mostly raps in a combination of Xitsonga, the language of the Tsonga people, and English. Her bubblegum-bright party track “Huku” is in Swahili, a language Madjozi learned to speak fluently in Tanzania.

These multilingual flows unfold over a style of music known as gqom, a shadowy strain of house that began bubbling out of townships in Durban, South Africa, in the early 2010s.

To untutored ears, gqom can sound gritty, with its apocalyptic sirens and ribcage-rattling bass. In Europe and the United States, Madjozi said, the style is often “perceived as being alternative or experimental.” But in South Africa, she added, “Gqom is the biggest sound. Gqom is the pop of South Africa.”

Recently, American hip-hop heavyweights seem to have recognized gqom’s combination of rough-hewed authenticity and commercial potential. Kendrick Lamar’s soundtrack for the superhero movie “Black Panther” features gqom beats, and Beyoncé’s new “Lion King” album brings in South African gqom musicians on the track “My Power.”

Madjozi hasn’t had her Hollywood moment yet, but her songs are among gqom’s most accessible examples. On her debut album “Limpopo Champions League,” released in December 2018, she put the genre’s beats into a typical “verse, chorus, verse,” pop song structure, she said.

It may sound obvious at first, but Helen Herimbi, a music journalist based in Johannesburg, said that this approach was radical because “gqom typically features vocalists who use minimal lyrics or chants.” Madjozi, she added, “ushered in an evolution of the sound, by including entire rap verses.”

Madjozi was a poet before she was a rapper: You can see one of her spoken-word pieces, “Why You Talk So White?,” on YouTube. Recorded at a poetry slam while she was studying creative writing and African studies at Mount Holyoke College, “Why You Talk So White?” was an early indication of Madjozi’s smart, incisive takes on the nuances of race.

Madjozi said that being poet helped her “understand rhythm” and made her “very technical” about her lyrical flow. “You can like my flows without understanding what I’m saying,” she added.

Alex Okosi, the director of the TV channel that hosts the BET Awards, said that “language is becoming less and less relevant” in pop music.

“Fans are choosing to enjoy the artistry, sound and creativity of music regardless of its origin,” Okosi said. “Sho’s ability to weave African storytelling into her music delivers songs that resonate.”

Madjozi said her early songs and poems were “about asserting my independence as a young black woman in South Africa, and being rebellious.”

“It was big for a woman to be talking about boys, about alcohol, about partying,” she said, “because Tsonga culture tends to be a little bit conservative.”

Her focus has turned to pointing out South Africa’s “glaring problems,” she said, adding: “The inequality within that place is unignorable.”

Again, her image is an important part of that narrative. She said she wanted to appear fun, positive and empowering, presenting an image of what a young African woman might be like if she “didn’t come from a place that had been subjected to colonialism and apartheid.”

Part of doing that is regularly wearing the traditional Tsonga garb, onstage and off, Madjozi said.

“You’ll wear your traditional attire at weddings,” she explained. “There’s even a day called ‘heritage day’ where people will wear their traditional attire to work. I just said, ‘I want to wear it every day.’

“My question was always: ‘Who are we then the rest of the time if we’re only ourselves on specific occasions?’”

Most black South Africans, Madjozi said, “learn to put away your Africanness.” Those who move to the city from a rural area often feel like they have “to take off” their ethnic identity, she said.

“The lucky thing,” she added, was that “I learned to never take it off.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/arts/music/sho-madjozi.html" id="ee54b555-1790-33c1-a369-0ebe691deec7">The New York Times</a>.

BARCELONA, Spain — On a recent afternoon on a hotel rooftop, rapper Sho Madjozi was twirling one of her candy-pink plaits and talking through her signature style. These bright extensions were inspired by the decorative “Fulani” cornrows she had seen girls wearing in Senegal, she said. Her take on them has since become so popular, she added, that in South Africa, where she’s from, they’re called Madjozi braids.

Sho Madjozi's Mixed Up, Pan-African Rap

The band’s third album, “Serf’s Up!,” had just made the Top 20 here, and the group was returning from a photo shoot at a nearby children’s playground, where it had been instructed to vacate the merry-go-round. This was very much in keeping with its image as naughty misfits from London’s grotty underbelly.

Fat White Family has a knowing disregard for good taste. The band has sung about Hitler and Goebbels, Ike and Tina Turner’s abusive relationship, serial killers and heroin abuse. “Serf’s Up!” is more accessible than its first two albums, geared around thrusting disco and psychedelic country, and yet there is still the nuclear-pop of “Kim’s Sunsets” (probably the sexiest song ever written about Kim Jong Un) and one inspired, in part, by Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called “Unabomber.”

Fat White Family formed in 2011, in south London, and came out of a squat-party scene that shaped its politics. The group is anti-gentrification, anti-consumerism, anti-censorship, and at points some of its members have been homeless or struggled with addiction and mental health issues. The band also rejects the notion that pop should have a politically correct agenda, and its music explores — sometimes gratuitously — the grim, often more perverse side of subjects like toxic masculinity and sexual desire.

“We’re entering into an age of new puritanism,” said Lias Saoudi, Fat White Family’s frontman. “It’s depressing that we’ve let things drift in that direction. If you can’t explore difficult ideas in art, where can you explore them? Not everybody can afford a therapist.”

“We live in an offensive world,” he added. “It’s not polite, it’s not kind, it doesn’t care what you believe. It’s solipsistic rubbish to think otherwise.”

The band’s history of drug and alcohol abuse is well-documented. In 2016, after playing its biggest headline show, it kicked founding member Saul Adamczewski out, again, because of a spiraling heroin and crack habit. He has since rejoined, and wrote many songs on “Serf’s Up!,” but he declined to be interviewed.

“You can never get rid of the heroin problem in this band,” Saoudi said. Instead, the group has gotten used to the unpredictability this brings: So far, there’s been a revolving cast of 26 members, though the other musicians present during the interview, Lias’ brother, Nathan Saoudi (a keyboardist), saxophonist Alex White and guitarist Adam J. Harmer, are the band’s current mainstays.

What is constant, however, is that Fat White Family likes to blur the lines between self-expression and shock value, irony and the impulse to be outraged. During early live shows, Saoudi tried on a few old punk-rock tactics: smearing himself with feces or appearing onstage naked.

Back then, he said, “everything was so boring, and tame, and homogeneous” in guitar music, and Saoudi thought that “somebody should give it a nudge in the explicit direction, to heighten the medium, so it’s not all moronic indie-boy pop.”

Irish pop musician Róisín Murphy was so taken by the band after seeing one of its live shows, she got in touch via Instagram and asked whether she could direct a music video. She dreamed up the Monty Python-inspired visuals for Fat White Family’s recent single “Tastes Good With the Money,” which depict the band at a bourgeois tea party that goes awry.

“They have a true punk vein running through them,” she said in a phone interview. “Bands like that don’t come around that often.”

Lias Saoudi said that being anti-establishment “will always be our politics” but “Serf’s Up!” marks a shift in tone away from nihilism: It is “upbeat and melodic,” said Saoudi, rather than “dismally pessimistic” like their previous material. The album is about “learning to celebrate” the world’s harshness “in a beautiful way, so it’s not so disturbing,” he added.

The band was interested in “sneaking interesting ideas into a pop song,” said White, the strikingly mullet-haired saxophonist, and seeing what it can “get away with.”

The day after our interview, Fat White Family hosted its own “pop-up boutique experience” at an empty store in South London — a sarcastic nod to the retail trend that is often a harbinger of gentrification. At Fat White Family’s store, however, fans lined up to buy radical pamphlets that poked fun at the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, and secondhand items such as a pair of Lias Saoudi’s soiled sneakers. Bands with similar anti-consumerist messages performed, with names like Pregoblin and Scud FM, that have sprung up here following Fat White Family’s success.

“They definitely created a revolution,” said one fan, João Oliveira, 21. “I like when art offends me. I like it when art makes me uncomfortable.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/arts/music/fat-white-family-serfs-up.html" id="4727b696-1af8-33fc-a802-b26419bc1d41">The New York Times</a>.

Fat White Family Is Trying to Start a Rebellion, Messily

LONDON — On a recent afternoon, four members of the band Fat White Family were sitting in an East London cafe, dressed, as always, like they’ve been riffling in the trash bags at the back of a thrift store. And that is being polite.

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Kate Hutchinson

Articles written by the author

Beyond the Stereotypes, a New View of Indian Music

Sho Madjozi's Mixed Up, Pan-African Rap

Fat White Family Is Trying to Start a Rebellion, Messily