I was fourteen years old and bloody bored sitting in my house. So I picked up my phone and started googling terms with the word “white” before it like white nation, Whiteland etcetera, just for the hell of it. Then suddenly the word “hinterland” came to my mind, I didn't know what was its’ meaning back then but it sounded cool. So I typed ‘White Hinterland’ in that search bar and a beautiful dream pop band came up. That was my first exposure to music outside the mainstream and I didn't stop discovering from then on.
I’m now twenty-one and at that time, the Punjabi music industry was in a calm phase, which means that nothing new or exciting was happening. Our music always goes through a boom phase when many new artists suddenly start poping up out of nowhere and present something new and amazing by presenting their own brands of a fusion of Punjabi folk music and western genres.
Like in the early 90s, artists starting mixing their music with American pop and in the early 2000s, they started mixing rock and a little bit of hip hop too. Then between 2009 and 2012, they started mixing a bit rap too and now, artists are doing complete Punjabi or Hindi rap videos with the chorus in Punjabi or Hindi. That’s right, we have multilingual raps.
Now let me tell you why I listen to Punjabi pop music from that era and other music which people of my generation haven’t even heard of. Last year my cousins from Canada came for a visit, we were going to a prominent Gurudwara (Sikh temple) and it was a two-hour drive. I don’t like to hangout with extroverts but they are really polite people so I decided to go.
I decided to play the only rock song I had, because they were somewhere around 30 and I presumed that that’s what they like. It was Love Gun by Kiss, I've heard it in a Hollywood comedy film once and absolutely loved it but didn't bother to try listening to some more of their songs. What they said then triggered something in me at that very moment, they said “that’s white music. What are you listening to, put some hip hop on” and I did play some Tupac for them. But what I realised was that minorities of Canada listen to rap and hip hop majorly and listening to “white music” would make me different. I mean, that’s why I listen to the music of Punjabi people of the age of 25 and above. This desire to rebel from the dominant youth culture is for some reason inherent in us introverts. That’s why we do almost everything different, right? And people saying “that’s not how it is done” only make us want to do it even more. At least that’s the case for me. But not all introverts are alike, we are humans, after all. We just think more and act on it differently. I think that’s why I’m an anarchist libertarian.
After that, I now not only listen to 70’s hard rock but also hard punk, oi, anarcho-punk, folk metal, rockerbilly, hardbass, dream pop, German & Russian gangsta rap, Punjabi folk & Sufi/Qawali and hip hop from the 90s and early 2000s of course.
“You don’t have to be gangstas, hos,
read more learn more change the globe.”
- Nas