All too rare ... MIA at the Rock en Seine music festival in 2007. Photograph: Moreau Lionel/Empics Entertainment
The bill for last weekend's Love Music Hate Racism was fairly impressive and eclectic. Damon Albarn's multiracial The Good, The Bad And The Queen headlined. Jerry Dammers - a lifelong champion of ethnicity in British pop - led an all-star cast through the Specials' Ghost Town. Babyshambles were incomplete - their frontman having been once more detained at her Majesty's pleasure. The View and Hard-Fi flew the flag for white-boy indie. Roll Deep and the mighty Dennis Bovell represented the variety of UK-based black music. Buried in the middle of the bill was a solitary Asian - although Jay Sean is hardly an Asian name (he was born Kamaljit Jhooti), nor is his vaguely Indian-tinged apolitical R&B paticularly representative of young UK Asians' concerns. But at least Sean was there, and got me thinking: why aren't there more British Asian pop stars?http://www.theukama.com/
In 1992, one of my earliest major assignments in music journalism was to probe this very question, but back then it seemed an explosion was on the way. I travelled the country, attending vibrant events and meeting all sorts of fascinating people. The gist of what they told me was this: records by Asian artists are actually outselling the Madonnas and Kylies, but these sales aren't registered because they're in underground Asian shops. Also, a new wave of young Asian bands was on the way to banish forever the stereotypes of bhangra and cabaret bands led by ageing fellows who the younger acts said were like "embarrassing uncles".
For a while, it looked like this was going to happen. Forth came the eclectic Asian Dub Foundation and polemic-spewing Fun-Da-Mental. Apache Indian had a terrific raggamuffin hit with Boom Shack-A-Lak and looked like becoming the first British Asian superstar. Even the indie scene - so often the preserve of everything white, male and middle class - got in the act as bands as diverse as Echobelly, Black Star Liner and the Voodoo Queens had Asians in their line-ups. Cornershop blossomed from scratchy Jesus And Mary Chain racketmakers into genuinely inspired hitmakers with the fab smash hit Brimful of Asha.
But the revolution dissipated. Fun-Da-Mental's original line-up fractured in a split over fundamentals. ADF lost their lead singer and grew increasingly marginalised. Cornershop's Tjinder Singh is apparently making a new album right now but has kept a low profile for some years. Apache Indian last had a hit in 1995, having seemingly gone the way of the Cherokees in John Wayne films. Jyoti Mishra had a terrible time in the spotlight after his 1997 number one Your Woman and vanished without trace for some time (he's now happily making indie records again like he did before). But give or take the occasional hit from acts like Panjabi MC - who sampled the Knight Rider theme on Mundian To Bach Ke, a worldwide hit, and DJs Bobby and Nihal's efforts to champion homegrown Asian music on BBC Radio One and Asian Network - very few others have come along in their wake and hit the mainstream. MIA is, of course, an honourable exception.
The British black community has played a pivotal role in virtually every British music movement from the late 60s onwards, even punk and goth (movements which also provided early launchpads for future Fun-Da-Mental/Death Cult man Aki Nawaz and Salvation/Black Star Liner's Indian-West Indian Choque Hosein) and continues to do so. But British Asians seem absurdly unrepresented in mainstream-ish pop right now. An Asian beat or Bollywood sample still finds its way into the pop charts, but more often than not courtesy of someone like Missy Elliott, who cannot possibly know what it means to be young, British and Asian.
The phenomenon - or lack of one - is all the more curious given the Iraq war, which seems to have politicised young Asians like never before, but not noticeably sent them into recording studios to document their arguments with beats. Are young Asians simply not interested in making pop music? Or are there bands out there, just not being widely heard? This year's UK Asian Music Awards honoured people like Sukshinder Shinda and Hardkaur , who are hardly household names (their You Tube appearances suggest they make American-sounding hip-hop about "laydeez" and sound as Asian as I am), although Nitin Sawhney is rightly (if a little vaguely) honoured for "commitment to the scene". It's 16 years since I looked into this with anything like a magnifying glass, so I'm confessing to some naivety here, but I wonder what happened to Radical Sista, Pardesi Music Machine and all those other hopeful people I met back in 92. Where is the next generation?
