Bhangra

The best music I've ever experienced at a wedding reception was Indian bhangra, at "Juice" and his wife's wedding. (Sorry Burgeoner and Mood, my wedding’s DJ: good music, but not loud enough; not quite an experience.) The wedding itself was a blast, too: three hundred people (or more) not paying attention to a lengthy ceremony involving paste applications and gold lamé fringes, but rather getting snacks from waiters (including a server whose entire role was to carry around a tray of dips) and visiting the open bar. The reception featured a series of skillful (and a few less-than-skillful) dances performed to club-volume blasted bhangra, which I’d never heard before. This set off a years-long search for CDs to recapture the feel of that music. Thanks to a fine municipal library system, this quest wasn’t too expensive, but tinny computer and headphone speakers have been as unable to duplicate that wedding experience as recordings are incapable of replicating the power of live music. Still, I’ve found a number of good songs:

A. S. Kang – Teri Janjhar

Don Shiva – Dake Dake

Anakhi – Lok Boliyan

The first two come from the compilation Bombay Bhangra Club (not to be confused with Bombay 2: Electric Vindaloo, which is now my all time favorite album title) and the latter from Bhangra Beatz, and it looks like these songs appear on other compilations as well.

Information on A. S. Kang, per a translated German website:

A.S. Kang with "Teri Jhanjar", with which Indian rhythms with schneidigen raps, traditional singing and modern Synthis combine themselves to a packing Soundclash.

Exactly. That’s my only information, other than “boliyan” which means something like “bundle of traditional songs,” and “bhangra” itself, which is derived from a Punjabi word for hemp. Speaking of hemp, maybe “Juice” will download, drop by, and translate some of the lyrics in the comments.

If you're wondering, the worst music I ever heard at a wedding--also VERY, VERY loud--was during a middle class Tanzanian reception, coincidentally also three hundred strong.

First, you should know, that Tanzanians always turn their radios, boom boxes, and walkmen to the maximum volume, distortion—or nearby music sources—be damned. (Thanks to Mista Bly for pointing this out). You want a fuzzed-out KiSwahili cover of “When Doves Cry”? Got it. You need Kenny Rogers for jeep beats? Yep. You like Huey Lewis Muzak with squelching violins? Yours. Yes, you’ve never believed that elevator music could be played at ear-piercing levels. But you’ve never been to a Tanzanian reception.

The reception I attended not only featured a DJ, but also a small brass band (two trumpets, a trombone, two drummers), and there were apparently no rules about the two interfering with each other, as random trumpet blares competed with various siren screeches from speaker stacks (usually signifying some transition in the program, e.g., from everybody shaking hands with the bride and groom, to everybody dancing past the bride and groom). The DJ also interjected synthesizer machine gun sounds during particularly poignant moments, and allowed feedback to well up to numbing volumes a couple of times. Actually, so far what I’ve described ain’t too far off from a Bomb Squad production. But Public Enemy wouldn’t play Phil Collins twice. Or “Yesterday,” or “The Greatest Love of All,” or “Jambo Bwana,”* although Flav might appreciate the incongruous explosions that punctuated them.

*”Jambo Bwana” is a tourist KiSwahili song delivered in the same sing-song manner of American children’s records or Kurtis Blow, the official** version backed with the tones of the smallest of Casios. As far as I could gather, no Tanzanian conceives of kitschy culture as embarrassing, and adults routinely sing along with as much fervor as they muster for Shania Twain’s lyrics. The words to “Jambo Bwana” translate as such:

Gree-tings
Gree-tings mis-ter
What is your news?
Ve-ry good now
Let us all sing
Let us all dance
Ki-Swa-hi-li
Is our lan-guage
[then some repetition]
Ha-ku-na-ma-ta-ta [no worries]

**There are at least three official versions, Tanzanian, Kenyan, and generic “African”.