Mixed messages: unsettled cosmopolitanisms in Nepali pop

Abstract

This is an age of jazz. This is an age of having long, tangled hair, and of [young men] wearing an earring, and of wearing caps backwards [with the visor in the back]. And it is also a period of rap. Some raps are known as bhattirap and some are known as party rap. And some are meaningless raps. But at this moment it is a time of deuseerap. Deuseerap!!

Opening rap in ‘Deusee rey extended mix’ by Brazesh Khanal

(translated from Nepali; underlined words are sung in English)

Throughout Asia, the English word ‘mix’ (or variant thereof) is being used today to characterise a new mode of musical borrowing and syncretism distinctive of several pop musics that have emerged in the 1990s. Earlier modes of pop music borrowing typically involve timbral, rhythmic and melodic adaptations of both indigenous and foreign materials, in which contrasts between different musical elements are smoothed over so that they can be integrated into unified musical expressions. In contrast, the new ‘mix’ music of India (Greene 2000, pp. 545–6), Nepal (Greene 1999A; Henderson 1999), Japan (Condry 1999), Indonesia (Wallach 1999) and South Asian diasporic communities (Manuel 1995) employs the latest sound studio technologies in order to reproduce more precisely than ever before the precise timbres, rhythms and tunings of sound bites of both foreign pop and indigenous music. Yet as these foreign and indigenous sounds are coming more sharply into focus in Asian soundscapes, their meanings and histories seem to be going out of focus. For one thing, a ‘mix’ commonly takes the form of a sonic montage: abruptly juxtaposed musical styles heard in rapid succession that project only a weak sense of overarching form. In this ‘mix’ configuration, foreign and indigenous sounds sometimes present themselves as inscrutable sound bites – snippets detached from their original musical and cultural contexts. Mixes typically celebrate sonic contrasts, rather than attempt to reach or move the listener within any single musical idiom. Moreover, foreign sounds travel to Asia so quickly through radio, music television, recordings and the Internet, that they are detached from their histories and original cultural contexts, and often present themselves as suggestive, intriguing, but underdetermined cultural indexes. This point is taken up below in an analysis of Nepali heavy metal, one of the elements in the mix. Both Western pop and indigenous sounds become perspectival constructs, taking on a range of meanings and affective forces in different listener experiences. Mix music embodies new, understudied and essentially postmodern musical aesthetics (in the sense of Manuel 1995) that have taken root in Asian and other world communities.