bhangra

Shook my ass off at Bhangra night at the Fez. Local DJ The Incredible Kid and ... shit, i can't remember, but it's not like you'll find rival bhangra gangs in Portland. A half-assed, half-hungover search on the net yielded the sampler below.

Anyway, this club night is not to be missed. The Fez's groovy Moroccan decor and good vibe lays a perfect foundation for a mixed (in the Indo/European sense) group of people happily shaking their asses. At one point, the Hindi guys started running around in some kind of mad mosh pit, hava negila chair raising.

Hey, voxeons: they even played some Dahler Mendi.

Various Artists: Bhangra Beatz: A Naxos World Collection - PopMatters Music Review: "The other branch focuses on the dhol, the larger drums worn around the neck and played with hands or with curved drumsticks. The dhol is more closely associated with Indian folk-dances than with ragas, and the main way that the dhol is used in modern music is in the dance form called bhangra. This music, which has been filling clubs from New Delhi to London to New York for more than 10 years, relies on the dhol to function as a huge bass tone, thumping out a heartbeat that shakes dancers to their very souls while Indian folk- and film-derived melodies and vocal lines float above it. It's exotic, it's familiar, it's the best of both worlds.
But most of the people shaking their asses to this cool sound have little or no idea that bhangra as a musical and dance form has existed in the Indian/Pakistani territory of Punjab for centuries. Farmers have celebrated the harvest of 'bhang', or hemp, for 600 years with this dance, so it is really no surprise that it can be updated (and boogied to). This compilation collects some of the best bhangra tracks from Kiss Records, one of the UK's most prominent labels of South Asian music; it was originally released in 2000, but has now been re-released with a 'nicer'-looking cover, which means I can stop kicking myself for not grabbing it back when I had the chance.
And it's kickin'. You drop this disc in the player, pump up the "