Black Handsworth by Kieran Connell

Author:Kieran Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520971950
Publisher: University of California Press

CONCLUSION

By the beginning of the 1990s many of the groups discussed in this chapter had disbanded. In 1992 Kokuma moved out of its base in Handsworth to premises in central Birmingham; by the end of the decade, following a series of arguments about the direction of the group, it folded. Other groups changed almost beyond all recognition. Following the release of Handsworth Revolution and three less successful follow-up albums, in 1982 Basil Gabbidon left Steel Pulse, the group that he had cofounded. “I couldn’t handle it anymore,” he remarked. “I was tired and worn out, angry and depressed.”118 The band’s core market increasingly became the United States and, following its Grammy win for Babylon the Bandit, Steel Pulse performed at President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration party. By this time Steel Pulse had already relocated to America and contained only two remaining members of the original Handsworth lineup.

There were other changes taking place within Handsworth’s music scene. By the late 1980s, in Handsworth as in other urban areas, parallel developments illustrated the extent to which dread culture was just one prominent element among other, diaspora-oriented musical subcultures. A South Asian scene had emerged with a focus on bhangra, a folk music tradition from the Punjab, the large region that runs along the northern border of India and Pakistan. In its British iteration, traditional instruments such as the dhol and the dholki drums formed the backdrop to songs that evoked an Asian diasporic experience, with the Punjab functioning as the key symbolic homeland. Performed in Punjabi—and often at “daytime disco” events that facilitated the younger generation’s critical involvement in the shaping of this scene—songs such as the 1988 “Soho Road Uteh” (On the Soho road) by the Birmingham band Apna Sangeet (Our Music) explored the experience of migration through the prism of two lovers attempting to find each other on separate journeys from India to Britain. While undoubtedly less militant than Handsworth Revolution, the importance of the reference to Handsworth’s Soho Road—which was a pervasive motif in British bhangra—was that, like dread culture, this was a diasporic formation that was conceptualized as functioning assertively within the Handsworth and British contexts.119 In 1990 Steven Kapur, a twenty-three-year-old Handsworth resident of South Asian descent, built on this tradition as he embarked on his own musical career. Under the stage name Apache Indian, and initially sporting dreadlocks similar to those of David Hinds, Benjamin Zephaniah, Ras Tread, and many other figures discussed in this chapter, Kapur released his debut single, “Movie Over India.” It single drew on Kapur’s two main influences: the British bhangra scene, garnered from his upbringing in a Punjabi household, and reggae, an influence from his time spent toasting for various sound systems in Handsworth. In 1992, following in the paths of Bob Marley and Steel Pulse, Kapur signed a deal with Island Records. The following year he released “Boom-shack-a-lak.” The single quickly became one of the biggest-selling reggae records in the United Kingdom. With its party-like tone and irreverent lyrics, it has featured on numerous advertisements and film soundtracks around the world.

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