“This Is Not the Sound of the Asian Underground”: On the Borders of Britain's New Asian Kool, 1997–2000

This article reconstructs a recent historical geography of the late 1990s genre of British Asian dance music that became known as “New Asian Kool” or Asian Underground. Most synonymous with the musician Talvin Singh, whose album OK won the Mercury Music Prize in 1999, this music genre is identified as deeply contested from its very inception by an emergent seam of second-generation British Asian musicians and bands, such as Joi, Nitin Sawhney, Fun>Da>Mental, and the Asian Dub Foundation. Central to their concerns around the term Asian Underground were, first, a sense of its inadequacy to capture the diversity of dance and popular music being produced by British-born South Asians in the late 1990s, and second, a fear that a generic category placing these musicians in the subterranean holding space of the “underground” would prevent mainstream commercial success. Taking this brief moment in late modern British popular culture seriously, and engaging with debates around generic classification and with the music itself, the article argues that, in these fractal British Asian soundscapes, at stake were contested experiences of British Asian expression, belonging and the politics of representation, and ultimately the articulation of South Asianness with Britishness. Understanding the almost immediate disavowal of Asian Underground as a music genre is key to understanding the emergence of new constitutions of Britishness and British public culture at the turn of the last millennium.