Remix

As a term, ‘remix’ has predominantly been associated with music, gesturing towards the act of mixing the elements of an existing musical record to create a renewed version of it. Thus, at its very core, remixing is a material practice; be it the disc-scratching that DJs fall back on to introduce an electric scratching sound to songs, or actually separating elements of a song wherein the melody, the beats, the lyrics that have formed a cohesive union in the original are stripped from the whole, and readied for new combinations and thus new musical objects, remixes are all physical practices. By definition, therefore, a remix is reliant upon an existing sonic media object, leaning not just on its elements but on its memory. While some of the practices associated with the remix have been a part of the sonic landscape of the subcontinent ever since the arrival of sound in the 1930s, the most distinct iteration of the remix emerged in the early 1990s as a subgenre of what was developing then as Indie-pop. As a culturally hybrid product that mixed the musical form of popular Bombay film music, Indian folk music and Western electronic sounds such as electro, rap and reggae, the remix became popular not just within the subcontinent but also with the South Asian diaspora, particularly in Britain, largely due to the popularity of British–Indian DJ Bally Sagoo. Sagoo first gained attention in 1991 with his album Magic Touch that comprised remixes of Pakistani qawwali maestro Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s repertoire. His next venture – Bollywood Flashback – was ostensibly the first popular album to remix songs from old Hindi films. He also recorded an album dedicated to remixes of Kishore Kumar’s songs. Following Sagoo, DJs who remixed songs usually retained the original lyrics and the basic melody of the song. The entire emphasis was on recreating a new rhythm, accompanied by instrumentation that insiders within the music industry nebulously described as ‘modern’, or ‘western’, referring not just to them being contemporary media objects, but also signalling their departure from the aesthetic of both film and folk songs of India. The western influence was further highlighted with the addition of rap bridges that consisted of lyrics in English and other non-Indian languages. Most remixes retained the original tune and lyrics, but there were some distinctions: some remixes added beats to the existing vocals by playback singers, while some actually re-recorded the songs with new, and often less-known singers. In working with