http://www.thefader.com/fader/current_issue AS HIP-HOP AND BHANGRA CLOSE IN ON EACH OTHER, THE HOUSTON-BRED PUNJABI MC DEEP MIGHT BE AT THE CENTER OF THE COLLISION NEW SOUTH STORY BY EDWIN “STATS” HOUGHTON “Rap is basically music of the ghetto, the underclass, and India has the largest underclass in the world.” --NIHAL OF BBC 1XTRA Like water boiling, it’s some kind of law that music will catch fire exactly when and where you’re not watching. Check for New York, Atlanta blows. Search for the next invasion from overseas, it detonates on your doorstep. So by that logic it’s probably a good thing for the outsider South Asian art form that is bhangra if people are looking for its next great brown hope in London, Mumbai…anyplace but the dirty rap capital that is Houston, Texas. In recent months, the UK desi circuit catered to by BBC 1Xtra disc jocks like Bobby Friction and Nihal has been thoroughly infiltrated by a song called “Dekhlo Punjabi Munde,” a sort of bhangrafied reaction to Eazy-E’s gangster rap classic “Boyz N the Hood.” The track is built from a chopped Punjabi vocal bouncing between left and right channels over an ominous double-time synth that can only be called indo-crunk, but the first thing you actually hear is a bassy voice sliding from Southern drawl to the unaspirated consonants of Northern India—“This is your boy Deep, reppin that Houston, Texas”—before it assaults the track with an aggressive and intricate flow. For the first five bars he sticks to a complex internal rhyme scheme Ain’t no introduction needed everybody in the dirty know/ Deep bleed the block, keep a Glock stocked, plenty ‘dro/ …Freaky with them bullets hit you all when them triggers go…then lets the sixth bar ride out, punctuated by gunshots instead of words. The track first surfaced on Nihal and Friction’s show as a white label voiced by Deep and singer Kamla Punjabi over a Young Jeezy beat, and even in that form it was pushed to the top of their most-requested list by the counterpoint between two engagingly gangsterish verses and a singsong hook in equally greasy Punjabi (Dekhlo Punjabi mundeh, kidda rolle paundeh/ Bottlan de bottlan ni roj karekounde, which translates roughly as “Look at the Punjabi boys, making noise, clinking bottles together everyday.”). It is officially credited to J-Nas aka UK-based producer DJ Sanj, who reworked the beat into its current hybrid form—a club-ready behemoth on the order of Punjabi MC’s “Mundian To Bach Ke.” But unlike that track, which rode European charts as an instrumental party-break through five years of slow burn before hitting stateside with Jay-Z aboard, “Dekhlo” already has its radio-ready voice built in. Tracking down the voicebox behind “Dekhlo” leads not into the UK bhangra scene, but into the heart of Texas where a straight-ahead rap LP with Deep’s name on it is selling in the usual mixtape spots and cap shops. It’s titled In Trunks Now (get it?) and contains all the jeep-beat dynamics, pre-set production values and mixtape style cameos that the title promises. What emerges is not East-West fusion but an ethnically ambiguous MC who slips into Spanish as often as Punjabi and can hold his own next to giants like Too $hort and David Banner. Hearing it, it’s hard not to relate it to a prophecy made by BBC 1Xtra’s Nihal in an earlier interview: “Rap is basically music of the ghetto, the underclass, and India has the largest underclass in the world,” he said. “Once you get somebody like an Indian Eminem…it’s all over.” The Mathers effect is clearly there in the minds of the LP’s producers, the Assassins, right down to the way Deep’s voice is mixed on certain tracks and the jokes in the between-song skits, and his potential to speak to the massive diaspora Nihal’s talking about seems real. But the whole comparison just falls to hell when you open the CD cover and behold him, machine gun aimed at the sky, fronting the small army called OCP (“That represents ‘Outta Control Punjabis,’” Deep says). They’re arrayed 30-deep in front of three adjacent houses that form the OCP compound—turbans, beards and wifebeaters, flaunting assault rifles and the ceremonial swords called kirpan. The old-fashioned black vs white dynamic Eminem operates within is simply inadequate to the task of containing the bizarre mix of Texas redneck gun culture, Sikh warrior pride and gangster ambition embodied in that look. Even in strict rap terms Deep is at his best in a more thuglife mode than Em, a slower and lower register more in the style of Pimp C, gripping grain and switching lanes (“Purple dank, purple drank, purple blood in my veins.”) The guest spots from Too $hort and Big Moe are especially revealing, demonstrating that he can not only chop it up with the pros lyrically, but also that he can match them in feel. But the David Banner collaboration “Take it to the Yard” is illuminating in a different way. As with the “Boyz N the Hood” white label that became “Dekhlo,” it has been re-built by Sanj into a hybrid track, the dark crunk beat augmented with a raspy Indian flute you didn’t know was missing until it appeared. The melody shifts the track into exotic territory, but at the same time the sonics recall a rusty swing or chain-link gate sawing on its hinges, a concrete echo to the playground beef of Banner’s shouted hook that heightens the overall adrenaline. Deep rises to the violence of the occasion, bawling out,"Off the chain, beast unleashed/ Wifebeater, jeans creased/ Throw on a K-Swiss, we gon’ spray clips/ …screamin’ out, ‘F*** peace!" Over the phone Deep, aka Amardeep Basra, conveys the reserved but pleasant manner that is the essence of the South, miles from the war-like stance of his records. Asked how the rhetoric relates to his real-life experience, he keeps his answers abstract. “It wasn’t too many Punjabi people here when I grew up, so you kinda clique up how you cliqued up. I did grow up like that. I’m not gonna say I went out there and killed anybody but I will say pretty much everything else…it’s the truth. It just represents growin up in Houston. If you’re not an affluent, wealthy dude…hey, you have to find ways to get by, so you’re exposed to a lot more of the real world situation and the street life, you know?” But even as he’s talking about hustling, he highlights the various jobs he’s worked, from Red Lobster to tech support, and is so generally good-natured that his answers seem cagey more in the way of a rapper who doesn’t want to bore listeners with details of his regular-ass life than of a criminal trying not to cop to misdeeds on tape. But ask around within the small world of Punjabi immigrants in Houston and other stories emerge; of Deep’s habit of moving with the armed clique that is OCP, his cousin’s wedding reception broken up by his arrest in front of downtown Houston’s fanciest hotel and, most jarring of all, the imprisonment of his younger brother Jasdeep for the murder of his and Deep’s parents, found beaten to death with a baseball bat and then set on fire in their sleep, just before Jasdeep went to hang out at a local house party as if nothing was awry. Deep doesn’t speak of the incident other than to confirm the facts of the case: “My brother was officially charged and pled guilty to capital murder of my mother and my father, December 31st, year 2000,” he says. “Basically, that was it. There was no trial. Forty to life, no possibility of parole.” Nevertheless, it is the unavoidable turning point in any conversation about his path to making music. It was in the aftermath of his parents’ passing that he left day jobs behind and pursued recording full-time. “I said, You got one shot. If you’re gonna do it, this is the time to do it. I had some resources and some people that were willing to help me out and I just came back to Houston and got to work.” The last track on his LP is reserved for a song called “The Boss,” a “Dear Lord”-style confessional wherein he confronts his maker for taking all his immediate family. But although he obviously has material enough to fuel several career’s worth of self-analysis, his strength is not in tortured introspections. His therapy is more in the vein of Swisher Sweets and blue jane, his comfort zone a Cadillac with DJ Screw on the speakers and a shotgun in easy reach. Ironically, in fact, he is most fully at ease when talking violence, at his most confident and poetic spitting lines like, I got a loaded pistol grip, extra shells on me/ I got the devil in my blood, I got hell on me. Some of this gun-talk is well within the time-honored rap tradition of reverse pride, a reclaiming of negative stereotypes that is less an embrace than a cobra clutch. Plainly, lines like, “You don’t want to wear a red dot on your forehead” and “I do the bhangra Indian dance and make it rain from the sky” take on whole other levels of meaning when backed up by a squad of Outta Control Punjabis holding Kalashnikovs. It’s hard to say whether it just comes naturally or it’s deliberate button-pushing, but the vocabulary of turbans, brown skin and AK-47s that Deep has cloaked his rhymes in is a pose at least as scary to the terror-spooked America of 2006 as the image of young black males with guns and money was to an earlier era. Navi, who also goes by the name Head (presumably because he’s head Singh in charge at Deep’s label, Da 1 Records), is a soft-spoken Punjabi dude who happened to graduate in the same class as Paul Wall and Chamillionaire at Jersey Village High School, the same school Deep graduated from a few years before. Not the place you’d look to as a breeding ground for rap superstars, Jersey Village is a regular-looking suburb with cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac of houses that can only be described as mini-McMansions. One of these houses, distinguishable by the wrapped Da 1 Records van parked in the driveway, is where Deep lives with his Latina wife, his year-old baby, and his pitbull Chiquita (named not after the banana, but after the masked dancehall queen/assassin in Hype Williams’s Belly). The crib is roomy, a wide screen TV and pictures of Deep’s departed parents decorating the living room, next to the studio where Deep and Kamla Panjabi are putting together a full-length LP that DJ Sanj has commissioned to follow up on the success of their initial two-track collaboration. Refining the elements that worked on “Dekhlo” into a patentable process, Deep and KP write to jacked beats of the “Nextel Chirp” variety, trading bars between gully Punjabi and hood English, creating a song structure around which Sanj can build a new, original track. It’s a perfect one-two combination; on these new raps Deep’s voice sounds stronger and, well, deeper—possessed of the kind of swagger that can make you listen to bar after bar of a mantra like “I’m known to be ambitious and vicious…” punctuated with a screwed & chipmunked voiced screaming, “The world is yours!” “Bang” is his most lyrical and violent track yet, a cinematic gangster epic. Wailing behind him, Kamla Punjabi’s vocals are to a traditional boliyan as Nate Dogg’s are to soul music—he tends to slide over the notes not so much because he can’t hit them but because he sounds too faded to bother or too insolent and badass to do things by the book. There’s also “Chirasi 1984,” which recounts, over a beat jacked from Panjabi MC’s “Mirza,” Kamla’s shorty-eye view of the state of emergency in ’80s Punjab. That was the era of fallout from “Operation Blue Star,” in which the Indian Army laid siege to Sikh separatists who were bunkered in the Golden Temple. It was a Waco-like disaster that ended with mortar fire on the temple itself and bullet-holes piercing Sikhism’s holiest relics. Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards in retaliation, and reprisals shed untold blood; the emotional peak of KP’s narrative is his ten-year-old self witnessing a fellow Sikh gunned down right before his eyes. “Chirasi 1984” is the kind of story that can make you feel physically panicky, even sitting in a carpeted and air-conditioned den in suburban Texas. The eeriest thing about Deep and Kamla’s collaboration is not the hair-raising stories though, or the way they seem to finish each other’s stanzas, even when flowing in different languages. It’s the way the perfect timing of it has unfolded, adding another weapon to Deep’s arsenal just as the LP with the Assassins carved him a place of his own in Houston’s rap scene. You’d think it was a master plan, but in reality the timing is based purely on parole schedules, as Kamla was mostly absent from In Trunks Now because he was locked up for possession of ecstasy in the kind of quantity that can’t be explained by personal use or even group therapy. He got out just in time for the Sanj-produced tracks. Meanwhile, the Indocentric elements the new songs bring open up doors to new audiences, even as they reinforce the music’s pull with his regular Houston rap fans, the ones who aren’t sure if Deep is Punjabi or Mexican or just light-skinned. “I just took KTSU 90.9 a single I did,” Deep says. “And on the way out, [the station’s DJ] Stevie C asked me, ‘Hey mayne, you don’t ever do anything mixed with some Indian in it?’ I started laughin and said, ‘If I’d known I woulda brought you that s*** right now!’” Like that raspy flute, the minor keys of Sanj’s production and Kamla’s renegade bhangra yell seem to click with Deep’s sound like pieces that weren’t missing ’til they fell in place. More than just a tagline for his record label, the way things are aligning around him makes you think Deep might actually be “the One” waiting to be discovered, as he sits in the micro-mansion he shares with his wife and baby, a pitbull named Chiquita and the ghosts of his murdered parents.
