Obscure Sub-genre #3 - Boingra

We’ve had fifty years of multi-culturalism in the UK. The concepts of a community formed by members from all corners of the world have been ingrained in policy making by parties left and right as unquestionably as the notion of democracy. Yet walking the streets of our major cities you will see people fractured roughly along lines of race or religion, choosing to self-ghettoize themselves. Has the past few decades been a futile exercise? Do we need a stronger, tribal identity to operate within than the broad “one and all” British one we are coerced into? Do our boundaries make us who we are?

As always seems to be the case in situations like this, we look for positivity in the next generation, the youth co-mingling in our schools. For before the hang-ups of sociological handcuffs make themselves apparent, equality is the norm. And where youth congregate, new scenes will follow, taking reference points from their homes and twisting and skewing them into new shapes.

Just as early hip hop producers mined their parents funk collection for the breaks, kids in Leeds and Bradford are digging through their parents and siblings collections for samples and ideas. What’s chucked up is Bhangra by the Asian kids, while the white kids are nicking their older brothers “Bonkers” mix CDs, bringing happy hardcore to the table. In school rehearsal rooms and bedrooms across Yorkshire, these influences are been fused into Boingra, a bouncing pounding sitar soaked tabla bashing soundforce that’s doing a better job bridging the sometimes testy differences between splintered groups in the area than any Westminster diktat.

It would be interesting to see the phizogs of the forefathers of multi-culturalism in the midst of all the different faces on the dance floor of The Mill in Leeds on a Boingra night, but I’m sure there’d be a smile at a job finally completed and through the most unusual of vessels.