[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkpuAQIdoD4[/youtube]
Have you run into much of the ‘English-only’ attitude here?
I remember a few years into establishing the band in the Bay Area, I got called by a big local radio station asking me if they could include a song of mine in their compilation of influential Bay Area artists which they would rotate heavily on the air. The DJ said “Rupa, do you have a song like ‘Poder’ that’s in English?” “Poder” is a Spanish song off our first album that laments what can and can’t cross the US-Mexico border, noting that money and goods can cross, even labor, but not people with their dignity unharmed. It is an homage to those people who cross. So I replied “No, I don’t, but please feel free to use ‘Poder’ because many people here in the Bay Area would love to hear that message on your radio station.” I told her that I was only singing one or two songs in English those days and the reason she might consider me “influential” was probably related to the fact that I was not predominantly singing in English. She answered that she couldn’t put a Spanish song on the compilation because listeners might feel the station was a Spanish language station. The segregated and provincial thinking around cultural experience, racial and socioeconomic difference that still exists in the Bay Area is a challenge to overcome to anyone who tries to grapple with it.
To you, what makes a good Rupa & The April Fishes song?
If it rings true to something deep that cuts across cultural assumption, if it contains a certain wild sense of honesty and abandon, a rebellious truth that refuses to be simplified, watered down or ignored. It contains the spirit of something that cannot be suppressed, like laughter or life.
Of all music classifications, the one I cannot stand the most is “world music.” Since all music is a part of the world, the phrase just demonstrates to me American’s musical isolationism. What is the biggest challenge of making internationally influenced music in this country?
It’s a challenge to make music that pushes expectations. A band fronted by a brown Indian woman who is singing in French, English, Spanish, Hindi, Greek and Romani, playing songs that mix reggae with cumbia with rockabilly, using orchestral instruments and whipping people into a frenzy? I advise people to come experience it before categorizing. And the music is forever changing. Our upcoming album I am currently recording with composer/producer Todd Sickafoose is mostly in English, pulling from musical idioms I didn’t even know were in me. Fun!
.Interview: Rupa and the April Fishes Headline Winter Jazz Fest
