E17S1FINAL - Nightclubbing: Uncovering India's Disco Dream

Hi everyone, I’m Siddhanth, and welcome to Nightclubbing. What did you listen to growing up? is a question we don’t ask nearly as much as we should. I want our stories of sound, music, and heritage to be documented as an unofficial pedagogy of joy—a way of history making, a means of which we make sense of the past before charting on increasingly uncertain futures. Give vocabulary, beat, rhythm, groove to an untethering temporality. Make sense of our future nostalgia. The title of the podcast is inspired by the incomparable Grace Jones’ seminal album of the same name. I wanted to start this series as an experiment in joy, a term black-feminist and performance artist Gabrielle Civil coins. A way for us to see how we can make space for joy in a time that seems relatively absent of it. My experiences of growing up in Singapore’s nightlife culture came to my mind as visceral and unmediated moments of joy. It’s the dance music I grew up listening to that foreshadowed my 5am nights in the club. It’s dance music that has brought so much joy to groups on the periphery—a hopeful helplessness. In this time of dissonance, maybe joy is the only thing we can mark as certain. Still, I wonder…. Why should we look for joy when we could be making space for humanity? Joy has felt like a privilege, of late. And for many, joy is a luxury that isn’t remotely affordable. I hope that this project, however momentary, can help make your joy feel justified. This project is one that would not exist without collaboration. We may be isolated, but it is important for me to keep connected. Not only am I collaborating with friends who are interested in the topics we’re diving into, but I am also urging them to collaborate with their family members as a way of connecting with potentially lost lineages of sound and culture. This week we deep-dive into my homeland, India. It is beautiful and complicated and something that can’t be given justice to in one episode. I’ll be splitting up my discussion about India in 3-4 parts over the upcoming weeks. We start in the late 70’s and 80’s, a time of seismic change for India, and the world. The musical developments of the country ran parallel to the socio-political and economic changes that were unfolding in the subcontinent. Today I’m joined with a close friend of mine, Rhythm, a fellow Brown University student. She’s coming in live to us from Baroda, Gujarat.