The New York Times

June 19, 2005

I Want My Hyphenated-Identity MTV

By DEBORAH SONTAG

ON a fine spring day in Manhattan, Reshma Taufiq, 28, was the first to audition for a role on a new MTV channel that will be aimed at second-generation desis, or immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. Her emerald-green bodice fit snugly atop navel-baring jeans, and her long black hair curtained her cheekbones as she sweated under the studio lights, trying sexy, then cheery, then exuberant variations on "Live from Jackson Heights, Queens, it's MTV Desi."

Ms. Taufiq summed herself up: R&B artist who is bilingual in English and Hindi; news reader for a local ethnic channel on which she conducts phone-in quizzes on Bollywood trivia; frequenter of the late-night desi party scene who thinks that arranged marriages are not such a bad idea; and, well, chemical engineer now working in software development at Hewlett-Packard.

Azhar Usman, 29, with his knitted skullcap and full beard, presented somewhat differently. An MTV executive, he explained, had recruited him, saying: "We're going to redefine the identity of the MTV host. It doesn't have to be someone sexy and good-looking." A comedian (and lawyer) from Chicago, Mr. Usman used the audition to invent an exaggeratedly accented (and quite amusing) character: Vijay the V.J.

Most of the applicants thanked MTV for thinking of them as a demographic ready for a music-video channel all its own. "It's so nice to be recognized," said Tara Austin, a Sri Lankan-American from Los Angeles. "I am just an American girl at the end of the day, but I have a strong South Asian background. I eat with my hands, you know? We're, like, so hungry for hearing our own culture."

That's what MTV World is counting on as it introduces three new channels focusing on the growing population of young, acculturated Asian-Americans: first, MTV Desi, which will go on the air in late July; then MTV Chi, for Chinese-Americans, by the end of the year; and MTV K for Korean-Americans next year. The channels will not be merely tweaked reproductions of MTV India, MTV China or MTV Korea, three of MTV's 42 channels abroad. Rather, they will, like their target audiences, be hybrids, blending here and there and grappling with identity issues, mostly in English.

MTV Desi will serve as the prototype. Interspersed among Bollywood videos, electronic tabla music and English-Gujarati hip-hop, it will feature brief documentary clips profiling desis, comic skits about South Asian-American generational conflicts, interviews with bicultural artists and desi house parties, live. MTV Chi will mix up Mandarin rock, Canto pop and Chinese-American rap; MTV K will tap into South Korean hip-hop and the little-known but vibrant Korean-American pop scene. MTV Desi will start on satellite nationally and then move to digital cable systems in various parts of the country.

MTV World's premise for these new channels was commonsensical: that young bicultural Americans have tastes different from those of youths in their ethnic homelands and therefore need, as it were, a customized MTV.

In that premise lay a confluence of academic and commercial thinking. For at least a decade, academics have explored the idea that many immigrants possess "transnational" identities. That is, aided by jet travel, technology and global commerce, they - and their children - maintain vital, current links to homelands that are never really left behind. There has been a fervent debate in intellectual circles about the "cultural space" inhabited by the children of recent immigrants and to what extent its very "hybridity" makes it a place of its own.

MTV's exploration was less theoretical: market research through house parties and minigroups involving Asian-Americans in New York and Los Angeles. MTV concluded that second-generation immigrants not only desire their own age-appropriate connection to their parents' homeland but that they also passionately want to see their struggle to define themselves as hyphenated Americans mirrored on television.

"If you're a young Chinese-American or Indian-American, what channel do you tune into to see yourself, to see artists that reflect your lifestyle?" asked Nusrat Durrani, 44, senior vice president and general manager of MTV World. He has an almost missionary zeal about this project, but then, as a native of Lucknow, India, who now lives in Brooklyn, he has a firsthand view of hybrid life. As he sees it, the Asian-American population, which is booming, is also coming of age. "This country has had the African-American experience, the Hispanic-American experience, and now it is the time for the third-largest group, the Asian-Americans," he said.

The Asian-American population grew to 12.3 million in 2004 (or 14 million, when including Asians of mixed race) from 6.9 million in 1990, according to the Census Bureau. The three target audiences for the new MTV channels, especially Indian-Americans, are better educated and more affluent than average Americans, according to the census. The median family income of an Asian Indian in the United States was $70,708 in 1999, compared with $50,046 for all Americans; 64 percent held at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 24 percent for all American families.

Still, Mr. Durrani said, "The Asian-American experience has not been articulated on the national stage, although there are these incredibly vibrant subcultures, artists from all these communities who are entirely untapped."

ENTER MTV, ready to give these artists a platform, to "superserve" the young ethnic populations of the United States and, then, perhaps, to entice young Americans of all backgrounds to tune in and check out a universe, cultural and musical, that they know little about.

These channels won't live or die by the size of their crossover audience, said Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks, a division of Viacom. Initially MTV will be supplementing an investment of what he called "several millions" with some programming from MTV UK, MTV India and other international MTV's.

But there is nonetheless the hope that these channels will reach beyond their niche audiences, meaning that MTV, which has long exported American pop culture to the world, is trying to import global pop culture into the United States.

When MTV began to establish channels abroad in the late 1980's, critics viewed the expansion as quintessential cultural imperialism that would homogenize youth culture worldwide. Early on, though, MTV learned that it made better business sense to be "glocal" - their motto is "think global, act local" - than to impose a wholly American cultural product. Young people, wherever they were, would watch international acts for only so long before they wanted to see something of their own. So each of MTV's international channels developed local talent and its own personality: MTV Indonesia has a call to prayer, MTV Italy has cooking shows, MTV Brazil is, visually speaking, extremely colorful and, sartorially speaking, quite bare.

Still, the MTV's around the world share that distinctive, hyperkinetic MTV footprint, and they are profoundly commercial, and not always profoundly artistic, enterprises. So some second-generation immigrants are leery of MTV's zeroing in on their market potential.

One young woman hoping to be a V.J., Niharika Desai, 27, declared during her interview that she had auditioned partly out of curiosity to see "what corporate America thinks of me."

Her comment met poker faces from Mr. Durrani, who that day wore all black and studded jewelry, and Lem Lopez, a Filipino-American executive producer for MTV World, who wore his long hair in a slipknot atop his head and his floral shirt loose and half unbuttoned.

"Not that you're corporate," Ms. Desai said to them, pedaling backward. "I know that you're a kinder, gentler version of the Man."

Projecting a kind of perky punk aesthetic, Ms. Desai wore her hair shaggy, with a streak of blond, her jeans folded up and her Converse sneakers faded. A video editor who grew up in upstate New York, she verbally motored on, trying to make amends, sort of.

"My whole thing coming here, it's really cool that there's going to be a desi channel," she said. "I also have some thoughts. Growing up, I became who I am more from influences in Poughkeepsie than from the Indian community. My parents didn't raise me watching Hindi films and what not. So I implore you, please do something more than Bollywood." Actually, she punctuated Bollywood with an expletive, and then again when she clarified: "Don't get me wrong. I love Bollywood. But desi kids in America would so benefit from having a cool influence and learning hip stuff, too, like M.I.A."

Ms. Desai was referring to Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan-English performer who goes by the stage name M.I.A. Clearing his throat, Mr. Durrani, who seemed to be charmed by Ms. Desai's irreverence, said simply: "I want to put you completely at ease. This isn't corporate America. And M.I.A. is so central."

M.I.A. is the daughter of a Tamil militant whose family fled the violence in Sri Lanka and eventually settled in a housing project outside London. There, she said in an interview that will be shown on MTV Desi, she started over as refugee "scum," with hand-me-down clothes, in special schools, on the lowest rung of the English social ladder.

Ms. Arulpragasam is a mesmerizing entertainer who cuts and pastes musical genres - old-school electro, futuristic dance hall reggae, Bhangra, punk, hip-hop - while moving from Cockney to Tamil to American slang and back. Her sound is catchy and full of political attitude, and her videos mix urban grime and guerrilla war scenes. The one for her single, "Sun Showers," puts her in the jungle, on an elephant, washing clothes in a river, dangling on a tree limb as she rhymes and cracks open a mango.

"It's an awesome video," Ms. Desai said after watching it in preparation for a screen test in which she would "throw to," or introduce, "Sun Showers."

Mr. Durrani agreed. "M.I.A. is MTV Desi," he said.

Actually, it is Mr. Durrani who is really MTV Desi. Not only is he an immigrant - he was also lured to this country by MTV.

As Mr. Durrani describes it, in the early 1980's, while an M.B.A. student in Lucknow, he received a gift - a tape with the first music videos he had ever seen, including David Bowie's "Let's Dance," which he found "magical and transporting." Years later, when Mr. Durrani was married and working in Dubai as a marketing director for Honda, he watched MTV for the first time. And he needed to be part of it, he said.

He traveled to New York, making a cold call to the human resources department at MTV headquarters in Times Square. Told that he did not possess the qualifications for a job there, Mr. Durrani was undeterred. He and his wife, Afshan, a fashion designer, discarded their comfortable expatriate life in the shopping capital of the Middle East and moved to New York to start over as students. In the summer of 1996, Mr. Durrani, while working on a master's degree in communications, secured a foothold - an unpaid internship - at MTV and never let go.

IN a recent interview in his Times Square office, Mr. Durrani sat in front of a Bob Dylan poster and discussed his father's scratched vinyl 78's of Indian divas like Begum Akhtar, his own exposure as a youth to Western music ranging from Sam Cooke and Dean Martin to Dylan and Bowie, and his passion for discovering a new generation of bicultural musicians in England and America.

Most of these artists have not enjoyed the success of M.I.A. or Jin, a Chinese-American rapper with a song shouting, "Yeah, I'm Chinese, and what?" and proclaiming, "The days of the pork fried rice and the chicken wings/ coming to your house five years is over/ Y'all gonna learn Chinese!" Both of them have already gotten air time on the regular MTV.

But Karmacy, a vibrant hip-hop fusion group composed of self-described "bicultured individuals" of Indian origin, has not. Karmacy is something of a cult band based in Los Angeles, and, as Sammy Chand, 30, the lead member and producer of the group, said, "We've been in our own little universe for such a long time." MTV Desi changes that. "You can always go city to city, club to club, but MTV Desi will really give us a way to speak to our audience in a unified manner," he said. "It will be like a Grand Central station for everyone into our kind of music."

When Karmacy introduced a new music video at the Key Club on Sunset Boulevard in May, MTV Desi was there to record it. "Blood Brothers" is percussively rapped in English and Gujarati, with synthesized sitar and flute. In three acts, it tells the story of the conflict between two Indian brothers when one emigrates to the United States to seek fame and fortune. "How do I move on, bhai (brother)?" the chorus goes, then repeats the question in Gujarati. "Cuz no matter where I go/ My soul is in the same place."

Ms. Taufiq, the V.J. applicant who works at Hewlett-Packard, said she had opened as a singer for Karmacy.

For her audition, Ms. Taufiq was shown a Bollywood music video, an extravagant number from "Happiness and Tears," a huge hit film in 2001. She knew it well, and her head bounced along. When Mr. Durrani exclaimed that the leading man, Hrithik Roshan, was a seriously handsome man, Ms. Taufiq recoiled somewhat, saying, "But he has six fingers!"

Mr. Usman viewed the same video, watched it with a progressively widening smile, laughed robustly at the end and said, "Are you finding this ridiculous?"

Given several minutes to prepare an introduction to the video for a screen test, Ms. Taufiq decided to pretend that she was broadcasting from Jackson Heights, in front of Kebab King, whose quality, she said, could be measured by the long line of yellow taxis in front.

Mr. Usman decided to go with: "My uncle in India says desi stands for 'doctors earn significant incomes.' My relatives in Pakistan say desi means 'Don't ever say India.' Here on MTV, desi means South Asian flavor, style and music. Check this new video out. It's going to knock your socks off. You've heard of a big production budget. How about 500 backup dancers? This is like 'Grease' meets desi, making it ...greasy. No, that doesn't sound right."

Mr. Lopez grinned. "That's absolutely on the money, man," he said, and then Mr. Usman broke into broken English as Vijay the V.J.

"People think in my country everybody so sad, crying, terrorism," Vijay said. "We not terrorism, we dancing. Not dancing like panties falling down .... What is this panties falling down" the buttocks? And so on.

In the end, the choice of a starting V.J. was difficult. Mr. Durrani said that he worried that Ms. Taufiq was too much of an Indian-American stereotype (beautiful overachiever) and that Mr. Usman would be straitjacketed in a V.J. role. Ms. Desai had no experience in front of a camera but she was cute, hip and sassy, and this captivated, as she put it, the Man.

And so Niharika Desai - a fresh take on Carson Daly, if ever there were one - will be the first face of MTV Desi, the first to introduce this channel to its audiences and then, perhaps, to introduce their vibrant, hyphenated culture to the larger world.

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