Rapper Mandeep Sethi Seeks a Global Audience
Indiawest
Local Bay Area artist Mandeep Sethi, a Punjabi activist, rapper and musician, has created a music form he calls “Folk Lokh,” a cross-cultural and intergenerational multimedia project. “Folk Lokh” — which took a prize from the American India Foundation’s inaugural Arts Innovation Fund this spring — supports the preservation of traditional Punjabi folk music with the aid of 21st century producers and musicians, with a specific focus on Punjabi hip-hop.
Now in India on tour, and scoping out opportunities to live there full time, Sethi explained his personal artistic journey in an interview with LiveMint.
“The craziest part is that hip hop culture is what brought me to India,” Sethi told the site. “It wasn’t Sikhism or Indian classical music. I was tired of looking for brown folk making hip hop in North America and I found them all in here.”
Sethi was first exposed to the form as a young man in Los Angeles, where he experienced his first-ever Asian hip-hop concert.
“The No. 1 experience that shapes my personal history in hip-hop is the multiculturalism that I was growing up around — Koreans, Latinos, African-Americans, Filipinos — those cultures blended with my own Punjabi culture, and I saw myself as a representation of my own culture in the larger context of other cultures that were all making up this one hip-hop culture.
“I represent for my people, and I represent on behalf of not only Sikhs or Punjabis but the greater South Asian diaspora,” he said. Check out his music at www.mandeepsethi.com.
