There’s a new Drake album, and a kid in Philly couldn’t be more excited.

Sure, he’s thrilled to hear the latest work by an artist he admires, but with his laptop and a library of other music, this kid has a plan.

With its growing popularity on network serials and reality TV, Bollywood — India’s Hindi-language film industry and the songs from its musicals — is hot on the lips of entertainment aficionados around the world. With dazzling colors and dizzying choreography, Bollywood dance has gained enormous popularity in the United States.

For first-generation Indian Americans, dance and music are anchors to their parents’ culture, even if it is rooted thousands of miles from home. American college teams perform and compete using different types of Indian dance, and as these styles began to evolve and mix, so too did another artistic fusion: music.

From Bollywood and bhangra to pop and hip-hop, young DJs around the country are combining the sounds of the East and West in online mashups and mixtapes.

For the South Asian American diaspora, music presents a unique way of marrying multiple cultures. Music and dance are inextricably linked in India: Classical dance styles are set to Hindustani and Carnatic music, with dancers required to understand different keys and tempos as part of their dance education. It makes sense, then, that the burgeoning fusion dance scene would have a musical counterpart.

Bhangra, bhangra, bhangra

Before the world caught Bollywood fever, it was folk music and dance from the North Indian state of Punjab that got attention in the West. Bhangra teams and competitions took hold at American colleges and the genre’s infectious drum beats and melodies permeated pop culture.

“I always had a very strong cultural tie to Sikh Punjabi culture,” says Iqwak Bhurji, 28, who DJs under the moniker Klasikhz. “When I came out here to the States, one of the most important elements for me was the concept of the arts. It was literally the most pure form that allows people of different worlds to just kind of communicate. That's a very clichéd statement, but for me it meant a lot to sit in a room and jive to the same dance song as somebody else.”

Bhurji told Mashable that he began mixing different musical styles late in high school, when he couldn’t resist adding tabla drum beats to a sample of “Ms Jackson” by Outkast. As a student at the University of California San Diego, Bhurji got his first taste of competitive bhangra from watching the UCSD team.

“People weren't really experimenting as much, and if you fast forward 10 years to today, people are experimenting like crazy," Bhurji says. "It's a beautiful sort of evolution, but at that moment in time no one was really risking that. Everyone was coming from a much more traditional mentality.”

Mixing for a dance team instead of his own entertainment gave Bhurji renewed accountability for the 16 other individuals relying on his skills. After he mixed for UCSD, other bhangra teams approached Bhurji for help with mixes, to give them a competitive edge.

“Sound gets stale. Experimentation is vital but at the same time it's really up to that artist or that DJ to put in that creative energy to make it stand out,” Bhurji says. “People are OK with having a dubstep segment in the middle of a bhangra routine, it's OK. It still has to be done creatively.”

“I think being different, being original and really just being excellent at what you'll do, that'll gravitate energy from all these other teams,” Bhurji adds. “At that time, it was just too early to know that this was something we can externally go out and tap into. All I was trying to do was just define a very strong identity for [my team] in a fusion world.”

The 'Desi' Dance Network

As Bhurji graduated and continued work as a DJ, the face of Indian American college dancing expanded enormously to include Bollywood and Western fusion. Competitions bring together students and teams from all over the country, and social media created a space to share their art.

While Klasikhz was dropping tracks from San Diego, a college freshman named Srihari Sritharan was listening and learning from the East Coast.

“There was the South Asian show that every college has, and we had a freshman dance,” recalls Sritharan, who now releases mixes as Dr. Srimix. “I had the idea of 'Hey, what if we combine some songs here and there,' like make a nice, fluid mix for us to dance to. And that was the first mashup or remix that I'd made.”

Sritharan joined Brown University’s undergrad fusion team as a dancer, but creating new, interesting mixes was a crucial part of his tenure.

“I was already very aware that people are blending Indian and American culture in that way, but it was never – it was rarely, rather, that it was extremely integrated,” he says. “It was always kind of like, take some Indian instruments and put it underneath a Sean Paul song or Kanye/Ludacris song, that kind of thing.”

Sritharan found that most mixes got stuck in a particular genre and didn’t vary enough for an exciting dance experience. “Either it was very DJ-style – meant for parties and 30 minutes long and straight bhangra, straight Bollywood, or EDM-heavy ... which I thought was not very great for dancing,” he says. “Or it'd be the complete opposite — five consecutive songs with silence in between.”

“I really only started getting into the Indian fusion kind of music by listening to a lot of A.R. Rahman and just being so inspired by that,” says Vissagan Gopalakrishnan, who DJs as VGo. Gopalakrishnan tried different musical instruments while growing up, such as the classical Indian harmonium, eventually experimenting with a keyboard in middle school and high school.

“There needs to be a unique organization of the music,” he notes. “At one point, overlaying two songs on top of each other just doesn’t work out – almost all the time. There needs to be a lot of tweaking a lot of ways to give each song its own space and respect, but still being able to complement each other. It’s a very imprecise science.”

Sritharan guided Sajan Patel into the collegiate dance and music scene, where Patel was recruited to make a mixtape – a fusion mix designed to generate hype for upcoming dance competitions.

“Before I did the Infusion mixtape not many people had done EDM/Bollywood,” Patel adds. “That was like, Sanjoy ... but once he stopped doing things with the circuit, nobody else really did it, so I think that kind of brought it back. And now I see other DJs starting to do more EDM/Bollywood as well.”

That word comes up a lot in these conversations: circuit. "The circuit" is the world of fusion dance, a world built by first-generation Indian Americans. There’s the pervasive collegiate mindset among these young artists, because their work exists in a specific sphere. The dance “circuit” gave rise to fusion mixes, and though it thrives there, it's limiting in its own way.

The 'side hustle'

Bhurji is part of what you could dub the first wave of South Asian American DJs; he now works in advertising and continues to DJ and produce music. But he might be the exception; Sritharan is pursuing a Ph.D in neuroscience, while Gopalakrishnan and Patel are both planning for medical school. There’s a reason that graduate school doesn’t have its own dance circuit – it’s not exactly known as an environment rife with free time.

For the moment, Sritharan devotes his days to science and his evenings to music.

“I just know that while I have this momentum in music and remixing I should use it as much as possible,” he says. “This is so amazing where I just put a track out and everyone is eager to listen to it. That's something I would've never have imagined and I'm extremely thankful for it, but I do know that if I wait like five more years and no one knows me personally, this just becomes ... the spark is no longer there.”

“I really do try to use the music as a way to break from my school stuff,” Gopalakrishnan agrees. “Music mixes have really become part of who I am, so for me to sacrifice that for my medical career wouldn’t be the best for me.

It’s something cool to talk about, too; I can talk to you about medicine, but people I talk to at my med school are like ‘Oh, tell me about your music.’

It makes me a more well-rounded person.”

Patel started a DJ company with his friends in high school and was working events well before making mixes for a community of dancers and fans. With an approaching MCAT and more rigorous schoolwork, he may have to slow down the music.

“Most people don’t see behind the scenes, what goes behind every gig and planning. You have to organize your equipment, organize people, understand what kind of crowd you’re going to be DJing with,” he explains. “Once I get into med school ... I might just do mixes on SoundCloud rather than DJing live events because I doubt I’ll have time. I feel like after med school it’ll probably be a hobby, but honestly it just depends on where it goes.”

“I took an Uber to this one bar, and the Uber driver was so curious, and I played him some of my stuff and he shared it with some of his friends,” Gopalakrishnan says. “He messaged me about it, saying that he really did like my stuff. I think just by having live DJing or live mixing, that is definitely pulling in a different crowd.”

SoundCloud and beyond

If there’s a particular obstacle in the way of this musical movement exploding past the undergraduate bubble, it’s SoundCloud. Recently, the streaming platform began to remove specific tracks, sometimes shutting DJs’ accounts down entirely.

Sritharan has the perfect analogy: “Imagine today if YouTube just disappeared. There are other video hosting sites out there, but to get everyone — like a billion people — to switch to a different site is not an overnight process,” he says. “It took a really long time for people to know that SoundCloud is the place to go for Indian remixes, and pretty much just as soon as that happened, SoundCloud started getting into legal trouble and shutting people down left and right.”

“I made a mix of ‘Rude Boy’ by Rihanna, and under fair use you can use like 10 seconds of it – I also completely changed the key and pitch – so I thought I would be totally fine,” says Gopalakrishnan, whose account was recently shut down for a third time. “I was aware that SoundCloud was doing this, but some bot took it down. Even Bollywood songs are being taken down — Bollywood remixes that I thought would not be susceptible to these takedowns.”

That brings up another development: Original Bollywood remixes. Popular Indian music producers began adding club beats to their own songs to package multiple versions on the original album.

It's partly a response to the American DJ movement and partly to supplant it with an Indian equivalent. The demand for more exciting musical styles makes losing a resource like SoundCloud even more disheartening.

"I’m not sure exactly how to bring it farther out," says Gopalakrishnan about spreading his music beyond its current niche. "Right now the college scene is so tight as a community that it works really well to push music out there. I’ve been DJing some, more than I have, particularly over the past year, and by doing that I’ve gotten the word out about my mixes."

“My really big hope is to kind of bring out like a new – to really push this to the next step, wherein it’s the combination of Indian music with opera, or drum and bass," he adds. "I’m working on a couple mixes where i’m trying to mix it with some African stuff as well, or Chinese stuff – so really trying to hone in on trying to share a new musical experience.”

"We're in a place in society, in our generation, where we have a lot more power than we think we do," Bhurji says. "And music, dance, art – they are some of the most powerful things that we can do to bridge these confusing gaps that society has placed on us. We can do a wonderful job showing people we have more in common than we actually do. Music shows that. And for me that purity, that defines this hustle. That's incredibly inspirational for me."

Clearly, it's inspired a whole lot more.

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