British-born DJ and producer Panjabi MC (Rajinder Rai) is famous in the U.S. for a remix of his "Mundian to Bach Ke" ("Beware of the Boys") that featured Jay-Z. "Beware of the Boys," an almost seamless blend of bhangra and hiphop, is a warning to young women to, more or less, protect their virginity from the sexual hunger of wild boys. Obviously such a message has no currency in the pop-rap world that made Jay-Z filthy rich, so the title of the remix was cut down to "Beware," and the meaning of the song changed to "beware of the boyz in da hood." (However, it would have been marvelous, a real breakthrough, to hear Jay-Z warning American girls to keep their skirts long and protect "that thing"—to use the words of Lauryn Hill—from the wolves of the street.)

Panjabi MC has been mixing hiphop with traditional Punjabi rhythms (or riddims) for over a decade, and for those of us who are exhausted by serious hiphop (which dominates the underground) or the bling-bling rap (which dominates the mainstream), it is nothing short of a relief to hear DJs, rappers, and singers have so much fun with the genre. When we hear desi (desi meaning South Asians in diaspora) mixes, scratches, and rhymes, we hear a celebration, a cheer that we almost never hear in our hiphop: "Hiphop hooray, ho-hey-ho-hey-ho-hey-ho." This is no exaggeration; desi hiphop has that kind of excitement and energy.

And it's not a matter of it being indifferent to the market, indifferent to the music of the cash register. Like old-skool hiphop, the desi scene is about paying bills, beating the breaks, getting "paid in full," liking your "pockets fat not flat," waiting for the moment that "the papes come," "wrapping your hands around a hundred dollar bill," "getting money to the day that [you] die," and the universal "C.R.E.A.M." What marks the difference between the current desi hiphop scene and the American one is this: In American hiphop, creativity and commercial success have been divorced since 1997; for desi hiphop, on the other hand, that marriage is not yet over. And the figure who stands as the father of that great union—a union of not only market drives and artistic innovation but also two seemingly distant/distinct cultural worlds (the rural sounds of the Punjab region; the urban sounds of the U.S.)—is Panjabi MC.

Who can ever forget Panjabi MC's performance at the Showbox two years ago or so? It brought together elements of a Third World market, elements of the kind of hiphop extravaganza you might have seen in a New York City park 30 years ago (towering dancehall speakers, breakdancers, the original MCs hyping DJs), and traditional Punjabi dancing (costumes and all). South Asian food was sold near the club's entrance, behind the DJs—who were cutting records "down to the bone"—was a large screen that advertised local South Asian businesses and services (from computers to travel agencies to real-estate agencies), and at the bars stood sexy and young South Asians, sipping well drinks as they watched men and women on the stage doing dance moves that once celebrated a harvest, the arrival of a new season, or the birth of something or someone important.

The cultural mix was intoxicating. The past and the future were compressed into the tight space of the dance floor. The dance floor had such meaning, such power. It was a laboratory, a site of experimentation that involved the modification of values, the transvaluation of values, the reinforcement of values. You weren't sure where things were exactly heading—was the future changing the past or the past modifying the future?

And to make matters more exhilarating, more complex, the hiphop that Panjabi MC spun that night (and mixed into the music he sold) was coded as Western, as that which stood opposite to the code of the East—the dohl-drum rhythms. But when did hiphop become one with the idea of Western civilization? Indeed, it was music made by people who, for the most part, have been rejected by or are on the margins of Western society. But there on the desi dance floor, hiphop had a crucial role that was not far from the role that enlightenment played in the 18th century—a modernizing agent. Hiphop was the means by which the past became the future.