When Jimi Hendrix appeared as the multi-headed and multi-armed cosmic Vishnu on the cover of his band's second album, Axis: Bold as Love, in 1967 it caused quite a stir among the small but growing Hindu diaspora in the United States. However, the fact that Michael Jackson appeared as the face on the head of an iconic statue of the buffalo demon Mahishasura being trampled and slain by the great goddess during the 1982 Durga Puja held in Kolkata, while the singer's recently released song “Beat It” blasted repeatedly through loudspeakers in the background on the streets, raised few eyebrows. I had these two contrasting images in my head, the latter personally witnessed by me, as I began reading the book under review. But the author did not fulfill my expectations when he perhaps too easily dismissed such transnational borrowings at the very outset of this brief but jam-packed book.

Elliott H. Powell summarily rejects Caucasian (and Indic, I might add) appropriations at the beginning of his study in a vignette about a conversation he had on a plane with a passenger who grilled him about the use of Indian music by the Beatles and Madonna. The conversation ended abruptly when Powell impatiently put on his headphones and tuned out his inquisitive seatmate. In Sounds from the Other Side, Powell wishes to move beyond the white, Caucasian consumption of Indian musical culture by focusing instead on the collaborations between African American musicians and their South Asian counterparts by seeking out relationalities between these two social and political groups that reside on the periphery of mainstream American society.

Entangling African Americans with Western appropriative practices, he argues, “obfuscates the particularities of cross-cultural musical making practices between racially marginalized musicians” (p. 3). So, he asks, “what happens when we consider Black musicians’ South Asian sonic explorations as distinct from those of their white Western counterparts” (p. 3)? Much of the book under review seeks to answer this central question. Powell goes on to argue that there have been failures in reading race, gender, and sexuality together in Afro-Asian studies as a whole. He thus wishes to move beyond a white, male, heteronormative perspective to queer Afro-Asian musical collaborations by focusing on what he calls the “other side,” which is the side that excises and silences the dominant, masculine voice of the majority culture. By doing so, he expects to entangle the visual and sonic scapes that interact and blend together in the recordings and performances of African Americans and South Asians more in North America than in India, thereby exposing the musical collectivities one finds in genres such as jazz, funk, pop, rap, and hip-hop.

To achieve these goals, he begins in the 1960s with John Coltrane's 1965 album A Love Supreme and ends with Beyoncé's 2016 Super Bowl half-time performance. Sandwiched in between these two chapters, we read of Miles Davis's forgotten classic On the Corner (which was originally panned by critics); the freaky and funky unexpected connections between Rick James and André 3000 of OutKast; the sexual politics of Truth Hurts's song “Addictive,” for which she was sued by an Indian recording company for her Bollywood sampling; and, finally, Timbaland's cross-cultural collaboration with Rajé Shwari, a Gujarati American singer, supplemented throughout by a varied set of references to Indian elements in African American music included in the extensive endnotes that follow this short text.

All in all, Powell looks at the complicated ways that race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are “queered” on the other side. By “queer,” however, Powell does not simply mean same-sex relationships of the amorous sort (although many of his allusions are precisely that); instead, he suggests, the term has a more multivocalic sense, since it is not just a gay synonym but a word that stands for any form of “non-normativity” (p. 23), which is what characterizes the other side. In the case of Coltrane, for example, it is not his sexuality that makes his album queer but rather his tireless transgressions of boundaries that define it as belonging to the other side. Similarly, the Truth Hurts song “Addictive,” extensively explored in chapter 4, is about heterosexual lust, but with a rough, sadomasochistic twist, which also makes it non-normative.

Whether it is about Black politics, sexuality, sonic styling, or visual imagery, Powell argues that what binds his case studies together is their use of South Asian imagery, instrumentation, such as the tabla (tablah, tablā, ṭabl) or the sitar, or the sampling of Bollywood songs coupled with a commitment to Indian culture generally, as in the case of James, or to Indian spirituality more specifically, as in the case of Coltrane. One cannot disaggregate one from the other, as Powell argues in chapter 2 about Davis's album, in which the tabla and the conga percussively engage in a true dialogue with one another, not just mimetically related in a call-and-response fashion.

Powell makes a compelling case for attempting to disassociate Afro-Asian musical collaborations from their white interlocutors, but, in this reviewer's opinion, he perfunctorily overlooks or maybe intentionally ignores how white musicians, producers, arrangers, and others were and continue to be a part of the dialogical process to which he refers. For instance, he bases his conclusion that whites had nothing to do with the fusions discussed in the book by noting that his interviewees never mentioned the Beatles or Madonna in their discussions with him.Footnote ¹ However, Powell claims that it was Miles Davis who discovered the Bengali tabla player Badal Roy, but it was the guitarist John McLaughlin on the album, a white artist known for his deep commitment to Indian music and spirituality, who had suggested the electric sitar player Khalil Balakrishna and the tabla player Bihari Sharma to Davis several years earlier during the sessions leading up to Davis's most famous album, Bitches Brew, which was released in 1970, two years before On the Corner. Moreover, the white multi-instrumentalist Collin Walcott, a former student of the sitarist Ravi Shankar and tabla player Allah Rakha, also performed on the album along with Badal Roy. In fact, quite a number of the musicians on the album, such as keyboardist Chick Corea and producer Teo Macero, were not Black or South Asian. And Davis himself acknowledged that Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German experimental composer, influenced the album greatly with his aleatoric techniques, electronics, and especially tape manipulation, which Macero used extensively while mixing the album.

One could go on and on with other examples similar to the ones given here, such as the fact that the electric sitar, which was an instrument of choice on many African American pop and soul hits in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, is a white American invention of the late session musician Vinnie Bell. The irony, of course, is that it was the Indian musician Balakrishnan playing the white American electric sitar, which was made to sound like the Indian acoustic one used for northern Indian (i.e., Hindustani) classical music as well as Bollywood films, while a white American also played it on the album along with Balakrishnan.

Considering all the issues raised in the previous paragraph, one is compelled to rethink and further complicate the us/them dichotomy by asking, is the case of the electric sitar in particular an appropriation or a collaboration? And perhaps Powell's “other side” argument could have been accentuated by expanding it to include Latino/a musicians who performed with Davis (and the others) as well, since they, too, have been marginalized politically and socially in mainstream American culture. The point is that the deeper one excavates, the murkier the terrain becomes for seamless analyses. This is not to say that Powell has not made a significant intervention into the history of Indo-American crossovers by focusing solely on Afro-Asian fusion, but the story he tells might be a little too neat by excluding others who were a part of the overall mix.