Dont Be Shy - Rouge (2005) - by Ciaran Thapar
In December 2005, when I was in year 10, my family travelled to north India. It was my first time in Asia. As we drove between relatives in Punjab — including the home of my cousin Amulya in Chandigarh — I listened continuously to my metallic green iPod Mini, which held a maximum of one thousand Mp3s.
Among them was Don’t Be Shy by Rouge, which became a personal soundtrack to my time away. It had appeared as a video on Channel U earlier that year, stunning me into young teenage awe on discovering three brown women singing with catchy confidence on the television screen, in a space mostly preserved for releases in underground Black British music. I’d then found from a quick surf of LimeWire that a remix existed featuring ad-libs from New York hip-hop and Dipset heavyweight, Juelz Santana.
By the time I got to India at Christmas, it had become one of the most played songs on my iTunes. Looking back, it was a rich example of how the mid-2000s formed a golden phase in UK urban music’s eclectic, experimental, exportable onward journey.
At the time, American hiphop featuring cheesy, soulful vocals was topping the charts and producers like Timbaland had started sampling Bollywood songs. Grime was still in its raw infancy and UK bhangra had gained a mass audience after the popular explosion of Panjabi MC’s Mundian To Bach Ke.
Meanwhile, a new generation of West Midlands-based artists like Dr Zeus — the man behind this and many other bangers from that era — were finding new ways to pierce through to mainstream dancefloors by combining dhol thwacks, tumbi and bansuri melodies, shuddering bass lines and Punjabi vocal cuts, sprinkled with the sugary seasoning of American r&b or UK garage production techniques.
Don’t Be Shy emerged from the convergence of these trends.
Six years later, in 2011, when I was on the cusp of my twenties, I spent a month travelling in the Himalayas. On my way back down to Delhi to fly home to London, I passed via Chandigarh to visit Amulya again. He offered to drive me around in his new car. As we cruised slowly through the bustling grounds of his university campus, Don’t Be Shy started blasting from his speakers, vibrating our seats, prompting me to glance at him with a knowing grin and hit the rewind button on his stereo. Turns out we’d both been listening to it all along, on opposite sides of the planet.
Then when I visited again last year, in February 2023, 12 years later — with us both now married and in our thirties — it came on at the shisha bar he took me to after watching Twenty20 cricket over plates of tandoori soya chaap and glass tumblers of Old Monk rum. It took me back to our first meeting in the small neighbourhood park opposite his grandmother’s (my dadi ji’s younger sister’s) house, reinforcing our distant yet digitally connected brotherhood.
I never heard another song by Rouge. That’s probably my mistake. But what must be their greatest creation stays in my rotation.
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