Envy Music

Description:Text: Rajinder Kumar Dudrah

The Soho Road houses several South Asian music and video retail stores. These date back to the late sixties and early seventies, when mainly Indian shopkeepers began to run their own retail outlets. In the early years music tapes, record albums, and film magazines were sold alongside household groceries.

With the growth of the British Asian music industry since the eighties, Asian music and video shops have now become an identifiable feature of the Soho Road. The legendary and latest artists and their sounds are often heard projected out on to the street from the loud sound systems in these shops.

Such stores also act as local information points through fliers and word of mouth. They inform a largely youth clientele of the latest gigs and club nights in and around Birmingham. Alongside the latest releases and back catalogues of South Asian films, British bhangra music, Anglo-Asian pop, folk music, and British Asian newspapers and magazines, the latest and back catalogue of Hollywood blockbusters can also be found. In this way, the Asian music and video store is an eclectic mixture of South Asian, African-Caribbean, British and American popular culture.

See Sources and Further Reading:

Dudrah, Rajinder K, “Drum’n’dhol: British bhangra music and diasporic South Asian identity formation”, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, pp 363-383