On January 23, fire engulfed the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America. Over a century of accumulated history—some 85,000 artifacts—could have been swept away like dust: film reels, old records, typewriters, wedding dresses, copies of the first English-language Chinese American newspaper. About a third of its archive was eventually recovered, but the disaster underscored the collection’s irreplaceability. MOCA’s founders, Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai, had initially salvaged items from dumpsters; apparently, the owners didn’t view their junk as worthy of preservation. As the cultural critic Hua Hsu observed last year, “Immigrants have not tended to regard their own lives as rising to the status of history.”
Something of the museum’s humble approach to memorializing—accumulating the residue of ordinary life, building it into something consequential—is expressed in Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East, the first release in the Smithsonian Folkways’ Asian Pacific America series. Like several recent albums by artists of color that reimagine the American cowboy, it discards the romantic myth of a white gunslinger galloping across Western plains. Instead, it claims that the true spirit of the cowboy—his courage, resilience, and relentless pursuit of freedom—is embodied by immigrants. Jain’s ancestors migrated from Rajasthan to Western Punjab, and then during the 1947 partition of India, fled to Eastern Punjab in one of the largest mass migrations in history.
In the 1970s his parents emigrated to Rochester, New York, where he absorbed his siblings’ fervor for “Rush, Ice-T, and guitar ‘gods’”; he listened to his mother’s Jain bhajans (devotional songs); he discovered jazz legends like Max Roach and John Coltrane. Since then, Jain has become part of a rich heritage of South Asian American artists—and Asian American artists more broadly—who put Western jazz and other black music in dialogue with Eastern classical traditions. Wild Wild East, which combines influences from Bollywood music to surf rock, testifies to how second-generation immigrants form their own distinctly American identity.
Plunging into the cowboy theme, the album immediately conjures the arid frontiers of Ennio Morricone, the composer behind some of the world’s most iconic spaghetti western scores. Wild Wild East’s opening track, “Immigrant Warrior,” is cinematic almost unto parody, triumphant horns galloping with heroic resolve. But after a minute, the narrative begins to fray. Electric guitar whines and sputters, unchaining itself from the melody, until the composition snaps back to the victorious march. Other disturbances come later in a sensuous saxophone passage that flows into low, accelerating drum beats. Jain seems to suggest that there are spaces of possibility within these ruptures, signs of trouble within the smooth continuum of history.
Many of these compositions are intellectually thrilling to unravel, even while stifled by the album’s lofty concept. Wild Wild East is indebted to R.D. Burman’s vibrant, Morricone-influenced soundtrack for the 1975 “curry western” Sholay, but Sholay is imbued with a sprightly mischief and whimsy that Wild Wild East doesn’t quite reach. It’s really that the omnipresence of Morricone’s ghost can grow tiresome. “Wild Wild East” and “Aye Mere Dil Kahin Aur Chal” are invigorated by Ganavya’s wistful singing and Jain’s electrifying dhol rhythms respectively, but they would have benefited further from the sort of jubilance Jain unleashes with his dhol-and-brass band Red Baraat.
The album’s most frustrating song is “Red, Brown, Black.” Its opening cymbal crash is akin to the protagonist of a teen drama plugging his guitar into an amp to signal that he’s about to rock the high school auditorium. “Embarrassed of my culture from the get-go/Hip-hop raised me with best flows,” L.A. based rapper HASEEB boasts. Though well-intentioned, his subsequent acknowledgment that “black culture taught me how to say it with my chest though” is a superficial bid for cross-racial connection. As the album’s only English language-based song, it becomes an overly simplified attempt to summarize the release’s 42-pages of meticulously written liner notes on personal and global history. Then again, this record’s geographic and historical scope is so ambitious that its flaws reveal the difficulty of balancing cultural rigor with accessibility.
It’s worth remembering that the cowboy—tall, imposing—is revered not for who he is, but what he represents. Lionizing the immigrant in his place may be, on one hand, a long-overdue recognition of those who have been overlooked by history. But, more cynically, it can be a shiny valorization of one overbearing ideal for another. The most sincere moments on Wild Wild East are the ones least weighed down with meaning: After Pawan Benjamin’s solemn reflection on the bansuri flute in “Blackwell,” Alam Khan loosens the mood on the sarod. In “Wild Wild East,” shimmering walls of sound feel like floating face-down in a pool and watching light patterns dance on the floor. These small moments of peace feel more radical than any grand statement.
