Cornershop

One of the few '90s acts embraced by both rock critics and antirock club kids, Cornershop embodies all the possibility and spectacular excess of the global cut-and-paste culture. Although the British five-piece first established itself with conventional alt-rock songs, it has gone on to incorporate all kinds of noise into ambitious collage-style productions: The sweet Punjabi singing of leader Tjinder Singh's heritage, the scattershot crunch of sample-based beats, the idyllic sitar of Anthony Saffery, and the blistering funk of James Brown.

The initial Cornershop efforts, Hold On It Hurts and several out-of-print EPs, showcase a band with a taste for energetic pop and strident antiracist rhetoric. By the second full-length disc, the taut rock structures were overrun by sounds from the world bazaar: Woman's Gotta Have It is primarily an Indian pop record with wry English lyrics and an inclusive musical sensibility reflective of the burgeoning Asian Underground movement among British musicians and DJs of Indian ancestry.

The band's breakthrough came in 1997 with the hit "Brimful of Asha," a worshipful tribute to Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle that heralded the uniformly tremendous When I Was Born. A showcase for the beatific talk-singing of Singh, that single and other more assertively funky bits (including "When the Light Appears Boy," a collaboration with poet Allen Ginsberg) established Cornershop alongside Beck and others as purveyors of a new kind of hybrid pop, one that treated ethnicity as something to be messed with, explored, and exploited, not treated with kid gloves.

It took years for Cornershop to put together a formal followup -- there were several EPs and a lo-fi side project called Clinton, which debuted the chant "People Power in the Disco Hour" -- and when Handcream for a Generation finally arrived, in 2002, some considered it a faint echo of When I Was Born. Talkier and less rhythmic, it lacked an accessible single but instead offered several sprawling experiments, including the gospelly "Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform," bolstered by a children's choir, and the sample-heavy philosophical treatises "Motion the 11" and "Lessons Learned From Rocky I to Rocky III." (KEMBREW MCLEOD)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide