um, hang on...

'asian music' [desi/bhangra etc] is intrinsically tied up with an ethnic identity [tho obviously it doesn't mean it should be exclusively produced and consumed by an asian audience] and the cultural heritage from which it derives, to one extent or another

'indie music' is not. (if we;re gonna trace back things, back to 60s guitar bands...well, who did the rolling stones etc rip off - white fellas with guitars? nem..) The entire 4-ugly-(white)blokes-with-guitars' feature of it is not something that should be celebrated, *let alone* accepted and unchallenged. unless yr the sort of muscial neanderthal who pines for Real Music and wants to live with the decomposed rotted noelrock corpse of britpop trapped in 1997 for eternity, obviously..... That's the sort of attitude that leads to and perpetuates the dumbshit attitudes towards [eg] women in the 'indie scene' or the 'idm/electronica scene' we've got today that need tearing apart
[the ethnicity of indie bands'isnt exactly really a pressing topic in need of debate in the way the gender one is tho, i'm happy to concede..but it brings up related points..-]

going back to the point of other certain scenes though, you've the double edged sword of being labelled some cultural tourist if yr a whitemiddleclasskid who's just innocently falling in love with 2-step or bhangra or ragga or hiphop or whatever. no win. even artists fall prey to it - witness the criticisms levelled at some of the Tigerbeat6 crew for being a bunch of [by and large] white guys tucking into hiphop and pulling it into new shapes, "thieves" of black culture yadda yadda....uhh, even tho 606 is venezuelan by origin, not a white homebred american kid, but hey, what are details to some journos.....yet amongst their midst now is jayce clayton aka dj rupture who uses incredible cross-genre samples and knows his pan-continent musical history/heritage so so well, straddling race and thnicity, and its revealed so in his music. And i don't see him having a problem with them? [[the initial press for "minesweeper suite" was more of that "white kids stealing black culture" bs anyway, regardless, just cos it was on tb6..]]

i dunno. this is going round in circles a bit, its tricky to make it otherwise - we can't fix it all ourselves on our own. i still challenge the idea that other scenes eg the uk bhangra one are as deserving of criticism of that sort as the indie one may be, just due to the progeny of the respective genres - we need to put things in some context, frankly. plus, the press has mucho to answer for, which goes without saying really but shouldnt go unmentioned..