Thirty Years of Kula Shaker’s ‘K.’

It has been thirty years since Kula Shaker released the album “K).” This is a style of writing you will sometimes see — ‘Can you believe it’s only been 110 years since Billy Murray popularized Irving Berlin’s, “I Love A Piano?”’ It’s true! — and it’s meant to be something of a shorthand. Music lies deep within us, so much so it lights up neural pathways that would otherwise be lost to dementia, and yet we can’t hold music. It’s time-travel. It’s air. And so of course we’re surprised when someone tells us a song or set of songs has been around for a while. How could that be? It was just here, right here.

The elevator pitch of the band Kula Shaker might go something like this: imagine if — at the height of Brit Pop — a band emerged that played like a psychedelic Franz Ferdinand. Imagine this band being inspired by The Beatles visiting India in the 1960’s. Imagine lyrics that — when sung in English — were fairly simple, everyday, and direct. Catchiness was king.

For myself, the band proved to be something of a door. I would not have become a fan of Alice Coltrane, Zomes, The Comet is Coming, or even Nils Frahm if it weren’t for the way in which Kula Shaker entered the fairly rigid and regimented radio landscape of the 1990’s — where you heard the same set of songs every day for months on end — and said, “Hey, you realize you can expand the possibilities of all this just a bit, right?” (If you like movies, think of it as the equivalent of watching The Darjeeling Limited and realizing that that can then take you to the films of Satyajit Ray.)

Govinda Jaya Jaya
Gopala Jaya Jaya
Radha-ramanahari
Govinda Jaya Jaya

And then there’s the song of theirs that I think holds up best, “Govinda,” quoted above, a traditional devotional chant in Sanskrit.

The song sits in my ten-year-old heart like a kid’s version of an Umm Kulthum song. It was my song in a house full of Ravi Shankar. The sonic texture always left me wondering what sort of bird matched the sound being crafted in the song — something multicolored, something ‘trippy’ felt far too easy — and so I pressed on into the overgrowth, whistling for the Simurgh.