No genre is complete without its own one-hit wonder, and Truth Hurts fills that space. Sample: Lata Mangeshkar – Thoda Resham Lagta Hai It translates as: “If someone wants to commit suicide, what can you do?” The liberal sprinkling of sitar might not have aged fantastically well, but at the time it was completely refreshing to hear. The Hindi hook chosen raises some question. Here, however, the Hindi vocal is treated with respect, given its own time to shine. It was produced by the legendary Just Blaze, a man more famous for making sampled beats for the likes of Jay Electronica on Exhibit C, and the incorporation of such a wildly different sound might have felt forced and just a novelty in lesser hands. React helped shape the template used for sampling old Bollywood hits for the rest of the decade.

Sample: Asha Bhosle and Mohammad Rafi – Chandi Ka Badan Over a decade on, any Indian wedding DJ worth their salt has this up their sleeve as a guaranteed dancefloor filler. Slightly distasteful references to snake charming aside, Jay Z revved up the bandwagon, and before long everyone was on it. The stripped-back original is largely indistinguishable from most folk-tinged bhangra, which makes the Panjabi MC remix all the more impressive. Somehow, a bloke in the Midlands slapping some dhol and a vocal over the Knight Rider theme sparked a period of Hindi and bhangra revolution in the urban music industry, and never one to miss a trick, Jay Z got himself involved for the official remix. This was one of the first major crossover hits, a song that would creep in to school discos and punctuate adverts as well as blast from radios.

The next, I was being mobbed at school by people wanting me to either sing, translate or identify songs for people. One minute, national radio geared towards Asian people was a bit of a joke, with production values that sounded like the music was being broadcast through a yoghurt pot and string from a Solihull basement. Nothing prepared me for the first time I heard Asian music being sampled by the biggest names in R&B and hip-hop.

Hindi modern song