Nasa - Shah Shah

What this video is

Nasa's 'Shah Shah' (1990) emerges at a peculiar crossroads in popular music history: the brief window when Sire/Warner Bros. invested in experimental East-West fusion acts for mainstream alternative audiences. Released the same year as Peter Gabriel's 'Passion' (1989) and amid growing Western fascination with world music spurred by Ofra Haza's crossover success — with whom Nasa collaborated on the album's title…

Why it matters

As one of the earliest major-label attempts to fuse hard rock guitar structures with authentic Middle Eastern modal instrumentation (sitar, tabla, dombek, surna), Nasa's 'Shah Shah' prefigures the 1990s world-rock fusion trend by several years. Its Sire Records backing and François Kevorkian remix…