For a brief, shining moment last night, Rupa & the April Fishes held the #1 position on YouTube with the video for ‘Une Americaine a Paris’:

The Gypsy swing song is about a chilling moment of anti-American in an Algerian hood in Paris:

She began with a song called “Une Americaine a Paris” — decidedly not a reference to George Gershwin’s blithely upbeat ‘An American in Paris’… An [Algerian] man had struck up a good conversation… “This wall came down between us,” she says. “And he said, ‘Aren’t you afraid to be an American in Paris with all these angry Arabs? If you were in my neighborhood…’ and he just went [motions hand across throat]… it was probably one of the most chilling experiences I’ve ever had…”

She was born in the San Francisco Bay Area; her parents moved her back to India, then to France; and she settled again in California… Rupa Marya is a doctor of internal medicine on faculty at UCSF… She was able to take advantage of a flexible residency track designed for female doctors who may be expecting children, which allows her to spend six months working and the other half of the year touring. [Link]

… their enchanting mix of chic French nouvelle vague, rousing Latin alternative grooves, energetic Gypsy swing, and dreamy Indian ragas… earned them comparisons to everyone from Manu Chao, Pink Martini and Lhasa to Beirut, Dengue Fever, Gogol Bordello and Keren Ann… [Marya writes] songs in a multitude of languages, including French, Spanish, Hindi and English…. [The live shows’] circus-like atmosphere… channels a modern-day Moulin Rouge. [Link]

Here’s the video:

Previously: Zunerupa