Cartel Madras | Buzz Meter
REPRESENTATION IS CENTRAL TO EVERYTHING THAT SISTERS CONTRA AND EBOSHI do as hiphop duo Cartel Madras. “When we began making music, we were making it from the perspective of diaspora artists, immigrants, people of colour, women, the queer community. All of that came together and we started calling it goonda rap,” Contra explains.
Their new EP, Age of the Goonda, is brash, loud, and carves a space in hiphop for stories that once only existed in fragments. Embracing the word “goonda” — a South Asian term that loosely translates to “thug” — goonda rap is the umbrella under which the duo embrace their intersectionality.
“Age of the Goonda makes the case for a certain type of Indian woman that we really don’t get to see,” Contra explains. “A South Indian woman who is radical, who is very sexually in touch with herself, is aggressive and takes up a lot of fucking space. I think that was the type of the woman we wanted to make an album about and for.”
Born in Chennai, India and based in Calgary, the pair joined Seattlebased Sub Pop Records in 2019, and credit the label’s liberal attitude as one of factors that drove them to sign their deal.
“Working with Sub Pop has really been an artist’s dream in a lot of ways,” says Eboshi. “Sub Pop is a really artist-centric label. There’s no aspect of the music we’re creating, the look we have [or] our personalities that’s being run or controlled by them. They really are just like: do your thing, do it well, do it loud. Go wild.”
Although the sisters wear their many identities proudly, they refuse to be written off as tokens. They take a music-first approach to Age of the Goonda, where universal draws like breakneck rhymes and rousing beats (provided by hidden gems like Vancouver-based producer Skinny Local and Calgary beatmaker Nevik) take precedence above all. But there are nods to South Asian culture, Hinduism, race and queer identity that speak very specifically to people who see themselves in one or many of these spaces.
“At the end of the day, Age of the Goonda is trap music. But who is delivering it? A different character than people are used to,” says Eboshi. “We want people to [see] that there’s versatility here. [ We’re] going to showcase these identities in a way that [no one has] seen before.”