KEEPING IT SIMPLE
mula that Puri and Singh cracked in their first meeting in Mumbai: make something in Bhojpuri which is identical to Punjabi hip-hop in style but doesn’t have the features associated with the raunchiness of Bhojpuri songs. “I want to better the image of the Bhojpuri music industry. I want to do for this region what Honey Singh did for Punjabi music. Why cannot we listen to these songs with our families? This is because no one is ready to experiment with new genres/styles,” says Singh. It takes around ~2-3,00,000 to produce a song. The production cost and profits are shared between Singh and the music company.
Iwant singers and artistes in the Bhojpuri music industry to observe, and if possible, emulate me,” says 28-year-old Chandigarh-based rapper Chandan Yadav aka Gangster Yadav. Yadav feels that since members of the Bhojpuri industry did not produce
“decent quality work”, people like him – a digital marketeer with no prior experience in composing music or songs – had to step in. “They got stuck to a pattern of songs that bordered on vulgarity. They refused to change when the world around them was experimenting with various genres,” he says.
Yadav has put out three songs since 2016. He is working on his fourth, titled Dadagiri, portions of which have been shot in Thailand.
Yadav is a fan of Punjabi rapper Bohemia. But he never imagined that he would himself create Bhojpuri rap His immediate surroundings provided inspiration. In Chandigarh, what he saw around him were migrants from the region in various professions. “People from Bihar are an integral part of almost every state and city in North India, and Chandigarh is no different. So you keep listening to their language every now and then,” he says.
When Punjabi rap artistes became popular, Yadav thought of trying something different in the genre.
Yadav’s songs are a mix of Hindi and Bhojpuri rather than out-and-out Bhojpuri. They resemble Punjabi albums in production quality and beats. “I don’t use actual raw Bhojpuri. We keep it simple so that it can reach the masses,” he says.
Gradually, he says, he wants to diversify into Hindi and Punjabi songs.