The cultural import of Sidhu Moosewala
Diljit Dosanjh walks into a bar, fresh from a break-up. He asks the concierge broken-heartedly the estimated value of the establishment’s inventory, pays it off in hard cash with an almost matching tip, and then issues a warning: To keep shut about what is to follow. He takes large swigs to make short work of a bottle of whisky and vandalises the place. The drinking and the mindless violence change the mood and he leaves the place dancing. No lives lost, no living beings harmed. The endearing sequence is from Dosanjh’s hit Panj Tara (Five Star).
Thankfully, the lowest depths his rage plumbs is the destruction of a cocktail mountain creatively set up by an industrious bartender doing an honest day’s work. Because, don’t we all know, worse could have happened. A Punjabi pop star of today’s is supposed to be a high-t, man’s man who doesn’t take bad news well.
Breaking glasses at a watering hole is relatively low-t. T, to those not in on the rap scene, is short for testosterone, ostensibly a driver of heteronormative stardom.
Literature and art from the region with a blood-soaked history have always been characterised by a fair share of veer ras (valour) and hasya ras (humour) but, over the past few years, musical sensibility has taken an obsessive turn towards gang culture. This may come as a surprise to the uninitiated, but it’s common in Punjabi music to use the sound of real gunfire as a percussion instrument.
Sidhu Moosewala was not the first young superstar showing off a morbid fascination with firearms and will, unfortunately, not be the last, though his cultural imprint as a desi gangsta rap icon is unlikely to be equalled. In a perverse way, his murder by pumping 24 bullets into him — he fired two shots in self-defence, according to Gurvinder Singh, a friend riding with him — will cement his legacy.
As stars — from Anil Kapoor to Drake — mourn the loss, the question on unfamiliar observers’ lips is what made Moosewala great? For one, his songs had heavy punching power, rousing lyrics delivered in a roaring voice. In a landscape infested with uncompromising masculinity, Moosewala was the alpha male. Fans saw in him a no-nonsense idol who was authentic — honest, stubborn, unsophisticated, representing old-school retrosexual values.
His subjects weren’t unusual — just good-old guns, girls, gaddis (cars), apparently things of everyday concern to the stereotypical Jatt flogged endlessly by the music industry — but their treatment was. Moosewala’s iteration of the Jatt was not the more common happy-golucky, yaaran-da-yaar (friend of friends) agrarian villager, or the prosperous urban pendu (rustic) driving his mates around in a Bentley. It was more likely to be the over-age college senior interfering in student union polls, leading an entourage of G-wagons, or a triggerhappy member of a gun club in Toronto.
Punjab’s stars put themselves out there to be judged on their choice of cars and guns, and the fans love to oblige. The opening verses of a Dosanjh hit announce the narrator has a car with an eight-figure price tag while in a collaboration with rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh we are informed that the hunter friends, Dosanjh and Singh, have but one hobby — recreationally firing gunshots — that keeps them on the perpetual lookout for “new prey”.
While Dosanjh, the only Punjabi singer with a social media following larger than Moosewala’s at last count, went mainstream with acting gigs in Bollywood after playing the lead in regional blockbusters, his musical choices evolved too: To happier pop songs with a wider appeal. But Moosewala, in his short career, remained true to his original genre: Earthy ballads set to a rap beat and mouthed with a visceral impact, not letting the listener forget that this is a land historically watered by blood.
In a song, he serves a dire warning to rivals fancying themselves as songwriters by just copying his work: They’ll be torn apart and thrown away by Moosewala (the reference to oneself in the third person lends a sinister touch to the threat that sounds chillingly real). Even a problem as academic as plagiarism is sought to be addressed through violence.
Stage personas are rarely true though. Moosewala, the gangsta rap legend, was not a real gangster just as Moosewala, the assembly election candidate, was not a real politician. It was in his own world of music that he ruled. As he asserted in the super-hit Dhakka (by force), no votes are cast in the jungle. An artist and his art are said to shape each other, and one is hauntingly left to ponder if the latest from Moosewala’s meagre but influential body of work — eerily titled The Last Ride — was a selffulfilling lyrical prophecy.