MO MONEY, MO PROBLEMS
Will the commercial success of gully rap disconnect Indian rappers from the struggles of the deprived?
HHow can you write without the pain? I will never let the pain go,” says 26-yearold rapper Naezy, when asked about his inspiration. Growing up in Kurla in east Mumbai, Naezy aka Naved Shaikh had been to jail for petty crimes by the time he was 14. In 2014, his DIY music video Aafat went viral, helping him stake a claim in the country’s underground rap scene. This year, Naezy, along with rap artists like Raja Kumari and SlowCheeta, will be seen on music reality show Hustle, a first-of-its-kind rap show to be aired soon on one of the biggest music TV channels, MTV.
The genre is clearly no longer an emerging art form, but a widely celebrated subculture coveted by big music labels and lifestyle brands. Major label Sony Music and newer indie label Azadi Records are each negotiating deals with more than half-a-dozen new hip-hop artists, while beer brand Bira 91 wants to double the number of hip-hop gigs it stages annually to 50.
Hip-hop music has travelled far since it first hit the streets of Brooklyn, New York, in the 1970s. Though constantly growing in popularity, rap achieved another benchmark of mainstream recognition when Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer for Music last year.
In India, to some extent, Bollywood film Gully Boy, released in February, did something similar for desi rap—validated the underground community of rappers. This is ironic since
the genre is somewhat of an antithesis of the popular music generally promoted by Bollywood. In the film, rap music is described as “hard”, and the harder it is, the better. While the film deserves credit for focusing on a subculture that has existed for a while in the country, it stopped short of getting too “real” and didn’t delve deeper into the angst of a Muslim boy growing up in a slum.
But the question is whether hip-hop artists in India will go the way of their US counterparts. Will they compromise on its ethics and go “soft” like many who “sold out” for riches and bling? When it first emerged, the ‘marketisation’ of hiphop was exciting for poor artists. In India, brand placement in Gully Boy from
companies like Truecaller, JBL, Adidas and Social Offline, confirms the genre’s growing popularity, but indie record labels such as Azadi Records, DesiHipHop, Gully Gang Entertainment are promising rappers that the integrity of their art won’t be compromised.
THE RISE OF GULLY RAP
In Mumbai, the early 2000s saw rappers and hip-hop crews popping up all over the city. Back then, there were online rap communities like Insignia Rap Combat, or performances at informal gatherings, called ‘ciphers’, of rappers, beatboxers and breakdancers. Part of hip-hop’s appeal was that it required few resources—a cheap pair of headset microphones, stolen beats from the internet, social media platforms like Orkut and ReverbNation and, of course, word of mouth publicity.
Divine (real name Vivian Fernandes) was introduced to hip-hop when a friend showed up in a T-shirt featuring American rapper 50 Cent. When Divine asked him who he was, the friend handed him a CD. “In da Club had just been released and 50 Cent was all the rage. I thought it was the coolest thing I had heard. I started digging deeper. I would sit in cyber cafes to learn as much as I could about hip-hop. I soon realised that 50 Cent wasn’t even among the coolest! Tupac, Biggie, Nas, Eminem… I learnt all their songs. It wasn’t all pretty, much like my life,” he says. Watching their videos, he said, “I began to talk like them, dress like them. I have always looked up to artists like Big Pun, Big L, Rakim and KRS-One… I related to their rhymes,” he says. At 17, he met Abhishek Dhusia (Ace) and Amey Patkar (AP), founders of the city’s first rap crew, Mumbai’s Finest, which opened up the world of rap to him.
In an interview to BBC News in 2017, Divine had said: “I’m talking [about] how I grew up, how I was left alone in this jungle, full of snakes and rats… We don’t have cars, guns, so we don’t talk about that.” Abandoned by his father at an early age, Divine was raised by his grandmother in Mum
bai’s JB Nagar after his mother moved to West Asia for work. He had friends who didn’t always operate on the right side of the law.
Hip-hop, says Divine, is a form of storytelling for the common man. “People assume it’s about booze or girls or violence. I didn’t sing about any of that. I wrote songs about my neighbourhood, my friends and my life. I rap in Hindi because it helps me reach a wider section of people, it makes my story and the listening experience more authentic.” Today, Divine inspires many to rap in regional languages—Marathi, Gujarati and Tamil, among others.
YO, WHERE YOU AT?
In hip-hop, where you come from defines your brand. In the capital’s urban villages, beat boys like the Khirkee 17 express rage against the man through b’boying and telling personal stories of survival and unrealised dreams. Khirki, just across the street from some of Delhi’s most high-end malls, is an area where the graffiti by the residents expresses their disjointed experience in a city that’s a collective of identities. In one-room tenements, young boys and girls sit composing their stories and flowing them to beats.
While the trio of MC Freeze, Akshay Tashan and MC Hari has found support in Khirki’s Khoj Studio that works with underground artists, Kochi’s Southside BBoys, a hip-hop crew, were invited in January to perform at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
India’s gaping inequities and class and caste struggles make it a perfect breeding ground for those who want to tell stories with unabashed punchlines. These artists understand technology,
the power of social media and the hope, that hip-hop will continue to be a cry for resistance despite the lure of money offered for stories of poverty and deprivation, is alive within them.
COMING OF AGE IN INDIA
In the US, hip-hop has been validated on various levels. By universities, like Harvard and Stanford and a Universal Hip-Hop Museum scheduled to open its doors in 2022 in the Bronx. Back home, Mumbai University launched a dedicated course on hip-hop this month—Introduction to Hip-hop Studies—the first such varsity-level course in Asia.
At the grassroots level, Dharavibased hip-hop group, Slumgods, has started the After School of Hip-Hop for the children living in Dharavi, in association with the Dharavi Project, set up by Qyuki and Universal Music’s CSR
arm. Even political parties jumped on the hip-hop bandwagon earlier this year in the run up to the Lok Sabha election, with the IT cells of the BJP and Congress releasing their own rap songs using beats from the popular tracks of Gully Boy.
According to Shridhar Subramaniam, president, Sony Music, and chairman of the Indian Music Industry, it took about four decades for non-Bollywood music to emerge as popular. Music streaming app Saavn was the first to launch an Indian hip-hop music channel and released Naezy’s Azaad Hu Mai as the first song on its Artist Originals (AO) programme. Music festivals have helped bring these artists and their music into the mainstream, encouraging high-end brands to approach them with offers of associations.
Hip-hop is the fastest-growing genre on JioSaavn. In 2017, the movement reached a high point with Suede Gully,a video featuring the largest collaboration in the country between Indian artists practising three different forms of street art—dance, graffiti and music. The video has artists like Divine, b-boying crews and graffiti artists from various cities.
“The rap scene isn’t just me and Naezy, but many more rappers, b-boys, producers,” says Divine, who always wished for a life different from the one he saw growing up. “Hip-hop speaks to everyone, irrespective of their postal code. That is its biggest strength, especially in Mumbai where the richest and the poorest walk the same road.” The rapper launched Gully Gang Entertainment in February as a one-stop shop for everything hip-hop in India. The company released its first single, Gully Gang Cypher, the most raw form of rap with a focus on lyrics. The single features fresh and upcoming talents like D’Evil and Shah Rule.
WILL HIP-HOP LIVE?
Recently, Bengaluru rapper Smokey the Ghost said that Naezy might compromise the integrity of his art form for money and riches. “I have to look after my own security, given the current political climate,” says Naezy. “As an Indian Muslim, it is difficult to get my voice heard. The things I have seen growing up—knives being used, fights over territory—has hardened me. I used to hang around with such gangs... I was going in the same direction. We eventually moved out of the chawl to a building nearby... It allowed me to see life for what it was and that’s where I started writing.”
Smokey the Ghost is verbalising what everyone is thinking—will Indian rap and hip-hop artists slowly stop speaking up about important issues in favour of more marketable music? Nas, the famous rapper, had declared in 2006 that hiphop, once music of protest, is dead with an album by the same name, lamenting the genre’s commercialisation.
VOICE OF THE MINORITY
Hip-hop is accommodating of new voices. The new-age protest vocabulary is expanding with artists like 20-yearold Awessum Frankie (Mohammed Huzaifa Reza), rapping to encourage young first-time voters to vote. Then there is Sumeet Samos of Odisha, from the Dalit community who wants to introduce Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi voices in the ‘Brahminical’ Indian hip-hop scene. The 26-year-old rapper has spoken up in interviews against the appropriation of slum life by upper-caste rappers like Raja Kumari (who has collaborated with Divine).
Aamir Shaikh, aka Shaikhspeare, founder of Bombay Lokal, a crew of beatboxers, graffiti artists and rappers in Mumbai, is one of the few rappers resisting the corporate lure to prevent a dilution of the genre’s protest ethos. Shaikh moved from Bihar to Mumbai in 2007 and started rapping professionally, earning a mere Rs 8,000-10,000 a month. His lyrics were supposed to feature in Gully Boy, but he says they were raw and dealt with Muslim identity and didn’t make it to the final film. His song Inquilab is an attempt to address the issue of being a minority person in India in the current political scenario. “I want to make conscious political rap,” he says. “I hope it works out for us.”
For now, the sneakers have arrived and the gully boys are tagging the brands on Instagram, basking in the glow of the fame from their rags-to-riches stories.