This has been happening in America for quite some time. I don't think the day is far when Indian girls will enter the rap game. In fact, it's not so much misogyny as playful sexual aggression. Not only do they have a lot to say, and about a range of subjects, they have also successfully put rebellion back into Indian music.Īs for those who find some of the lyrics misogynistic, well, it's really part of the genre. The new rappers, with their rough-and-ready recordings, have changed this. But one was always left with the feeling that most had little to say. They are technically very sound, and often use foreign professionals during production, which gives their albums a slick feel. Even though this is a revolution that will never be televised, the thousands of hits that these underground rappers garner on YouTube, and on their Reverbnation pages, shows that they have a massive audience.įor years, the Indian underground was dominated by rock bands. Of course, none of this stuff will ever make it to the television or the radio. His songs are brutally explicit about sex. The content though is hardcore desi Punjabi: the 'pind' replacing the 'hood', 'purja' replacing 'hoe', and so on. He borrows heavily from gangsta rap - the fast cars, the sharp suits, the branded sports gear, the sexual aggro/machismo. He doesn't perform his underground stuff but it's a huge success on the net. Honey plays live from Toronto to Dehradun. People like Kash and Faadu are invisible and don't do shows. But like the others he has an underground side. He now charges 70 lakhs for doing a Bollywood song.
Yo Yo Honey Singh, the final rapper in this little survey, is mainstream.
He is just an angry young man in his early twenties, rapping in English about the atrocity he sees around him: "We're taking back the throne/ With my fist held high/ And holding a stone." They thought separatists were funding him. He makes it clear that he has little to do with contemporary American rappers: "Everyday hustle, hell I ain't no Jay Z." He draws from an older tradition of American rap, which was about blacks resisting white oppression: "They can't stop an idea/ When our minds are free." His heart bleeds for Kashmir, a state he's never travelled out of: "They gave us blood and hate/ Then wondered why every man is a rebel." In an interview to the BBC he spoke about a comic but scary moment when Indian authorities raided his studio. His lyrics deal with the tensions between the hapless Kashmiri and the Indian state. If G**** Circus raps about the battle between the little man and the mainstream in abstract terms, MC Kash is very specific and concrete. I lost my virginity but other way round." Faadu's tracks reveal the dark flipside of our engineering success story: the perversions, and lonely and bleak inner lives: "Internet pe girlfriend ban gayi she asked me to come home/ As I started upon she had p- of her own/ Socha fir jab aa gaya to kuch to karke jaoon, yeah. The IITs have been trying to ban porn for many years but with little success. It's well-known that in engineering colleges boys brag not about how many women they've been with, but how many gigabytes of porn they have on their hard drives. Porn offers a solution but till a point: "Life me newspaper nahi padha but matrimonial padhta hoo/Maxim, Playboy, even Kamasutra bhi subscribe ki hai/ It's humiliating par Sarita, Grahshobha bhi try ki hai." This rings so true. And like all rappers, they are not afraid to use cuss words to make their point. Rap is perhaps the most direct musical genre, and these rappers are masters at saying it like it is. Honey Singh is strongly influenced by present-day gangsta rap. Calcutta's G**** Circus has a wider lyrical arc, but the words are essentially about resisting the mainstream. DJ Faadu draws from a personal-confessional tradition, much like Eminem. In 1970s America, The Last Poets railed against the oppression of blacks Kash talks about the plight of Kashmiris in contemporary times. MC Kash is in the activist mould, much like The Last Poets (in content, not in style).
It's not surprising that each of them draws inspiration from different traditions of rap. What unites them is the fact that they are using rap as a weapon to deal with local realities. None of these rappers know each other, nor are there rap festivals (like with Indian rock and electronica) where they can meet each other and share notes.