Four new artists from the city’s bustling hip-hop scene talk about tapping into the sound of the streets to make music that stands apart
Photographs Yusuf Lokhandwala
Junior Fashion Stylist Nishtha Parwani
“It’s all about that one moment when your track comes on and you hear people say ‘Aree, yeh ladka kaun hai?’ (Who’s that boy?).” These words from Gully Gang rapper Altaf Shaikh aka MC Altaf, echo the philosophy of an entirely new generation of Bombay hip-hop. What this post-Gully Boy class of rappers believes in is simple – using beats that stand out to tell stories that are as personal as they are universal. To these artists, music is a mere medium, a vehicle for their masterfully crafted stories.
“Sure it should sound good, but that doesn’t mean you make songs you don’t want to make. What does well and what doesn’t is beyond your control; it’s ‘I love Dino James’ today and ‘f*ck Dino James’ tomorrow. All you can do is confidently place your head on the guillotine and look them in the eye as they pull the string,” says rapper Dino James.
IN THE HOOD
In his formative years, Shaikh’s now-famous neighbourhood, Dharavi, had already been bitten by the hip-hop bug. The kids in his vicinity had caught wind of the breakthrough phenomenon that was B-boying. Amidst all their day-to-day problems, the slums fostered a thriving hip-hop culture that gave young kids a chance to dream of a world better than theirs. “It’s like the Tupac (Shakur) poem,” says Shaikh. “It was the rose that grew from concrete.” Shaikh started saving up for new, funkier clothes to fit in. “I want to be as ‘fresh’ as these kids I saw. Their Tupac and Biggie T-shirts and baggy pants were more than just clothes for me. It was a way of standing out.”
Once Shaikh could get his hands on the clothes, a deeper question presented itself: What was his place in the culture? He surely couldn’t dance like the others, so how would he make his mark? “I wanted to be different. Besides, dancing was never really my thing. I was more interested in the songs they were dancing to.” That’s when a friend introduced Shaikh to the enfant terrible of American west coast hip-hop, an artist who’d become one of his biggest influences. “He just asked me to go home and Google’ Fifty rapper’. In Da Club was one of the first songs I heard and I was instantly hooked. It came to a point where I waited in line at the local cyber cafe to get a printout of the lyrics.”
Fifty Cent (rapper Curtis Jackson) became Shaikh’s claim to Dharavi fame. “I just started rapping along whenever they’d play a Fifty song at a dance battle. People started noticing; he’s cool, he’s a rapper’ they said.” Soon after, he started writing his own verses, bars that talked about his life in the slums.
“People like Honey Singh and Badshah were already big by that time. We knew there was a market for rap but we also wanted to sound different. That’s why the boys from my generation started borrowing from west coast rap. We wanted to take that grit and ferocity and tell our own stories.” Shaikh believes his music works because of its innate ability to tell real stories of the places he comes from. “We’re not a country of luxury cars and Gucci jackets. Most of us cling to local trains to get to places every morning. All I want to do is be faithful to that struggle.”
MY CITY
When 22-year-old rapper Yashraj Mehra first started making music, it was out of a constant need to forge his path, even if it meant having to part the sea of people in which he was constantly engulfed. “Everyone talks about the Bombay dream but they don’t quite understand how monotonous it can get sometimes. It’s so easy to lose yourself in the ‘do what everyone else does and make a stable life’ crowd. Everyone who comes from a middle-class family like me is plagued by the same thing, they confuse being grateful for being complacent. For me, struggling to break out of the ordinary; and finding beauty in that struggle was the challenge.”
When Mehra started off, his sound was self admittedly more “mellow and pop-heavy” than it is now – a phenomenon he believes was just indicative of the music he grew up with. “I’ll admit I did start off blind. I knew I wanted to make something but I didn’t know what. I realised I was making music that well-crafted by all means, but just not that close to me. As a 20-year-old kid, it’s hard to find your sound.” But he did find it soon after, during the epiphanic metamorphosis he believes he underwent during the pandemic. “That was a time where I felt myself change. The angst that I had picked up along the way, and my own inhibitions, it was all starting to float to the top. I felt like the parda (curtain) was slowly coming off.”
Mehra’s 2020 song Kanipattu was a complete left-turn from his earlier sound. It was a fiery, and flamboyant love letter to Mumbai and its many stories (just like his own), that get lost in the crowd so often. “It came to a point where gully hip-hop became synonymous with Mumbai hip-hop. I wanted to bring a fresh perspective to it, tell stories that aren’t necessarily about the slums and a life of extreme hardship but are still innately Mumbai. It’s the side of Mumbai that I’ve seen very closely and I think it can be beautiful if you stop to take a look every once a while.”
Mehra credits his enlightened, culturally hyper-aware upbringing with instilling a thirst for the original and the unique in him. “I remember my dad telling me stories about how Micheal Jackson did a gig here and he had the Thriller jacket custom made just so he could wear it to the concert. I’ve always been exposed to meaningful music that belongs on elaborate records that do more than just entertain people. They are irreplicable pieces of art that define entire generations.”
THE ROOTS
For Azadi Records’s maverick rapper RAK, hip-hop is a unique way to stay connected to his heritage while venturing out into the world and making a life for himself. “In a weird way, it’s hip-hop that makes me feel closer to my people and culture. Rapping in Tamil allows me to explore deeply cultural concepts and stories that I wasn’t previously aware of. It’s how I keep my feet on the ground while dreaming of a bigger life.”
Growing up in Andheri’s Anna Nagar – a predominantly Tamil area, RAK heard songs and fables from back home that continue to inform and influence his musical sensibilities. “I could never tell I’m growing in a place that my family isn’t from. All I ever heard was Tamil songs and fables. Every story, every lullaby taught me something new about my culture.”
When RAK finally decided to give music a shot, he chose an iconic Tamil song as his canvas. “There was this song called Vaazha Meenukkum Velanga Meenukkum Kalyanam (a wedding between two different kinds of fish) that I just couldn’t get out of my head. I decided to change that to a wedding between medu vada and masala vada with the bubbling oil pan as the backdrop. It was all fun and games back then but it did encourage me to write more in Tamil, a language that was closer to me than anything else.”
To RAK, his language and culture aren’t barriers but a bridge towards forming deeper connections with his audience. “As long as it’s good music, it’ll work. We blasted Punjabi songs that we didn’t understand at all just because they were earworms. As long as it’s earnest and fun, it’ll work.”
BOMBAY DREAMS
Bollywood’s ever-illustrious world drew rapper Dino James to Bombay almost a decade ago. “Everyone wants to be in ‘the industry’ because it’s a soapbox. There are other ways to be heard and seen, but films are and will always remain king. It’s a numbers game, and no one rakes them in better than the movies.”
After a few years in the city, however, James caught on to the importance of having all ten toes on the ground and telling stories that are as authentic as they are personal. “There’s no point in doing stuff you don’t believe in. Sooner or later, the people that hype your music will stop listening if they don’t find it relatable or fresh. It’s all about standing out, about making stuff you want to make.” And so he did. James describes his early work as “expressive and irreverent”, a rebellion against what he considered to be a bastardisation of the craft. “I wrote a song about my dog dying because I wanted to. That’s the beauty of independent music. You don’t have to pass your art through these filters that take everything out of it. If you want to beef, you beef, no mercy. It’s all real.”
However, this rebellion against the mainstream comes at a price for James – harbouring pent-up angst. “You will get angry sooner or later because that’s how people act. If you’re a truly original artist, there’s only so much crap you can take from labels and producers about marketability and whatnot. The key I think is to take a deep breath, stay out of harm’s way and channel all that energy towards making new music and telling newer stories.” These newer stories, as he puts it, are much more balanced in their treatment but still extremely personal. “It’s still stuff I want to make but I guess I try to get some perspective too now. I understand that it’s not a sermon, people want you to sound good so you give them that, but the stories should still be yours.”
James believes our inclination towards Western hip-hop is the biggest barrier to telling and listening to stories like these. “We think hip-hop was born there, so it has to be that way, but that isn’t true. Hip-hop moved out of Compton and evolved long ago. There’s so much you can do with Indian instruments; you have to be willing to give them a shot,” James explains. For instance, a flautist friend made drill music out of the flute the other day, and I was baffled. It made me realise that there’s so much left to explore.”