Songs Of Freedom & Redemption

Can’t let the government tell me how my future lookin’.

— Kendrick Lamar

The  year that rapper Kendrick Lamar became the first-ever rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize, I met a bunch of young rappers in a rundown neighbourhood in Delhi. I remember MC Freezak among them. The Pulitzer board’s formal announcement called Lamar’s DAMN a “virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life”.  

Word over beat. Rhymes, metaphors, double-ent­endres. A contrarian form of expression That’s rap. Lamar, the rapper who is credited with elevating rap to the status of “literature”, says he could put his feelings down on a sheet of paper and they’d make sense. That’s what Delhi underground rapper MC Freezak says. Write down everything. Everything makes sense. All of this is protest. All of it is a story. All of it could be journalism.  

ALSO READ: Shaheen Bagh, CAA, Farmers’ Protest: Hip-Hop Is The Voice Of Dissent In India

It was 2017. I remember asking them why did they choose to rap. The lanky young man said he had a lot to say. When I asked him why he had a lot to say, he said, because he was from this place with its shanties and its poverty. Across the street, a ser­ies of malls reared their shiny heads. All that luxury and all that aspiration didn’t make MC Freezak want to become that kind of rapper who gets famous and writes about cars and women and this and that. Back then, these young men had launched a T-shirt line. Delhi 17 was written in bold with a rap sequence from their latest song. The pin code of Khirki, which he said was a place of extremity. It was a poor neighbourhood. They say the poverty looks starker when the rich and the well-heeled with their sanitised hands and lives shop for labels that sell for lakhs.  

I remember an old cart gathering dust in an open space. A garbage dump. Here, young boys and girls were learning to compress their life exp­eriences in songs. All they wanted was to be heard. Media didn’t tell their stories. Technology made them dream. In that virtual world, you stood a chance with your gully rap. They were brave. They would sneak into the air-conditioned mall and place their boom boxes and break into a dance and then run away and disappear into the dark alleys of Khirki. They were the new disrupters.

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MC Freezak is now the convener of Delhi Underground, a hip-hop collective of young men and women like him who come from everywhere. They want to be the holders of a new kind of truth. And this is why Lamar’s Pulitzer is significant. They speak truth to power. With verses. With graffiti. With dancing. They represent themselves.  

“Shock, inspire, love and break dance,” said MC Freezak when I first met him. They were members of SlumGods, a Delhi-based B-boying group formed at Tiny Drops, a hip-hop community centre in Khirki village where there are rappers, breaking boys and street art. A boom box is cheap, the park is a public space and the world is a stage.  

Hip-hop is the manifesto of the urban youth, mostly from poor localities, pushed to the periphery by lopsided development in cities, the division lines across class and caste. It is their canvas of dissent and fear, their rebellion and their storytelling in the face of growing inequalities.

ALSO READ: Why I Rap: A Hip-Hop Artiste’s Journey From Bihar To Stardom

It was during the Commonwealth Games when the poor, homeless and the migrants were forced out of the national capital that the city woke up to a few graffiti. Now, it is everywhere. Like the Occupy Movement that began in the US as a protest against inequality, the hip-hop movement is also an import.

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It is a strange coming together of things in this moment. There are these cyphers, a gathering of those who believe in hip-hop’s redemptive powers. Cypher means zero or nothing. They come from nothing. That’s important. That’s where the story starts. They want to lay claim to a movement that started in a place faraway, in a different political context. But all politics of inequality is the context everywhere. Perhaps, that’s why hip-hop travelled to places where oppression is a political device, police brutality is routine and caste, class and colour are markers of position in society.

United colours of dissent Protest graffiti in Delhi during Shaheen Bagh and farmers’ protests; Colourful sneakers of a hip-hop artiste in North Philadelphia

India’s tryst with hip-hop is not a recent phenomenon. It has followed a somewhat similar trajectory. Dilution was a given. That whole rags-to-riches story celebrated by Zoya Akhtar in Gully Boy, a film that was a hit, and maybe even got the Indian hip-hop scene Bollywood’s acknowledgement.  But, in the end, it was a celebration of that culmination of a hard life into a rich and famous lifestyle, a perfect capitalisation of class struggle sold to everyone.  

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The movement stays true to its original protest spirit in these cyphers. They have anger, they have the guts and they have the words.

MC Freezak is now a part-time courier guy. He picks up these odd jobs because he has to survive. I met him at a cypher in the city. Deer Park with its teeming couples and families and numerous picnics on a Sunday evening didn’t quite fit into the cypher scene but he led us to a skating ring. “This is where we meet,” he said. He has a YouTube channel. The group broke away a long time ago. They had to find jobs to get by. But for MC Freezak, hip-hop means a release. When he watches the news, he gets angry. He is among the believers here. They can change the world order with their music, they said. “This is a speech. The speech that’s contrary to what the political leaders say from the Red Fort or on television,” one of them said.   

Hip-hop is an authentic reflection of life in the toughest neighbourhoods of this country, in its conflict zones, in its poor places. It is then an ind­ispensable chronicle of the experience of the opp­ressed. “Rap is Black America’s TV station,” Chuck D told Spin magazine in 1988. “The only thing that gives the straight-up facts on how the Black youth feels is a rap record.”

That’s true for these men too. And in India, hip-hop is discovering its political essence in the wake of so many protests. These rappers of the underground hip-hop movement are here to ind­ict India, themselves and their community and, perhaps, greed and violence and sinfulness.  

ALSO READ: Clash Of Cultures In Smalltown Bihar

Lamar sings, “I feel like I’m boxin’ demons, monsters, false prophets, schemin’ sponsors, industry promises, niggas, bitches, honkies, crackers, Compton, Church, religion, token Blacks, and bondage, lawsuit visits, subpoena served in concert, f*** your feelings, I mean this for imposters”. There are stories about the inner city that they tell, the stories others won’t touch.  

In 2008, American sociologist and author Tricia Rose published The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop – and Why It Matters. She said commercial hip-hop—the dominant form is not the only one. There was this second tradition, a more substantive one. She called it “socially conscious” or “progressive” hip-hop. This one was beyond “powerful corporate interests” and “the gangsta-pimp-ho trinity”.  

ALSO READ: Hip-Hop’s Strongest Asset Is Its History Of Rebellion And Truth-Telling

Hip-hop became mainstreamed in India in the 2010s. This was also when the BJP rose to power. The division bells were tolling. There were these G-Funk mimics in underbellies of Mumbai, the cyphers in Delhi’s parks and subways and old warehouses in Calcutta and bars in Shillong. There were rap songs released during the Shaheen Bagh protest and the farmers’ protest and other movements.

Since CAA came into effect, a Delhi-based hip-hop group has been releasing music with titles like “engineering a pogrom”. Then, there is Delhi-based rap label, Azadi Records, which supported Kashmiri rapper Ahmer Javed, Punjabi rapper, Prabh Deep and Delhi-based duo Seedhe Maut.

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In 2012, I met a Black rapper named Philly Redface in Philadelphia in a broken neighbourhood called North Philly. He was the one who told me about hip-hop and what it meant to him. He told about the crack wars in his neighbourhood. He was a young child and he went running to his grandmother when he heard the commotion on the roof. He said he grew up in “poverty filled with hate” and how he had to hustle every day to “put food on my plate”.

ALSO READ: Hip-Hop Found A Connect In Pain Of Kashmiris

A six-time felon, Redface grew up in group homes after his mother became a crack addict and left home. The crack epidemic had hit the city and the drug dealers were making money selling it in poor neighbourhoods, getting the loc­als addicted to the instant highs. “There are not many ways for us to be heard,” he had said. I still have his CD called the Philadelphia Story that he would distribute to the people. That’s how I learned about the movement. With people like him. That helped me learn journalism. That kind of real storytelling.  

Years later, in India, I spoke with Naezy aka Naved Shaikh who had started to write about urban despair in a slum, and then became one of the poster boys of desi hip-hop, a widely-celebrated subculture coveted by big music labels and brands like Puma.  

There was Baba Sehgal and Apache Indian attempting rap but they weren’t really rappers. Then came Honey Singh and others who were celebrated by Bollywood for their misogynist and sexist songs and their flashy videos.  

Hip-hop is a brave art form. Technology is on its side. The underground rappers know the power of social media. I remember asking Naezy how he would write without the pain since he had bec­ome famous. “I won’t let the pain go,” he said.

This burgeoning commercialism is often at odds with hip-hop’s outsider ethos and that’s why rappers like MC Freezak stay in the shadows. That’s where the movement feeds us hope. If there is freedom of expression, it is in these gullies of cities where smog even hides the stars and the cameras catch any transgressions in speed and other things.

That should make us listen to them and learn from them. We, the media, have forgotten to tell stories. This is where we can begin. In these cyphers. Lean in and listen.