This is fun, these random decade round up posts as stuff occurs to me. It’s slow days anyway as we all prepare for New Years Eve (and, of course, the New Years Day tweetalong!), so I might as well put up random stuff. Oh, and forgive me if I mix up “rap” and “hip-hop”, Reflects on Life explained the difference to me months ago and I mostly understand it, but when we get into trying to use them as verbs and adjectives and adverbs, I got confused again.

Let’s talk Yo Yo! Born in Punjab, raised in working class London, learned music at his selective British charitable trust school, came back to India and at age 23 started working seriously in the Delhi music scene. In the early 2000s, Punjabi language film was beginning to start up again and Punjabi music had been thriving since, well, forever. Punjabi folk music and folk performers are a vital part of the region, they may have struggled to make enough money for food, but they were always there, recording records and doing the occasional song for Hindi film. They are still there, the occasional raw powerful sounding folk song in a glossy Hindi film coming straight from Punjab. And it was these singers who started up the Punjabi film industry again, Diljit Dosanjh and Gippy Grewal and Gurdas Mann are singers first and actors second, and major Major stars.

But Yo Yo was on the forefront of a new kind of sound, one that took the existing folk sound and combined it with the rap and hip-hop Punjabi returning immigrants (like Yo Yo) were bringing back from Canada and the UK. There was already a thriving rap/hip hop music scene in India down in Tamil Nadu, it had been around since the late 80s/early 90s, but this Punjabi hip-hop was a whole different kind of sound.

Yo Yo started out working with Diljit, taking the Bhangra folk softer sound of Diljit and adding some strength to it. He was beginning to get noticed, brought in by other singers to help with their albums, and then in 2011 his International Villager released and changed EVERYTHING.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT1_kMJVc4A

I’ll start with the headline, in 2012 for the first time in the history of youtube, a non-film song was the top for the year in India, Yo Yo’s “Brown Rang” video. That same year, he was paid the largest amount ever for one song to be used in one not-very-good comic Hindi film. The next year, he was paid even more for his “Angreji Beat” from International Villager to be used in Cocktail.

The way Yo Yo was used was similar but different from how Punjabi folk artists were always used. He gave a different rougher rawer sound, one that spoke directly to the Hindi belt who watch the Bombay produced films. Always the Punjabi artists were allowed a lot of freedom, they were brought in for that different sound after all. Dalar Mehndi, for instance, is still a powerful name in Hindi film and he is more than just a singer. But Yo Yo was more than “more than just a singer”. He was brought in as a consulting artist, a guest composer, the one make or break element of a film. All of the industry was running after him, begging for his magic touch.

And then Yo Yo had a nervous breakdown and disappeared. Tragedy! What could the Hindi industry do? Oh hey, turns out Yo Yo was just one of many extremely talented young rappers coming up in Delhi. First came Badshah (Yo Yo’s old friend and collaberator, arguably at least 50% responsible for the breakthrough International Villager album). Sonam Kapoor discovered him and brought him down for “Abhi Toh Party Sharu Hui Hai”, Karan Johar jumped on him too for “Saturday Saturday”. And then came the Meet Bros., and Raftaar, and on and on and ON.

The interesting thing is that the rap era didn’t change the sound of the whole industry. Most films have a rap track now, but it happily co-exists with the other “regular” tracks. Also interesting, the industry hasn’t changed the rap world. Sure, the Punjabi rappers have way WAY more money than they used to, but their sound hasn’t been co-opted. There’s something almost impossible to recreate in how they do songs (almost impossible, the exception being the Udta Punjab soundtrack), so just like the Punjabi folk singers before them, they still hang out in Delhi and wait to be called down to Bombay to do the things no one else can do.

The funny thing is, right there in Bombay are other rappers who can also do things no one else can do. While the Punjabi rappers were influenced by the folk music scene and the Canada/UK rap world, down in Bombay there was another generation of rappers coming up from the angry politically influenced side of rap. They rapped in English at first, then switched to Hindi when they had a hard time finding an audience. And finally two of them broke out, Divine and Neazy. They are 10 years younger than Badshah and Yo Yo, and they found success not through albums working with local established folk/film artists, but through angry gorilla youtube videos. The big break through was “Mere Gully Mein” in 2015, the same year the other side of Indian rap was arriving in Bombay film with songs about drinking and parties and brown skinned woman.

The decade started with International Villager and “Brown Rang”, and it is ending with Gully Boy and “Apna Time Aayaga”. Hindi rap is here to stay, of all flavors, and we are the richer for it.