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Journalism of Courage
Nerves seized rapper Fejo when he stood on the rickety podium raised in the promenade of Kadakkal Temple in Kerala’s Kollam district and gazed down at the sea of waving hands. Live shows are a stroll for him, he feeds from the energy of the heaving crowd but this was different. “This was the first time I was singing for a temple festival. I scanned the audience, and I saw many elderly people with their grandchildren. I was unsure whether they would appreciate the music,” he says. “I have never heard of a temple conducting a rap concert. Maybe, they wanted to woo a younger crowd but you know how people perceive rap. So I gave them a brief intro about the genre. That it is somewhere between poetry, music and speech,” he says.
Minutes into the show, Fejo, aka Febin Joseph, could see the puzzled stare on some faces, but as the concert rolled on, gathering an undulating tempo, he saw even the elderly swaying their heads to his rhymed verse. “This was the moment I realised that rap is no longer a subaltern culture in the state but has entered the mainstream, cutting across age and cultural barriers,” says Fejo, who would go on to conduct concerts in temples, churches, a mosque in Thrissur’s Chavakkad district and perform in Georgia and Canada.
Rap merging into the Malayali consciousness was a cultural phenomenon he had never imagined when he began making parody songs of Senegalese-American rapper Akon in his teenage in the mid-aughts. “When I grew up, it was unthinkable. Songs were meant to be composed in a certain way, with the conventional rhyme scheme and meter. We didn’t have the culture of independent albums, except devotional ones. Songs were only composed for movies. I never thought I would be making money singing rap songs, ” says Fejo, whose Koode Thullu is probably equivalent to the heavy metal Born To Be Wild (Steppenwolf), in its path-breaking relevance.
The odd rock band sprung but mostly sang covers of classic hits and had a niche following. Unlike the Tamil music industry, which straddled genres as early as the avant garde-Illayaraja fuelled ’80s, its Malayalam counterpart was less experimental. The first time a singer broke the mould — injecting English rap into a Malayalam song, Jassie Gift in the smash hit Lajjavathiye — the pundits scoffed him for spoiling the language’s lyrical legacy. Zip to 2024, the Malayalam rap industry is vibrantly diverse as well as an increasingly broad-based cultural trend, imperceptibly blending into the pop culture and movies, besides language, fashion and advertising. It blares from FM stations and tea stalls, Insta-reels and ringtones, government campaigns, football stadiums and temple concerts. Their images on t-shirts have acquired a Che Guevara-esque cult. It is the lingua franca of the youth, impossible to avoid.
The leap has been exponential — according to Spotify numbers, Malayalam hip-hop grew by 300 per cent year-on-year in 2023. Since its popularisation five years ago, the worldwide consumption has shot up by 5,300 percent. A raft of young Malayalam rappers — Fejo, Hanumankind, whose Big dawg generated global adulation, Dabzee, MHR, Vedan, Baby Jean, NJ, ThirumaLi, MC Couper and Joker to name a few — have set the charts afire with their variegated themes, styles and diction. “It’s going global, bro. Who would have thought!” says Fejo.
The sunsets in Changaramkulam are splendorous. A palette of colours spreads across the skies, illuminating the quiet currents of Bharathapuzha with a glow of deep tangerine and bubble-gum pink. The riverfront village, tucked in the innards of Ponnani Taluk in Kerala’s Malappuram district, whizzes into life. Glasses clink on the rickety tables of modest waterholes; roadside eateries turn into a flash of culinary gymnastics; the streetlights reluctantly wink to life; tea shops bristle into addas.
From Kannan’s tea stall, pipes out the jaunty beats of Manavalan Thug from the movie Thallumaala (2022). The 65-year-old owner, Raghavan, tries to catch a hum or two: Maniyara thorakkana chiriyindu, chiriyilu chelu pothinjeendu…” he stops, saying it’s too fast to sing along. “You have a smile that unlocks harems, a smile wrapped in beauty…”
“It’s addictive, isn’t it?” he asks his friend and regular Josekutty. “After all, our boy has sung it,” he replies, referring to Dabzee, aka Mohammed Fasil, who lives a couple of miles away from the shop.
The 33-year-old artist is the identity of the village, faceless like hundreds of others in the country. There are no foam-board cutouts to celebrate him, his face doesn’t peer from the walls or electric posts, they don’t always whistle his songs, or put them as their ringtone. But warmth and love ring in their voice when they talk about him. “His songs capture the rhythm of Malabar, its culture and heritage, our dialects and twangs. We can resonate with it, like how Vaikom Muhammad Basheer made our slang mainstream through his novels,” says Ahmed Kodinhi, a school teacher in Manjeri, on the western corner of Malappuram.
The infusion of local dialect is deliberate. “I used to be ridiculed for my slang by people from other parts of Kerala, so I feel sort of obligated to represent my culture and its voice,” says Dabzee, who quit his corporate job in the Middle East for his “real calling.”
After its release in 2022, Manavalan Thug became a game changer in Kerala’s hip hop scene. “It’s when hip-hop became really massy. It required a movie to make it mainstream, and Thallumaala did the job. Then hip-hop just shot over the roof,” says Muhsin Parari, a director, writer and lyricist.
So did Dabzee’s popularity. He says he grew up listening to music his father listened to, and Mapilapattu was one of them. He dexterously weaves the hip-hop ethos into the framework of Mapilapattu, a Muslim folklore genre that has been in the state’s culture since the 17th century. Parari explains: “I think Mapilapattu is a natural body for rap. In rap, you put in a lot of syllables in short sentences. It is the same in Mapilapattu. It was just a matter of them finding each other.” He strikes a football analogy. “It’s a bit like tiki-taka, you need to find rhythm in short spaces,” he says, referring to the revolutionary slick and short passing style of FC Barcelona and Spain that changed how the game was played as well as viewed. It is no coincidence that several of the rappers are from Malappuram. The Malabar dialect of Malayalam, with a heavy influence of Arabic, is intrinsically more supple than those in central and southern Kerala.
Hanumankind has his roots in Ponnani, Parari is from Edavanna, Baby Jean is from Othalur and Joker and MHR are from Tirur. Everyone, though, is different. Dabzee has more melodic hooks, Baby Jean is more conversational in the Eminem style; Hanumankind is groovier and has a more universal style of rat-a-tat rendition, Joker relies on wordplay.
Contrarily, Fejo, who is from Kochi, where a gruffer brand of Malayalam is spoken, says he has bumped into linguistic hurdles. “I think you can’t express anger in Malayalam. No matter how angry you want to be in Malayalam, there is an underlying sweetness that defeats the purpose, unlike say Tamil or Hindi. The best is Punjabi. But then you adapt and bend the language,” he says. Fejo is experimental, incorporating reggae and folk strains into his music. The dialectical rigidness has not prevented rappers from popping up in other parts of the state. Like MC Couper and Raftaar, who are from Thiruvananthapuram, where a coarser twang of Malayalam is spoken. Vedan is from Thrissur, ThirumaLi from Kottayam. The band Palakkadan Dystopia, eponymously, is from Palakkad. “In the end, it’s about how you connect with the audience and the relatability of the theme,” says Parari. It’s like the glorious sunsets of Changaramkulam. A palette of colours spreads across the state’s hip-hop spectrum. No matter the city they hail from, they have been grappling with similar circumstances, creative questions and obstacles.
Seven years ago, when an engineering student allegedly died by suicide, his death became heavily politicised. A disturbed Fejo wrote Oru Private Aravushala (A Private Slaughterhouse). “I could relate to it because I had studied in that engineering college. But I didn’t set out to write about politics. I‘ve also written about love and friendship,” he says.
Hip-hop itself is often misconstrued solely as a body of protest though it began dwelling on social themes only in 1982, nine years after it was born in a house party in the Bronx. But social causes and angst feature predominantly in Malayalam rap. Parari’s Native Bapa, considered the first hip-hop song in Malayalam, satirised the gunning down of four Muslim youths from Kannur by security forces in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir. “We were tired of the usual narratives propagating the stereotypes of Muslims and Dalits as savages. We wanted to give different perspectives of these to Kerala society,” Parari says. Its sequel, Death of a Native Son, was a tribute to Rohith Vemula, the Dalit PhD scholar at Hyderabad who died by suicide in 2016.
Similarly, Vedan’s songs vehemently question caste equations. He was raised in a Harijan colony near the Thrissur railway station. After his Class X, he took up odd jobs before moving to Thiruvananthapuram to work as a studio boy. In those years, he got hooked to rap, especially of the late American rapper Tupac Shakur. “So when I decided to sing, I thought I would write about caste and oppression.” The result — Voice of the Voiceless — was a lashing whip with delightful wordplay on societal hypocrisies. Like Njaan paananalla parayanalla pulayanalla nee thamburanumalla/ Aanel oru ma*irumilla. (I’m not a Paanan or a Parayan or a Pulayan. Nor are you a Thamburaan. Even if you are, I don’t give a f*ck!). “My politics is not subtle,” he asserts. He wears black, an ode to his idols, Karl Marx and Periyar.
He wrote the powerful song Va after he saw a bunch of kids from so-called lower castes being driven out of a ground with choicest casteist expletives. “There are no hard and fast rules. There is no social obligation to anything. It’s your choice, your music. Be comfortable in your skin,” says Fejo. The creative freedom, thus, has liberated a music industry trapped in conventional labyrinths.
Fejo remembers the first time he uploaded a song on his YouTube channel in 2011. “We didn’t have an internet connection those days. So I hit an internet cafe, and it took me four hours to upload the song. The people in the cafe got suspicious of me. What I am implying is that the internet was the biggest game changer for its accessibility as well as speed,” he says.
Close to a lakh watched the video, largely from the Middle East. Parari remembers a time they used to text battle with a group called Insignia on Orkut. It took several months for Parari and friends to recover the initial investment of Rs 2 lakh. Things though have changed. “The biggest spurt for hip-hop was that the artists began to get money for their works. They could stop worrying about finances and focus on their craft,” Parari says.
Fejo agrees: “There was a time when I used to set apart the money I got from stage shows to produce my next song. With internet connections becoming cheaper and video-hosting services proliferating, we got visibility and more money. Then came Spotify and others. The reel culture completely changed the game. It also meant, new singers, if their product is good, could become an instant success. There is less shell time,” he adds.
The other cycle in hip-hop’s monetary evolution was the beginning of music composers collaborating with them. Fejo felt fully secure of his profession when Sushin Shyam requested him to do a song for the movie Maradona in 2018. Dabzee felt the same when he sang in Thallumaala (co-written by Parari), its music composed by Vishnu Vijay. Six years after Maradona, Sushin set music for the runaway blockbuster of the year Aavesham, in which he had collaborated with a clutch of hip-hopsters, from Hanumankind and Malayali Monkeys to MC Couper and Dabzee. The latter’s Illuminati has entered the cult of fame in Malayalam music. The pandemic years too helped when people took refuge in reels and sought variety in music and movies.
The next motion in their journey, Fejo says, is getting labels like Mass Appeal, Universal and Sony Music, which have already begun investing in videos featuring independent singers. Parari says the coup de grace moment would be when it becomes a self-sustainable and standalone stream as hip-hop is in the West. “When music is consumed not as part of cinema but as an independent entity in itself,” he says. Or the rappers’ declaration of independence hour, and when it has breached the socio-cultural walls.
