Rap as Origin
About a decade ago, households in India and Pakistan were moving from dial-up connections to broadband internet. Teenagers were trying to protest and eventually escape from the reality they didn’t agree with. The time when Ares, Limewire and Kazaa (P2P sharing) entered our lives — allowing us to bathe in media like never before. Suddenly, there was a rush of mp3s on our hard disks and CDs. Scrawny boys in Indore began listening to Eminem and Nas. Yahoo chat and MSN messenger were opening up new ways of connecting with people. For many, it was the first time you could speak to people of the opposite sex without being judged or being labeled gay. 16 year old kids were pretending to be 25 and a/s/l-ing random people in lesbian chat rooms. And Orkut: a primitive but powerful social network that gave birth to communities of people in search of alternate identities.
Imagine this: You’re locked to a room in your house with no television, no computer, no phone and you’re supposed to spend anything between 12 to 16 hours a day solving Irodov’s physics problems only because everyone else was. The end game was to grab a seat at one of the premier engineering schools so you could graduate and go on to join a MNC and buy a fancy car, a fancy house and live the good life. There were a lot of people who embraced it. But then there were some who just wanted to explode. So they took to MSN spaces to write emo poetry or to Orkut, writing rap songs and text-battling each other.
MC Polly (Pulak), who’s now a good friend of mine created a community called Battle Shelter that focussed on text-battles first and moved to audio. I was primarily part of another community on Orkut called Desi Rappers and I had at least 4 different monikers by the time Orkut shut down. DR was essentially run by the DR clan. These guys were mostly out of Pakistan and they were really good. With all the political drama happening in the background between the countries, these communities felt like a cocoon — a safe place where you could connect, learn and inspire each other.
It wasn’t about religion and social or cultural backgrounds anymore — you were known by your lyrical prowess. Kids studying triple integrals during the day and posting tiny bits of creative writing in the night. That whole scene was kind of epic.
Honestly, a lot of the content was fake shit — imitating famous rappers and their pseudo gangster lifestyles. 8 Mile, the movie had come out a couple of years before and its influence was insane. You weren’t allowed to diss people’s families but there was a lot of trolling one another from things you’d see on profiles as well as immense amount of boasting and swearing. But there were tiny bits scattered in cyphers or metaphors that reflected the reality of the time. It wasn’t great writing, but with time, it got authentic and honest. There were female rappers in the communities who would go up against anybody. Speed Ice took inspiration from feminist literature and spit rhymes that shred people’s notions and made you sit back and think. The more mature the community got, the more they looked around them to translate what they saw everyday into rhymes that hit hard. It was an outlet.
As the entire community moved towards audio battles, the nuances got more complicated. Flow, emotion, speed, clarity and sound production became important. Nobody really knew how to do any of that till Ragged Skull (Asif Akbar) showed up. He had worked with a few international DJs and he started helping members with their audios. He passed away recently but folks from Battle Shelter and DR will remember him for a long time. So much flow, it makes me nostalgic. You’d download beats that producers would make and post online for free and take a shot at it. There was no professional equipment or a sound studio to record in.
Polly would lock himself in his bedroom, cover himself with a blanket and use a computer mic to record his tracks. At some point, his parents thought he’d gone loco.
His mom was concerned because he was swearing so much. I’d wait till my parents would go out for dinner or steal my mom’s cellphone for the night to record with. Parents didn’t understand it, but at some level they accepted it. It scared them quite a bit because they finally got a peek into what their kids were thinking. I can imagine it was quite overwhelming. All my notebooks would start with math problems and end with rhymes — mostly political and ideological stuff I had no clue about. It was because I started listening to Immortal Technique.
Our newly elected president? Never hearda’ her / Except when I was flipping through police files, she was there, accused murderer //
What it was though was me painting a picture of my ideal world. It was fantasy, and it was anonymous. We logged in every night because there was no point sharing this part of our lives with the people around us. It was a completely different reality. One that gave us immense confidence in ourselves.
One outlet eventually lead to another. Polly started creating tags and signature images for community members and tournaments. In his words, he became a graphic artist on Rap Royalty (an international community of rappers) by fucking around with Cinema 4D textures and Photoshop brushes. Today, he’s a graphic designer. Writing was his way to quench his thirst for creation. He fuses words with visuals now to realize his fantasy.
If this rap thing didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be doing Graphic Design. The maturity gave me the balls to tell my parents that I wanted to pursue design.
The communities have dissolved despite multiple attempts to resurrect them. Some of them are on our forgotten Facebook friends list. Some are still doing it. Others like Polly and I moved on. Our skills have faded away but that whole rap phase shaped our realities.
