Is Baba Sehgal back because Honey Singh is missing?
Many years ago, Simon and Garfunkel sang "Mrs Robinson": Where have you gone Yo Yo Honey Singh/A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Ok, I know, they were singing about Joe DiMaggio – Honey wasn’t even born then, but if such a song ever existed, it would have made perfect sense in the summer of 2015.
Honey Singh, beloved pop idol of our beloved nation, has vanished from the scene. I’ve looked for Honey high and low. I’ve looked under tables, I looked in the cupboard. For Honey, like God, is ubiquitous. He lives in our hearts and homes. I hit the streets of Delhi; I looked for him in Bandra. I heard a rumour that he’d gone to Dubai for a gig, where he messed with a sheikh’s wife. The infuriated sheikh, according to one version, then chased him down the desert. I went to Dubai. I went to the desert. All I saw were footprints in the sand. There are other rumours too – that Honey had a burn out, that he’s on a sabbatical.
Rapping
Then a friend Skyped from Toronto that he saw Honey in a club there. Dubai was obviously the wrong place to go looking for him. But look who sneaked in through the backdoor while Honey’s been away - good old Baba Sehgal, the "father" of desi rap. This electrical engineer broke on to the national scene more than two decades back with Thanda Thanda Paani, which was copied from Vanilla Ice’s "Ice Ice Baby", which itself was copied from the Queen/Bowie track "Under Pressure". Not be outdone, Sanjay Somebody came out with a track called "Garam Garam Chai", which also flogged the same tune. Thankfully, the photocopying ended there. After all, there is something called plagiarising something to death.
Baba always had the rapping skills but really didn’t know what to sing about. So he positioned himself as the king of nonsense rap – a kind of Edward Lear meets Vanilla Ice. Indian rappers, the few that there are, have distinctive lyrical themes. MC Kash, who is Kashmiri, is unabashedly political. Dopedelicz, who are from Matunga Labour Camp, Dharavi, sing about the slum, ganja and police harassment. Faadu, the cult underground rapper from West Delhi, raps about urban isolation, corporate slavery and kinky sexual angst: Main tera Jackie Chan/Main student, tu hain ma’am. Honey combines a Punjabi earthiness with a larger-than-life party-animal persona. Baba, on the other hand, is frothy, pulpy and delightfully pointless.
Gravitas
It’s not that Baba hasn’t given gravitas a shot. A few years back, he released a song about female foeticide called Kunjam Kunjam Control. Unfortunately, he expressed the idea in nonsense verse; the result was unintentionally funny: Newton bomb phatting/Chai piyo cutting/She’s a Lakshmi, one princess/Her polka dotted dress/Killing the girl like a mutton chop/How can you do it Mr Pop. Talk about having your heart in the right place.
In his two comeback songs, Baba has shifted his attention to food. It’s as if Baba decided: hey, if Honey has made drink his lyrical domain, from Char Botal Vodka to One Bottle Down, why not make food my area of lyrical expertise. Safer than foeticide. If Going to the Gym is about losing weight, then in Chicken Fried Rice, he seems to be saying, screw the waistline and dig in: Abhi dekho na kitchen se mom ki aayi hai aawaz/Beta bane hai rajma chawal aur sath me only pyaz/O my god its awesome with desi ghee/I love ghee ghee ghee ghee ghee.
Reality
There’s always been a link between rappers and cars. In America, west coast rappers rapped about American cars like the Cadillac and the Chevy; their east coast counterparts opted for foreign brands like Lexus and BMW. Honey boasts about his Lamborghini, Range Rover and Fortuner: 24 carat gold/AC full pe so cold/160 di speed/ Steering pe pura hold. Baba’s link with cars is far more fundamental. He had one song, Aaja Meri Gaadi Mein Baith Ja, which was about cars but not about any specific car. Baba’s rise coincided with the rise of India’s first mass car - the Maruti 800. Chances are that if you were driving a white 800 in 1992, you were also blasting Baba’s nursery rhymes on your car stereo. Baba and the 800 had a symbiotic relationship. One wouldn’t have been possible without the other.
If Baba is the father of desi rap, and Honey the bade bhai saheb, then Preet Vihar’s Aditya Parihar aka Faadu is the new kid on the block – a whiff of fresh loo. Instead of cars, he raps about shared autos and fighting for a seat on the Metro. He usually never gets the girls. On stage, he prefers to read from his notebook, part Hindi "manch-kavi", part Eminem. Faadu’s songs, on an average, clock 100,000 hits on YouTube, one of his songs will feature in a new Bollywood film called Gurgaon, and he’s planning on going live this year. Faadu, unlike rich rappers, doesn’t have to worry about "keeping it real". When I met him in Hauz Khas village last Saturday, he was worried about his motorcycle that was parked in Connaught Place. Life for Faadu is real enough as it is. This is exactly what gives him that extra raw edge over "oldies" like Baba and Honey.