Through his lyrics, Cherukat was attempting to fire up a cultural dialogue about identity.
The word on the street is that Not like us — a diss track by Pulitzer-winning American rapper Kendrick Lamar, one of the more influential rappers of the times — is the best of its kind. It became the fastest rap song to reach 700 million streams on Spotify besides leading the Billboard Global 200 for two consecutive weeks. But what Lamar, or the entire international world of hip hop did not anticipate, perhaps, is that the 17-time Grammy-winning rapper’s sharp-tongued track will be outstreamed by the meteoric rise of Big dawgs from India, where rappers, however talented, are not even in the vicinity of the rap map.
Created by Bengaluru-based Malayali rapper Sooraj Cherukat aka Hanumankind, Big dawgs found a distinguished placement on Spotify’s “Global Hip Hop List”. What worked was a combination of swag and sway, and the daredevilry in a rickety Maut ka Kuan (Well of Death) — a typical carnival attraction in India — in Kerala’s Ponnani where the song is shot with the rapper positioned in the centre of the velodrome bouncing off some gnarly beats; Cherukat was rapping in English, accent in place. But the appreciation was soon replaced by shock that the piece came from India, along with racist attacks online. The song, however, kept becoming bigger, breaking boundaries globally.
Through his lyrics, Cherukat was attempting to fire up a cultural dialogue about identity. The skin colour like the bourbon/ A worldwide sign that we face close curtains, he rapped. Here was a story that Cherukat had known. Born in Kerala, raised in Houston, he began freestyling in school before moving base to Bengaluru. Soon, he was trying to enmesh Indian sounds and motifs with slick English rap and came up with songs like Southside and the intensely political Genghis, which found attention. But they stayed in India. Big dawgs is in a different league, where the ‘big stepper’ as Cherukat calls himself, is turning on the heat.
