Rhyme And Reason

A new band is redefining the sound of Mumbai hip hop.

Our city has its share of wannabe MCs, but Mumbai’s hip hop scene can at best boast a couple of DJs (Living In Sin, DJ Sa) and a couple of rappers-gone-Bollywood (Hard Kaur, IshQ). So when we heard about a new hip hop “band”, we were cautiously optimistic. But as we look back at 2010, Bombay Bassment was perhaps Indian indie music’s most pleasant surprise of the last 12 months. A group that by their own description is closer to The Roots than to 50 Cent, and has been winning new fans with every gig they play. “We wanted to make it a band because the kind of hip hop we appreciate is closer to what you could call old school,” said rapper and de facto frontman Robert “Bob” Omulo. Among their influences, he listed “The Roots, Nas, a little bit of Common, Talib Kweli, a little bit of the West Coast stuff [like] Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg. We also love that jazz-funk stuff, Digable Planets.”

But more importantly, he said the music of Bombay Bassment—which includes drummer Levin Mendes, bassist Ruell Barretto and DJ Chandrashekhar “Chandu” Kunder—goes beyond just hip hop, and reflects each of their musical backgrounds. Omulo, who moved to Mumbai from Kenya 12 years ago to study, is the most heavily into rap among the four, and has done a fair bit of work in Bollywood; Kunder, whose tastes tilt towards reggae, is a veteran DJ best known for his five-year stint at now-shuttered Juhu music venue Razzberry Rhinoceros. Mendes and Barretto are former members of alternative rock college band Aftertaste. “Each and every song will have a bit of each of our personalities,” said Omulo. “It has elements of much more than hip hop. You’re going to feel some reggae in it, some drum n’ bass in it, some funk in it.” The result is a sound that mixes the lyrical depth of conscious hip hop with a feel-good, party-starting vibe.

“We are looking at a mature crowd, so we’re not going to come and start talking about things that never happened to us,” said Omulo. “They don’t want to hear about gang banging. We look at what’s around us, and just interpret everyday, normal things in a way that makes people appreciate it like they don’t normally do.” Appropriately for a band named Bombay Bassment, the group, has a song dedicated to their home city. “Bombay Blues” features lyrics such as “City of joy/City of pain/City of dreams/City of nightmares” making it in some way a twenty-first century post-liberalisation update of “Bombay Meri Jaan”.

Then, there’s “Hip Hop (Never Be The Same)”, about “[the] old school versus [the] new school, and the respectability that hip hop has lost by losing its soul far too much”, but also “Show Me What You Got” an irresistible floor filler that are among a handful of Bombay Bassment tunes that were written primarily to make people dance. The difference, as Kunder told us, is that they “keep it real and keep it clean”, another feature that makes Bombay Bassment stand out from other local hip hop acts.

Though much of this city, or country for that matter, still equates Indian rap with the likes of Baba Sehgal, the popularity of American hip hop has grown so big over the past decade, that music channel Vh1 organises a series of Hip Hop Hustle gigs around the country, while in 2007, at the height of his popularity, Smirnoff sponsored a concert by 50 Cent in Mumbai. At colleges in the city, rap battles have become a regular feature of annual cultural festivals over the last few years, yet until Bombay Bassment arrived, there wasn’t a single local hip hop act with a voice they could truly call their own.

“In my opinion, and this is not every MC out there, but many of the guys that do this stuff fail to connect with the audience,” said Omulo. “I’ve seen a lot of rappers come on stage and rap with the attitude of ‘Listen to me, this is what I’m telling you’. People just look at the spectacle, and that’s about it. It’s not something they would go out of their way to pay for. I’ve discussed this with a couple of them, I tell them that if you went right now to Cuba, the UK or Malayasia, you’ll find there are hip hop acts and they’re not all the same. Each of them has specifically adapted to their local culture. I think that’s where most of the rappers here fail.”

Whether through their lyrics or through their beats, Bombay Bassment has been connecting so well with their crowds, that starting from their debut at the Stupid Ditties album launch gig in the first week of November, they’ve performed eight concerts in less than two months. More impressive is that in just seven months, they’ve written nine songs, enough material to power through an hour-long set. The band says that the only reason they are so prolific, is that they’d been waiting to form Bombay Bassment all their lives, until that fateful day when their manager and Mendes’s colleague at Sony Music, Jayesh Veralkar brought them together. “When we met, I’d already written the lyrics of ‘Hip Hop’ for some imaginary band.”

In 2011, Bombay Bassment plans to release their debut CD, and while they are now considered artists-to-watch-for in the indie circuit, they’re hoping that increased popularity does not draw any unwanted attention. Though they’re not “political”, should it ever come to it, Bombay Bassment say they will never become Mumbai Bassment. “We might add another ‘O’ and become Boombay Bassment,” said Kunder, in a manner that seemed to us that he was only half-joking.

Stream Bombay Bassment’s songs here.