Does Tamil rap music’s secret to success lie in the diaspora?

How Tamil rap, emerging from cinema and going worldwide with the diaspora, is now ready to truly rule indie

Last summer, Yogi B presided over the Malaysian Tamil rap competition ‘Rap Porkalam’ as chief judge. “I saw at least 15 rappers who had world-class skills,” says the man known as the ‘Godfather of Tamil rap’. He was pleasantly surprised to see kids who knew how to rhyme, rap and spit. “Amazing lyricism,” he exclaims. Even more astonishing, to him, was an observation made by one of the rappers in competition. “He said, this is now the fourth generation of Tamil rappers on stage. I was the first.”"

“Sexy, cool and right”

Yogi B is a Kuala Lumpur-based rapper who, like most of Malaysia’s sizeable Tamil-speaking population, cannot trace his roots precisely beyond knowing his ancestors were from Tamil Nadu. Yet, he is the vanguard of an art form that, in a rare occurrence, originated in the diaspora and returned to the mainland, while also sowing the seeds for a global Tamil identity in hip hop.  

Yogi B, who has been in the business for 30 years, triggered that first wave of Tamil rap in 2006, with the release of his first album, Vallavan. He was already a big deal in Malaysia. Having won the first rap competition in Kuala Lumpur in 1992, he had produced three albums with the music label EMI.

In the early 2000s, Yogi B had an epiphany. “I loved Americana and hip hop culture, but I’m a Tamil boy who eats rasam-sambar, listens to religious music in the morning, cannot say the F-word at home. Hip hop is about authenticity, representing who you are at your core.” So he began work on Vallavan with the aim of making songs that were “sexy, cool and right.” 

Vallavan, created in collaboration with Natchatra, featured songs like “Madai Thiranthu”, a “remix” of a song by the venerated Tamil composer Ilayaraja; “Siva Siva”, in which he used a verse from the ancient text Thirumantiram by Tirumular.

Vallavan arrived just around the time that YouTube did. It sold 34,000 copies—a huge number back then—and found an audience in unexpected places. “Tamil rap boomed after that,” Yogi B says. “YouTube magnified and multiplied this wave of Tamil hip hop–it wouldn’t have reached the shores of Tamil Nadu or Europe or anywhere else.” 

A turning point

Hip hop producer Rohit Abraham, or OfRo as he is more popularly known, was one of thousands influenced by that moment. “I had seen rap videos on MTV, things like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. And suddenly, we saw this video of [Vallavan], with these Tamil guys looking global, a song and production that is global, the background is skyscrapers in a foreign country,” says the Chennai-based independent music producer, reminiscing about watching Vallavan for the first time. “I remember that was one of the first viral videos ever in Tamil.”

Born into a musical family with ties to the industry himself, OfRo started out as a bedroom producer while still in school. “I was almost born in the studio; I had understood the production and promotion pipelines long ago.” Now, he runs his own label, Atti Culture, with the multidisciplinary artist Ken Royson—a sort of laboratory where they help good writers take their craft to the world.  

Before Vallavan, during the 1990s, “artists like Colonial Cousins and Suresh Peters were the first [and only] names on non-film music,” says OfRo, tracing the history of Tamil rap. “Largely for the next decade, there was nothing else.” After Vallavan, “kids from Nagercoil to Madurai would bootleg MP3s of Yogi B’s music and were inspired by Malaysian rap culture while being in Tamil Nadu.” 

While Malaysia’s Tamil rap subculture cemented its place in national culture after Vallavan’s mammoth success, in India another decade would pass with the sporadic name—like Blaaze, Madurai Souljour and Hip Hop Tamizha—emerging from the underground. Then, around 2017, a few movements, in India and abroad, pushed Tamil rap into mainstream consciousness. 

Across shores

The filmmaker and film composer Pa Ranjith set up the Casteless Collective: An indie band that blended hip hop, rap, rock and folk with the centuries-old Gaana genre of Tamil music. As the name suggests, the Casteless Collective’s music was political and provocative, speaking of inequality and oppression set to the rhythm of intoxicating drum beats. From the 19-member collective, new stars were born: Arivu prominently among them.

Arivu “branched off into a very needed aspect of Tamil hip hop i.e. social reform,” as Yogi B puts it. OfRo worked with Arivu on his debut album Therukural (“Voice of street”) and remembers its success bringing out a lot of artists in 2018. “We had no venues,” he says, recalling the now-defunct Unwind Centre, sort of the hub for a nascent independent music scene in Chennai 15 years ago. “I personally used to go to parks and gather people. It was a great way to meet other upcoming writers, rappers, photographers, comedians.” 

“One of the kids who rocked up to the park was Asal Kolaar,” says OfRo, of the meeting and the rapper from Chennai who now has 102K followers on Instagram. “I put together his songs “Jorthaale”, “Vaanaambaa” and “Adi Odi”. All of them really went viral,” says OfRo. “It’s taken him to Bigg Boss. Now he’s a household name.” 

Meanwhile, in 2020, as the world was going into lockdown, a group of Canadian entrepreneurs put forth maajja, an initiative to consolidate a global South Asian identity in music and popular culture, with the rights of artists in mind. With the blessings of AR Rahman and Sri Lankan-origin rapper M.I.A., a new collective of Tamil rappers and hip hop artists came to the fore.

From Canada, it featured Shan Vincent de Paul and Yanchan, the duo behind the viral “mrithangam raps” series, Naveeni Akka aka Navz-47, and Two’s A Company. From Australia, the singer Dhee joined, while her uncle Santhosh Narayanan would sign on as producer. Later, from Singapore, Yung Raja would also participate in maajja’s live music initiative, YAALL Fest, whose 2022 edition featured R&B singer Pruitt, multidisciplinary producer and artist S.A.M and The Mystro from the UK, hip hop collective FSProd and CLEO VII from Switzerland, LA-based artist Suvi, and Rolex Rasathy from New York, among others. 

Among maajja’s biggest achievements (if mired in controversy) was the track “Enjoy Enjaami”, a collaboration between Arivu, Dhee and the producer Santhosh Narayanan. Things have been a bit quiet on the maajja front lately, but it was a mighty flex in scope and ambition when it started. It also underlined another truth: that “most of the new movement in Tamil rap has been happening not in Chennai or Tamil Nadu, but offshore”, says OfRo. “They’ve been doing it for two decades, it’s still pretty new here.” 

Influences and challenges

Part of the reason for this is a lack of venues. Apart from a handful of pubs and cafes, and now the new Phoenix mall, Chennai has not had a Fandom or blueFrog equivalent—spaces that have focused on spotlighting independent talent. “I’ve been to clubs in Germany where they’ll play Tamil music all night and people are loving it, but that’s not happening in Chennai.” 

OfRo feels the reason for this is the predominance of film music in Tamil Nadu. “We’ve also had non-film musicians here, but they’ve never quite been able to cut through the noise,” he says. Kollywood casts a long shadow but it also feeds the independent Tamil rap scene the world over. “I’ve been inspired by people and stories I see off-screen,” says OfRo, “whereas the diaspora artists have been inspired largely by what they see on-screen.”

Yogi B agrees. “Tamil movies was the pool that a lot of rappers tapped into,” says the rapper, a Tripundra drawn on his forehead, sitting in his KL home studio surrounded by stacks of hip hop magazines like XXL and Sauce, and production paraphernalia. “And Tamil movie poetry takes its torch from this big volcano called Tamil literature, which is gargantuan.” 

Of course, flex culture has its place, says Yogi B. But a lot of the most groundbreaking Tamil rap and hip hop artists tap into the wealth of Tamil cultural heritage for inspiration—whether it is ancient Sangam-era literature that finds place in Shan Vincent de Paul’s music, Dhee’s Carnatic music leanings, or Arivu and OfRo’s use of Villa Paatu and Parai, both forms of Tamil folk music. 

Informed by their legacy, Tamil rap artists have carved a niche in the global hip hop landscape. Now, believes OfRo, they’ve reached the tipping point where an audience at home is ready to skip the Hindi- and English-language parties and meet them halfway. “Havoc Brothers, from Malaysia, are the biggest independent artists in the world right now,” he exclaims. “They have the biggest numbers, the biggest audience in live sets. When they performed in Chennai in March, they brought out 2000-3000 people from all over the state. That’s something that even the local acts can’t do.”

Around the same time, in Kuala Lumpur, both OfRo and Yogi B are in attendance at the inaugural edition of Santhosh Narayanan’s Sounds of the South—a vast show featuring several Indian and diaspora artists born from the desire to express the “Thamizhness in our music”. “It was incredible, it was a showcase of everything that Narayanan has learnt and achieved in the last decade.” 

A resurgence of sorts

Yogi B, who performed with Narayanan, is now hard at work on his next album Mantrahood—which, he claims, will be his definitive album. “Internationally,” he believes, “hip hop is going through its worst phase. Black Americans have lost touch with their values, lost who they are. The music being churned out now is drunk on the flamboyance of life. Hip hop has a hangover,” he shakes his head. “But in Asian regions, it’s going through a good period.” 

Perhaps the most succinct examples of Tamil rap’s journey and future are visible in the artists that OfRo is collaborating with. Sample “Durai Sleeping”, a slick new track and video that he has produced with Royson aka Durai. Or listen to him tease a new artist whose name he is reluctant to share just yet. 

“He’s a 17 year-old boy,” says OfRo. “He’s grown up listening to devotional music. Then he got into Yuvan Shankar Raja, AR Rahman and all those film composers. And then at some point, 3-4 years ago, he started listening to Travis Scott. Now he writes rap music that basically sounds like Travis Scott devotional music,” he laughs, adding that his protégé’s debut is forthcoming this year. “He has no clue who Eminem is. But he’s going to blow up.”

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