Part 1: An American, An Englishman & A Pakistani Walked Into a Bar (well, sort of)
The first half of a story that covers how three people with subcontinental roots came together to make a song that puts identity in front of a mirror.
Well, this title could have gone in many other ways. It could have been ‘Two Punjabis and a Mujahir’ or ‘Two Rappers and a Ghazal Singer’ or to add a layer of flavor, we could have even said, ‘When Queens, Wembley and Lahore came together’. If my math is correct, I have used four different descriptors to introduce three people. In a way, we have twelve different personas who come together to make a song but these three dimensions are nowhere near an exhaustive list to give the following artists their identity. In fact, it would be criminal to limit them by these labels. Such is the complexity of trying to answer the question, “Who am I?” Let us attempt to get close to the answer through these gentlemen.
The three artists I speak of are: Himanshu Kumar Suri (HEEMS), Rizwan Ahmed (Riz MC) and Ali Sethi. The artists who performed ‘Aaja’. HEEMS and Riz MC make up Swet Shop Boys while Ali Sethi is a scholar, poet, singer et al from Lahore, Pakistan. His track ‘Pasoori’ from Coke Studio Pakistan has been a gigantic hit over the past twelve months but Sethi, like the Swet Shop Boys has a journey that brings them all together to make ‘Aaja’, which is probably the most entertaining and mind tingling song you have heard in a while.
This article will only scratch the surface on each of these artists along with their producer Tom Calvert, popularly known as Redinho. But I’m hoping we can pull some interesting themes out of it. So here we go.
HEEMS
Himanshu Kumar Suri was born in Queens, New York to a Punjabi family. Now, I’ve been to Queens once in my life to eat Bangladeshi Phuchkas, so my personal knowledge ends right there. HEEMS seems to have grown up as a classic second generation Indian-American. He was part of the student body in high school, went to a reputed college like Wesleyan, got a degree in Economics and then became a rapper. Well, that last one does steer away from the stereotype.
But still, he is very desi at heart as we see him in the video with Sean Evans of Hot Ones fame as they go around Patel Brothers to buy ingredients for the dinner they are about to make. HEEMS hilariously clarifies if the YouTube channel was going to pay for the groceries at the very beginning before loading up the cart. He even does a quick tribute to Parle G and Maggi as they shop. When they get home, his mom is savage. She literally says on camera that she doesn’t like him doing rap music and preferred her son becoming an Investment Banker, but also lived up to the universal polar duality of criticism and pride every Indian mother has for her child by saying he made great Butter Chicken (which he added Sriracha and I’m curious to see how that works) and Bhindi.
But now onto some of the music HEEMS has done and there is a lot. I had heard his music ages ago without even knowing it was partly him. I speak of course of “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” which he recorded as part of the group Das Racist. A few friends in college made me listen to this song about two friends literally saying they are at the Pizza Hut, they are at the Taco Bell and they are at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. At that time, this made no sense to me as I had just come to Atlanta from India. But there are many places in the US where fast food restaurants are side by side, share a wall or even share seating space with almost common kitchens. Taco Bell is what brings Indians from both the motherland and the US together. It has vegetarian options, tacos and tortillas are basically phulkas and chapattis and most importantly, it is CHEAP. Having a Pizza Hut attached meant we could get fancy with some breadsticks and marinara sauce if we wanted to splurge. So the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell was a treat. The song itself is silly but very well produced and catchy.
Here is a link to the song:
HEEMS (through Das Racist) did a bunch of things. Their song Rapping 2 U samples a 2004 Japanese song called Shiki No Uta by MINMI. Yet, the track is chopped up in the middle to sound like an Indian saragam at times. This maybe the only time the lyrics can include “Subaru”, “Seinfeld”, “Khalistani”, “Wasabi” and “Mukesh Ambani” all in one song and these are just some references. Rapping 2 U treads the theme of identity by both rappers who are of Indian and Hispanic descent respectively and many lines in the song will leave you in awesome on how they thought about that, thus showing their prowess in song writing beyond Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
Rapping 2 U by Das Racist (Listen for the lyrics and the background music)
The phrase sung at the 11s mark of the song below was sampled in Rapping 2 U
HEEMS’ solo track ‘Soup Boys’ is even more ambitious when he samples the viral hit “Why This Kolaveri Di”. Anirudh Ravichander and Dhanush would never have imagined their joke track with Tanglish (Tamil+English) lyrics would be repurposed as a song that raps about President Obama’s uses of unmanned drones to kill people. This is another great listen.
So HEEMS had put in many, many hours before linking up with Riz Ahmed to form the Swet Shop Boys. His verse in Aaja comes with ease and they lyrics are more mellow than many other songs he has written. There is still a funny wordplay in his verse when he calls himself a “Sexy Mother Fakhir” as the music video shows a Fakhir when that line drops. But he explores adding a little bit of melody in his rapping and that may be the influence of the other two collaborators in the song.
Riz MC
Rizwan Ahmed or Riz MC is now a household name. He is an Academy Award and Emmy winner all while having a flourishing hip hop career. Everyone in the subcontinent wants to claim him but his roots do come from Pakistan. I now stumble into limited knowledge to speak about the Mujahirs of Pakistan. Mujahir means “immigrant”. In this case, it is associated to those who moved to Pakistan from North India during Partition in 1947. Another layer of definition is that Mujahirs are those who came to Pakistan and we not from the original four provinces (Sindhi, Punjabi, Balochi or Pakhtun). A majority of the Mujahirs have made Karachi in Sindh home. I learnt the term for the first time when I read a book on the 1996 Cricket World Cup called “War Minus the Shooting” as Pakistan legend Javed Miandad was of the Mujahir community. He was included in the team after two years and his inclusion might have even subdued some riots in Karachi. Then, I recently started reading Wasim Akram’s Sultan and he mentions very interesting stories of another Mujahir teammate Rashid Lateef who used ingenious ways to blow the whistle on his teammates whom he suspected were involved in match fixing in the late 90s.
But back to Riz.
Using the simple Arabic definition of Mujahir, Riz is a double immigrant. His (very recent) ancestors moved to Pakistan in the 1940-50s and his family then moved from Pakistan to the UK in the 1970s. Born in Wembley and educated in Oxford, Riz, like HEEMS followed the subcontinental Western dream till the rap career came to be. His solo work as a rapper also explores identity about who he is as he does in his song ‘Englistan’, which is a mashup of “England” and “Pakistan”. His outfit for the music video is a combination of an England football team jersey and the 1992 Cricket World Cup Pakistani jersey which is special as Imran Khan led his “Cornered Tigers” to win the World Cup. The song itself is a beautiful insight on various aspects of multicultural UK and that includes the good, the bad and the ugly. Lines like “Racist beef, cakes and tea” is a perfect description to another line “Politeness mixed with violence”. Or times how he explains that it is ok to co exist with the line, “Hair of the dog, or beard for your God, After mosque or pub, it’s curry and kebab”.
Another common theme we see in the subcontinental diaspora rap across the Atlantic is a lot more inclusion within the brown community. In Soup Boys, HEEMS references Mecca and Medina right after talking about the Hindu Center on Kissena Boulevard while Riz MC follows the lines “A kicharee (kichidi for those from India) simmering, Women in Hijabs, syringe popstars” with “And the promise of a Patel as a ‘Man U’ star”. I feel there is a reason for this, so please indulge me.
We go back to the time when I began college. The terms FOB (fresh of the boat) and ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) were slowly reaching their end but still existed. I, along with many others were FOBs and there was a clique of ABCDs at college as well. There was an immediate divide between the two groups as we FOBs didn’t go around calling each other “dawg” and our accents gave our American counterparts Pavlovian trauma about their strict upbringing or even the version of India they visited every other year. So we felt like there was nothing in common. However, a decade later, a few weddings and lot of booze later, we kind of met half way. We got slightly more American and they discovered that being desi is not just about the world their parents left behind. Turns out we’re all the same. Well, except for one very important factor: The people we became on September 12, 2001.
For all of us living in the motherland, 9/11 was devastating to watch on the news. It did send a shiver of fear down our spines but we all went to school the next day and everyone still saw each other the same way. It was pop culture from America that educated us that our skin color’s resemblance to those behind the attack has labelled us all as bad people. Still, we didn’t feel that on a daily basis back home. But think of those who grew up in America and the UK. Think of a teenager who was annoyed with their family’s heritage because of how they didn’t fit in on the weekend Bhajans or Quran reading classes and felt a sense of identity with their classmates in school as being American. Think about how that got shattered into pieces on September 12, 2001. Their curry lunch box was enough to be isolated. Your whole identity was robbed at such an impressionable age. HEEMS went to high school two blocks away from the World Trade Center. Riz was detained at an airport and was asked about his views on the Iraq War, by the same people we all thought we could trust. Each of us have a demeaning story about navigating life being brown in the Western Hemisphere. But to see how our friends got through those years and still have the capacity to love and forgive, it is inspiring.
HEEMS and Riz MC had a different idea though. They said, let us use music to talk about it. A lot of their music questions how we are treated in no polite terms. Each song is an essay worth a deep dive. The exception is the song “Aaja”, has enough to raise eyebrows but may be considered mellow for Swet Shop Boys and it may be because of our third and final collaborator, Ali Sethi.
To be continued..