Baba Sehgal and Desiinger: Kings of nonsensical rap
It's a song no one can make head or tail of. Talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel even tried to get passersby to unscramble the lyrics by sticking a phone to their ears but not one succeeded.
The kids love it - total YouTube views stand at 131, 383, 118. I'm bad with numbers but that certainly looks like it's crossed a crore.
The song is called "Panda", and is the product of the imagination of a 19-year-old Brooklyn rapper who goes by the moniker, Desiigner, and is signed on to rap superstar Kanye West's label: GOOD, which, incidentally, stands for Getting Out Our Dreams.
The dream got busted Friday night as Desiigner was arrested in midtown Manhattan and charged with gun, drug (Oxycontin - is pharma is the new heroin?) and third-degree assault charges (waving a gun), in what appears to be a road rage incident in Lincoln Tunnel.
"Panda" debuted on the Billboard Charts at No 96 around Christmas, clawing its way to No 1 by April. Desiigner grew up in the borough of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the neighbourhood of New York from where rap royalty like The Notorious BIG and Jay Z hail from.
On first listen, you think: Gangsta rap is back. The song begins with the now-famous line: "I got broads in Atlanta/ Twisting dope, lean, and the Fanta."
As it progresses, it drops references to fast cars ("I got plenty of stuff of Bugatti whip"), guns and jealous rivals: "Know niggas/ they come and kill you on the camera").
All in line with a gangsta revival. But then, at some point, the song stops making sense.
There's a thriving online subculture dedicated to unravelling the references in lines like "Pockets swole, Danny"; "The choppa go Oscar for Grammy"; and my favourite: "Hitting of licks in the bando".
So what is Desiigner trying to say? Is he trying to say something or is that beside the point?
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| While "Panda" has made Desiigner rich, he bought the beat for the song online for $200 from a British producer called Menace. (Photo credit: Google) |
A lot of rap is wordplay and this is something Desiigner has pointed out himself, that he puts into the song what he sees from his window - a white SX, or what's been playing on a 19-year-old's mind: the multi-sequel movie Fast and Furious; the video game, Grand Theft Auto. A lot of this is random connection; the songs then become stories around loosely connected themes.
It's at this point that you start thinking: this is not all nonsensical rhyming. It's a lot of cool references strung together but the words are there for a reason.
And even if it wasn't so, nonsense verse has, paradoxically, always made a lot of sense. There is a tradition of mixing deep ghetto colloquial (which only those in the know know) with invented words (like "immobilarity"), pioneered by rappers like Ghostface and Raekwon, legends on the circuit for their creative use of slang.
Which brings us to the question of how to achieve global success. You make Bob Marley more palatable to the Western world by removing local references and smoothening out the latent roughness from the reggae.
Hollywood studios do it too when they make movies for global audiences (3D, action, adventure, fantasy). Compared to that, the rappers follow an approach contrarian to marketing wisdom. In their case, even with Eminem rapping about white trash Detroit, it seems that the more local they get, the more their global appeal is.
The slang "keeps it real" and lends the song authenticity, which global audiences like, even if they don't get the references entirely.
Another point about contemporary song writing. What prevails today, in a producer-driven recording industry, is a copy-paste approach (nothing wrong with it), where the lyrics often follow later.
Desiigner is on record saying: "I got the beat from one of my dudes. He said 'whip it up'." While "Panda" has made Desiigner rich, he bought the beat for the song online for $200 from a British producer called Menace.
The beat is everything in "Panda", although Desiigner's delivery is uber-distinctive, especially the way he half swallows, almost nixes the last syllable, whittling it down to a whisper-echo.
Closer home, we have our own king of nonsense rap, Baba Sehgal, now enjoying a revival of sorts. In his second coming, Baba has hit a purple patch, commenting on everything from the rise of Donald Trump, to professing his love for Rihanna: "We love you Rihanna/ Aur haan dieting mat karna/ Khana ache se khana".
Baba is the quintessential desi simpleton, with his heart in the right place, hopelessly chafing against the limitations of his own IQ, pushing the barriers of thought, until we are left with eminently hummable conceptual failure: "Tere gaaney store hain meri Sony pen drive par/ Jab aayoonga Los Angeles jayenge drive par/ Teri voice ki deewani hai yeh duniya o Rihanna/ Hindi mein kehte hain kela, English mein banana."
The former DESU engineer harbours a dream of East meeting West: "I wish we could someday collaborate together/Jab gaati ho tum naachtey hain peacock ke feather/ Hollywood ka apna hee nasha hai o Rihanna/ Even Bollywood mein Sallu sang o o jaane jaana."
Here, Baba takes a global pop phenomenon, Rihanna, and then mixer-grinds it with Indian themes and tropes: Athithi Devo Bhava, Hindi cinema, peacocks, family: "Grandfather is 'nana' and excuse is 'bahana'/ Next time jab bhi India aao, ghar zaroor aana."
The Big Mac is now a Maharaja Mac, more accommodating of the Indian palate and less intimidating than Rihanna.