The Rebel

For those of you who are following the Sikh hip-hop scene, Navdeep Singh Dhillon’s blog has a good overview of each of the musicians who’ll be in attendance at the upcoming Lahir 2010: Move the Movement event in New Jersey.  Here’s an excerpt about one of the rappers whose name means Rebel,

Baagi Gunjiv is one of the very few rappers out there who raps in Punjabi. The only other one that I can think of is Bohemia, and his songs are all about “thug life” in Oakland and Sacramento. Not that there’s anything wrong with that =) So just the fact that he is rapping in Punjabi and rapping about social issues like farmer suicides, droughts, and 1984, is hopeful, but he doesn’t really have very many songs out there to draw a conclusion from. The only other one I have heard, “Baagi di Vaari” was produced by Sikh Knowledge so it sounds very professional, but content-wise, it is a bit vapid. In his defense, the chorus “Bubbe noon kanna, te Gugge noon bihari” which details the two punctuation marks required to write his name in Gurmukhi, falls in line with any other debut rapper. “What’s my name? Snoop Doggy Dog.” “I’m Bushwick Bill, but you can call me Richard.” “Vanilla Ice Ice Baby,” “Hi, my name is. Slim Shady.”

So I am looking to forward to seeing what else he comes up with and remain optimistic that he will be the breath of fresh air for Punjabi music, both in Punjab and overseas so we can move more towards heightening the consciousness of the masses rather than songs like Diljit’s deep lyrics: “Chandigarh vich kudi milli, chocolate vargi” which I can’t even bring myself to translate. [link]