Bengaluru’s rap scene is upped once again as it makes a statement in Bollywood. This time it’s for the movie Detective Byomkesh Bakshy ’s first teaser song ‘Bach Ke Bakshy!’ featuring ’Luru rappers Big Deal and Smokey The Ghost.
This high-energy promotional music track of Dibakar Banerjee’s crime thriller features Sushant Singh Rajput do a kickass dance in a dhoti in most parts, straddling timeframes, and unable to stop himself from dancing in a parking lot!
Big Deal (Samir Rishu Mohanty aka #OneKidWithADream) and Smokey The Ghost (Sumukh Mysore) performed at India Music Week where the film’s music director Sneha Khanwalkar heard them and loved their live energy, say the boys. The best part of the whole song-making process was that the boys went in almost blind into the project. The music director didn’t give them any real brief, and there were no discussions, they say! Their parts were recorded in a studio in Bengaluru, with Sneha sitting in on a Skype call. “The lyrics of the chorus were written by Sneha and Dibakar. There were a whole lot of people involved in the song, and a whole Hindi rap set up. There was a drum sequence from their other song ‘Calcutta Kiss’ which featured in this song, and I threw a rap section on it, and Sneha liked it,” says Sumukh. “Nothing on the track was in English. Sneha was looking for something more academic, but she didn’t want to tell us anything beyond the mood of the song. So we kept in mind that he’s a detective…”
“We were given creative freedom. She just wanted us to be ‘us’ in the song. Neither of us have done a song in Hindi before, so after this song, we’ve started writing in Hindi also. It helps reach out to a larger audience,” says Samir. The two are part of a rap group they started in August 2014, called Smoke to Deal With Panic, which also features fellow rapper Panic. The group was formed as an offshoot of the first-ever Indian rap cypher that Bengaluru’s rappers put together last year. The group has since been doing live shows in Gujarat, Delhi, and in the north east.
The dark song ‘Bach Ke Bakshy’ hangs on the sense of mystery created by the rappers’ lyrics: “Yo, As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death/You see, His eyes ain’t even blinking, why you checking his breath?/ … Oh, so the murder weapon used was a chain on the neck/ Or did they bang on the head? Why is there blood on the bed?”
It was a great learning experience for the two boys, writing the lyrics in the studio with the music director watching on. Originally a trial session was planned followed by a recording. But Sneha kept the trial as the final recording, they muse. “Sneha works with vocal textures; she doesn’t go for the star voices,” says Sumukh. “She exploits your voice well. She asked us to deliver the words in a different cadence than we are used to, so we also learnt something new,” elaborates Samir.
Taking their rap to Bollywood definitely has its advantages, the boys agree. “Bollywood is the place to be. It has a large reach and that’s where the fame and money is. It helps us be more exposed to a large audience. And the crowd also gets to know that there is a serious rap scene in India, beyond Honey Singh,” Samir sums it up. They figure that even if some of the two lakh people who have watched the song already on YouTube go look up their individual work, it’s a great opening. “This is good brand visibility. People in the South regularly see us in live shows. We want to up the scene in the rest of India,” says Sumukh, who’s earlier worked on two Bollywood songs in Chennai Express and Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge .
