who let the big dawgs out?
some meandering thoughts on the new Hanumankind track and authenticity in music
I’m so sorry about this title. To explain the terrible joke: a high-octane track by Hanumankind, a rapper based in Bangalore, has been making the rounds, quite literally. “Big Dawgs” has gone viral off the spectacle of its music video, which is filmed inside a Well of Death. Within the cylindrical structure, cars and motorcycles drive up the walls, defying gravity, as Hanumankind stomps among the dirt and spits his bars. If you scroll through the YouTube comments, you’ll see that everyone is showing love, from Denver to Dhaka.
While the spectacle is enrapturing on its own, it’s the audio-visual narrative that really grabs our attention. The song follows a simple but effective four chord progression, where each chord is the sound of an engine turning at a different gear. As the track revs, the camerawork follows the motion blur of drivers accelerating up the walls, power posing, no hands. Director Bijoy Shetty finds many characters, including the rakish drivers, the riled crowd, and of course Hanumankind himself, boyishly handsome and confident. His flow is tight and unapologetic, his foot never easing off the pedal.
Perhaps my favorite detail is that the stuntpeople are locals, both men and women. They are dressed in the unpretentious, if modest, long-sleeves and pants worn by India’s working class, and drive equally unpretentious economy cars and scooters. Their presence shows the world what those of us from the subcontinent have always known. That despite the Western misrepresentation that the Indian is a backwards, pseudo-spiritual caricature, or a workhorse supplied by brain drain, or a member of the chai-drinking-Chopra-Jonas-Kamala-auntie-loving gentry, our people, who come from mud, famine, grit, are punk as fuck. Judging by the flabbergasted reactions of YouTubers, I feel that it is this counter-narrative that has made the project not just entertain but resonate.
At its most hype moments, the chords are amplified by brass instruments. It skids to a stop at the right moments, giving space for Hanumankind to hit us with his hardest lines. But it is precisely in these moments that I feel unsatisfied. I find the bars to be toothless. Take, for example, what I think are the hardest line of the song:
In school I used to fight the bullies, now I'm fightin' with the law
Guess some things don't leave you fully
These lines are well-written, making great work of the “l” phonetic. Hanumankind flings them with a playful cadence. But if I consider their meaning, even at the most superficial level, I have questions. How exactly is he fighting the law? I read that he spent a night in jail in Kerala, but it was an incident borne of college rowdiness rather than ruthless institutionalization. Similarly, when he recites a classic idiom of street life, “gotta pour it for the ones who gone,” for which fallen homies is he pouring out a can of Simba beer?
I appreciate some of the more personal bars that speak to his Keralan pride (“the Sourthern family gon' carry me to way beyond”) and his allegiance to the Global South (“the skin colour like the bourbon / A worldwide sign that we face close curtains”). But by and far, the imagery is placeless, a collage of hip-hop tropes. Unless fans of his discography know something I don’t, rather than crafting bars out of lived experience, he has foraged them.
Many great songs have generic lyrics. We love them anyways. For instance, the chorus to one of my most replayed songs this year goes:
(Baow, baow, baow, baow, baow) That's that booty meat
(Ayy, ayy, ayy, ayy, ayy) Look at them booty cheeks
Vibe and swagger, which Sexyy Red carries in abundance, can be just as memorable as punchlines. “Big Dawgs” could have relied on those two elements, but Hanumankind chose to display his bars as subtitles, in the cheeky yellow font of foreign cinema. He wants us to pay attention to their content, so I am.
I don’t think his method is inherently flawed. Plenty of artists talk about stuff they’ve never done, and plenty of listeners relish poking holes in a story just to see someone fall. The Internet polarizes, and whether an artist is posturing or storytelling is difficult to discuss productively, especially when we don’t have a shared definition of authenticity. What tends to be lost in that conversation is that hip-hop, more visibly than other genres, come from urban Black struggle and joy. Journalist Joel Anderson says it best. In a fantastic piece where he recalibrates his admiration for rapper-turned-conservative Ice Cube, Anderson states:
Those of us who grew up with hip-hop have fretted about the genre’s direction in recent years, with its increasing distance from its birth among Black and Latino street kids in the Bronx and hyperfocus on crass commercialization and digital streams that crack social media algorithms.
We can only discuss the authenticity of a hip-hop project by its proximity to this origin. But when that distance reaches across continents, I have no idea how to process what I’m hearing. On one hand, I don’t think Hanumankind is guilty of crassness. In “Big Dawgs,” he pays respect to Project Pat and UGK, the former of whom took notice. Hanumankind is engaging in the very pure process of absorbing the music he loves and transmuting it into his own. But on the other hand, the lack of authenticity in these bars caters to a simplified palette. If Western imperialism and capitalism, in the form of the monopolized and targeted internet, has succeeded in feeding the world a deracialized, impersonal hip-hop, then “Big Dawgs” is very easy to digest.
I have no right to gatekeep anybody, me who has consumed hip-hop, consumed Black culture, from within the privileged heart of the American empire. But I still crave authenticity, and if I may offer my own definition, I crave the entwinement of the personal, with the observational, with the political, with the tactile. I want more of Hanumankind in his bars. What was it like bouncing around Houston, Qatar, and now Kerala? How did Project Pat’s music inform his outlook? Was he ever in love or spurned? Who is his crew? When’s the last time he got lit at the club in Kerala? Writer Jacqueline Woodson says it best:
The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.
I mean, just so we’re clear, I do like the track!
“Big Dawgs" may not contain megaton bars like “they not like us” and “g block, all we know is redrum,” but “how you get like this // how you live like this” is indeed a chest-beating line to hear right after you’ve lifted a heavy barbell up and down. Sure, it’s unfair to compare an emerging Indian rapper to American superstars like Kendrick and 21, but I just want more. Hating is boring. Critique is a love letter. Hanumankind has the talent, hustle, and team to push Desi hip-hop in exciting directions. I just hope he does so with his personal story, and not just spectacle.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong about all this and I’m just being a big nerd. Perhaps he is fully locked in and unabashedly loves what he makes. I’m just one person with an inconsequential opinion, which I state not self-deprecatingly but factually. “Big Dawgs” has 30 million views and counting. I have to respect that achievement, and I have to respect anyone that executes on their vision without compromise. Ultimately, that’s some big dawg shit.