Hip-hop will grow with or without Bollywood push: Kidshot

Having worked in the web project Gabru: Hip Hop Revolution and the Ranveer Singh-starrer Gully Boy (2019), rapper Kidshot feels rap music has come a long way in India. Ask if his first Bollywood outing contributed towards the popularity of the genre and the rapper says, “Gully Boy definitely brought more eyes to the game, people are digging underground music more now. But the scene was supposed to blow up anyway. The film did not help the scene, but definitely helped a few artistes and boosted their careers, which is good. Somewhere, it made people come to this side [of understanding real hip-hop] and not just bump the commercial whack Badshah (musician) tracks, because at that time, people thought that’s the only hip-hop music coming out. Now, it’s more about lyricism and what you bring to the table. Hip-hop will continue to grow with or without any Bollywood push.”

The 24-year-old, who released a track called Ride Slow last month, believes that the rap scene in India will soon be big globally too. Calling rapper Divine a frontrunner of Indian rap’s global voyage, Kidshot says, “A few rappers are representing the genre globally and one of them is Divine. He’s doing great. The future is to go global for sure, but keeping it desi. We will speak our language, but people will enjoy it in different countries just like Despacito. Even if we don’t understand the language, we vibe on it.”

Given the popularity of Bollywood music in India, ask if rap can compete with mainstream genres and the rapper says, “I feel nowadays, there’s a dedicated audience to everything. People listen to real hip-hop and realise what we are really trying to say. The genre is taken more seriously now. Lyricism has become an important factor now. People put my songs’ lines as social media captions… So yes, people are listening to what we say and rap now is not just eight lines in a Bollywood song. It has made its own space and it will be an industry on its own,” Kidshot ends.