A hip-hop act launches an album with a gig where the content will be a deviation from what Mumbai's 'gully gangs' have to offer
Gari-B is a hip-hop character created by Tadpatri Talkies, a Mumbai-based comedy collective whose members come from diverse backgrounds. But none of them are from Dharavi, a place that has become a hotbed in recent years for emerging rappers and hip-hop artistes.
In fact, one of the main reasons why Gari-B came into being was to break away from the mould that Dharavi's rappers had set for the scene, which involved content based around the struggles that many of these musicians had to face while growing up in gullies.
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"The idea for Gari-B actually struck me when I was watching a documentary on these rappers, where each of them had exactly the same thing to say about the kind of conditions they came from and why they were doing hip-hop," says Gaurang Bailoor, a producer who is one of the founders of the act. He adds, "So, I took it to Anmol [Gawand] and Sidharth [Raveendran] and said, 'Hey, what if we do a parody sketch of sorts, a kind of Weird Al Yankovich, if you will?' We then built a character, Gari-B, who is not too different from the kind of rapper that you have been seeing lately. And we talk about his life in such a literal manner that it ends up being funny."
Anmol Gawand and Sidharth Raveendran
The execution of that idea -- meant more in jest and not as a snide takedown of anyone -- took the form of a track called Gari-B Ki Kahaani. In it, Raveendran, who enacts the role of the central character in an accompanying music video, spits out lines (sung by Gawand) like, "Producer maange paisa/ Yahan rapper'o ko beat nahi/ Charsiyo ko weed nahi/ Censor board ki maaki aan**, gaaliyo ko beep nahi [Producers want money/ But rappers here don't have beats/ Pot smokers don't have weed/ To hell with the censor board, cuss words don't have beeps]."
The track was received well enough for a second single, called A.B.T, to be released, and now Gari-B is coming out with its first full-length album, Bhookh, which will be out today on a digital stream. Tomorrow, the crew will play in a launch gig for it at a Lower Parel venue. "We will perform all the 11 songs from the album and will also stage a sketch, which will be modeled on the lines of a daily news show with a musical act coming in. Aseem Chandaver and I will enact it," says Raveendran.
But despite the sketch styled after a daily news show, Bailoor insists that Gari-B's content is completely apolitical. "Our agenda was never to be political or ideological about anything. We are going to do stupid sh*t, and that's it. We also want to have fun doing whatever we are doing. The moment a piece of creative content becomes political or ideological, it assumes a moral high ground, and that's not us," he says.
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