Rapping for a cause

For rapper Raxstar, hip-hop isn’t just a rebellious genre of music — it is poetry. He believes that if you remove the rhythm from an RnB song, the lyrics unravel itself as strong poems. “Spoken word with an RnB makes a rap song, and without it, it is poetry,” he says. Breaking free from the clutter of flash-in-the-pan hip-hop music, Raxstar has recently released a song titled Balwant in association with MTV Spoken Word that focuses on women empowerment.

Quite unlike rap songs, we observe. While Raxstar agrees that mainstream rap music tends to be degrading towards women, he believes that it isn’t entirely right to put the blame on the genre. “It is society’s fault. It’s a man’s world; it is a patriarchal society. The music is going to reflect that and that’s just how it is. Mainstream music everywhere is very patriarchal, very demeaning towards women,” he agrees.

Then where did the inspiration for writing an empowering rap song for women come from? “I don’t subscribe to the patriarchal notion any way,” adding, “There are strong females in my family and strong women in my life. For me to make a song that objectifies women would be alien because that’s not who I am. My music is just a reflection of me,” he says.

Raxstar took special care for it to not sound pretentious. “I’m an outsider, I’m not a woman and it doesn’t quite do for me to say that I’ve written this song for empowering them. I cannot empower anyone, people empower themselves. I can only give you an example of something that I think is empowering, and it is this,” he explains.

Born and bought up in the United Kingdom, the confluence of different cultures influenced his music from the get-go. “My music is a direct influence of my upbringing and my culture — it is a reflection of being Indian and British, a direct clash of cultures,” he says. However, he also points out that how despite belonging to two different cultures, he doesn’t really belong anywhere. “Growing up in the UK, sometimes you feel like you don’t belong here because you don’t look like an English person. And then you go back to India thinking you’ll feel like you belong here, but you’re proved wrong. Why? Because Indians treat you like foreigners,” he rues.