Is Punjabi pop the new hip-hop?

Written by Nikhil Sachan and directed by Shiva Varma and Saptaraj Chakraborty, Bajao is about three aspiring music video producers and directors and the limits to which they will extend their resourcefulness in order to make videos that will fetch them 100 million views.

The tone is irreverent in a non-cerebral, laugh-out-loud way — toilet humour is not out of bounds — and the gaze on this world, shown more as a sub-culture in Bajao, has all the quirks of a cult. For example, long-haired musicians drink breakfast cereal with alcohol.

The series has it black humour moments, although over four episodes which have dropped on Jio Cinema, there’s too much happening just to unleash farce: the ambition of the three friends, Ved (Tanuj Virmani), Dhaari (Sahil Khattar) and Cookie (Sahil Vaid)  largely defeated by the system are offset by the antics of hip-hop singers, gangsters and gun-totting music video producers.

In that sense, Bajao is quite out of steps with the world of Punjabi pop and rap, expanding exponentially around the world. The new Punjabi music isn’t just chest-beating, foot-tapping, cheer-soaked improvised bhangra that the world saw through singers like Daler Mehendi or even diaspora singers like Sukhbir and Bally Sagoo. The generation of singers who have grown up in the UK and Canada through the 2000s are consciously or unconsciously elevating Punjabi rap and pop into the ream of social commentary about race, belonging-and-unbelonging, the immigrant experience and its inbuilt injustices, drug abuse, gender equality and even violence. They are a medium for social commentary.

This is a breakaway from what Punjabi rap was even in the mid-2010s. Until around 2015-2016, Punjabi singers and rappers sang about drugs, fast cars and women’s bodies. That trend began internationally, specifically in the US, when Jay Z remixed Panjabi MC’s Mundian To Bach Ke (2003) and the UK-based production house Tru Skool produced Diljit Dosanjh’s 2012 album Back to Basics. Punjabi music shares beats, shimmies and even subjects with hip-hop—a genre which happens to be 50 years old this year. Bhangra’s shared soul with old-school NY hip-hop means similar tempos, rhyming, hip-hop’s emcees’ similarity to Punjabi music’s boliyan. Bhangra dance and b-boying has a lot in common too.

In the last decade, a new crop of rappers, riding the Yo Yo Honey Singh wave, began distancing themselves from everything associated with that music once spear-headed by Sidhu Moose Wala, whose lyrics around gun violence triggered inflammatory responses from South Asians and music labels everywhere. Guns, drugs, satanic worship, crashing fast cars and objectifying women became routine in Punjabi rap until now. In 2023, things are much more sanitised, appealing to Gen-Z tastes. Dhillon is in the throes of what Taylor Swift calls “lavender haze” in his cute new single With You. Sidhu Moose Wala was once Dhillon’s inspiration, like Tupac Shakur was an inspiration to generations of hip-hop artistes. Whether Punjabi pop manages to retain its edge with political correctness about the issues that keep the world occupied today remains to be seen.