Ever Seen Someone Waterski Behind a Pair of Cows?
I swear this is about music.
Whatever you think about “Big Dawgs,” the surprise Indian rap hit has undoubtedly given us one of the year’s best videos. The clip depicts rapper Hanumankind, from the town of Malappuram in Kerala, India, dropping blustery, English-language, Project Pat-indebted bars on the floor of a Wall of Death—a nearly 90-degree wooden bowl in which stunt people drive motorcycles and boxy sedans at a gravity-defying perpendicular angle. The track found success in the West for its throwback Three 6 Mafia sound and general catchiness, but the real attraction was in watching a woman climb out the passenger window of a little car and then riding supine on the hood (at around 2:24), one of the hardest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Hanumankind, too, rode around in one of the cars for the shoot, and apparently it almost made him barf.
The recent video for “Tapori” by Baby Jean and DJ Lyan, from the latter’s EP Thank You, Come Again, takes the ante of “Big Dawgs” and raises it by a couple of cows and a two-by-four. Baby Jean is a Malappuram star, too, though his approach on the mic couldn’t be more different from Hanumankind’s: For one, he raps in Malayalam, in a flow so deep and transfixing as to be cavernous, and takes maybe one breath every 12 bars. (His vocal tone here reminds me a bit of Tego Calderón at his most guttural.) DJ Lyan, a British-Asian producer, infuses the song with the low bong of sub-bass and synths reminiscent of the grime and garage in East London’s atmosphere, where he grew up. The word “tapori” has different meanings in various Indian languages, but here Lyan and Jean are defining it as “street thugs.” The video depicts men skillfully and furiously waterskiing, each pulled by a pair of cows, and a throng of middle-aged men smashing bottles on each others’ heads—perhaps over the bets they placed on the winner.
This is bull-surfing, otherwise known as Keralan maramadi. (As Diet Paratha, the South Asian culture IG page that first brought this video to my attention, put it, “Spanish-style bullfighting has nothing on Keralan bull SURFING!”) Not just a wild-looking sport, it has a utilitarian purpose: leveling a rice field after the paddy has been harvested post-monsoon, both a celebration and a way to prepare for the next planting. It’s a massive cultural draw, a high-stakes race that requires running hella fast (for the bull jockeys urging the animals forward) and having supernatural balance (for the surfers pulled on a plank behind them). None of the men in this video are depicted wiping out, though plenty seem to. (And, like rodeo in the West, animal rights activists have come out against the ethics of maramadi; the centuries-long tradition is technically illegal but continues in the open.)
Like “Big Dawgs,” “Tapori” seems destined to go viral, but both are serving a much larger purpose: to highlight and honor specific aspects of culture in Kerala, a state that, like much of Southern India, doesn’t seem to receive much attention outside of the subcontinent. (Mega-hit Telugu film RRR notwithstanding.) Here, it’s doing so on a total banger, which melds dhol percussion and shehnai melodies with the TKO bass of trap—or Desi Trill, as Lyan’s label is named. “I’m expressing the realities of living in a foreign region of the world,” DJ Lyan told the South Indian newspaper The Pioneer, “while also drawing on South Asian customs, sounds and cultural allusions. It’s about accepting who I am while respecting my heritage.”
Meanwhile, Baby Jean has released the video teaser for “Thalakkanam” featuring Lendrick Kumar, another slapper with his distinctive flow and propulsive sub-bass. Paired with a dramatic cinema-style poster, it looks like some kind of gritty movie about village life, culminating in a scene that seems to depict a woman slapping his head from the back in an alleyway. (The filmic flair here is fitting, too—Baby Jean is about to appear in Alappuzha Gymkhana, a boxing film by the heralded Malayali director Rahman Khalid.) In the final scene, it seems like he’s lighting something; maybe it’s his mom and she really does not want him to smoke. I await with bated breath.
