Sidhu Moose Wala was tragically misunderstood

The singer, shot dead last week, had acquired a violent, hip hop-inspired persona which obscured his efforts to instil hope in agrarian Punjab

Sidhu Moose Wala’s death is seen by some as a result of the gun culture and violence that he allegedly promoted through his lyrics. Such a view engages with his persona in a superficial manner without due regard to his journey through the soundscape of Punjabi folk music. To fully understand the repertoire left behind by Sidhu, it is imperative that his music be situated in its context.

Punjabi folk music consists of a vast array of musical styles and hip hop is perhaps the most prominent after Bhangra pop. Sidhu did not start his career with hip hop. Even in many of his later songs, he retained the melodious singing more characteristic of Punjabi folk music and than the hip hop style associated with singers like Bohemia and Divine.

Sidhu started off by singing devotional songs and songs about everyday life in the rural areas of Punjab. In ‘So high,’ a track that brought him fame, he shifts the imagery but not the focus. His lyrics incorporate the violence seen in Punjab, but the experience can be transposed to any Indian state. This is how his artistic style aligned with hip hop culture, and personas presented by artists such as Tupac Shakur, Nas, Ice T, Ice Cube, Notorious BIG and Snoop Dogg, known as OGs or original gangsters.

These artists saw life with a lens that exaggerated ambitions. In their fast life, characters got rich or died trying, and so they were affiliated to gangs such as Bloods, Crips, Pairus, MS-13. These gangs wielded influence over the record industry and used artists to invest in the music business. Rappers emulated gang culture by organising themselves into groups like Dr Dre’s NWA, RZA’s Wu Tang Clan and Snoop Dogg’s Dogg Pound, to name a few. With the song ‘Woofer’ by Dr Zeus, Snoop Dogg became the first to collaborate with Punjabi artists.

In his music videos, Sidhu often quoted and borrowed highly from this style of rap with West Coast beats, and highlighted in his videos a make of car preferred by Mexicans and Blacks in Los Angeles. However, these were mere gimmicks to reach a larger audience and to find himself at home with the Punjabi public in India and a diaspora living in the US and Canada.

A closer look into his lyrics in ‘Panjab’, ‘295’ and ‘Youngest in charge’ suggest his deep involvement in the politics of Punjab and his willingness to lead the youth. In one of his last songs, he expresses his interest in participating in parliamentary politics and equates Jat pride with VIP culture. Through his lyrics, he has depicted Jat culture as misguided, and suggests violence is thrust upon the community by a lack of opportunities elsewhere.

Sidhu innovatively fused the anger and frustrations of an art form created by a dispossessed minority with a rural public whose deprivation harks back to a violent past darkened by Partition, radicalism and insurgency---and now at odds with a hyper-nationalist political agenda. Those who listen to Sidhu and only hear misogynist hypermasculine paeans to the Jat community are not initiated into the larger history of this community, grappling with the choices of migrating out of India, joining the army and taking up farming.

Sidhu’s career bestows respectability to Jats involved in farming and warns them against idolising wealth, for instance in his song ‘Outlaw’. Those who feel Sidhu promoted or glorified a rule of cash mishear his lyrics and misunderstand the more intimate messages which dearly cost him his life.

(The authors are research scholars at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi).