How Raaj Babu Became One of the Most Trolled Contestants on MTV Hustle 5
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by Rahul
We keep asking artists to find their own voice, but what happens when we don’t understand the one they find?
When I look at Raaj Babu, I don’t just see a rapper, I see an artist who has spent the last few years slowly building his own little world in this already saturated industry we call DHH or Indian Hip-Hop.
There are a lot of good rappers in India now, probably more than there have ever been, and you can open Instagram on any random day and find someone who can write really well, has a great flow or can put together rhyme schemes that would have probably blown our minds ten years ago.
But being a good rapper and becoming an interesting artist are two different things for me, because at some point it isn’t only about how well you can rap anymore. It is about whether there is something about the music that belongs to you.
That is what attracted me to Raaj’s music when I first heard him a few years ago. There was something unusual about the pockets he would pick on beats and even now I find it difficult to properly explain exactly what it is. His cadence can be strange, sometimes playful, sometimes almost theatrical, but it rarely feels like he is trying to sound like somebody else.
Then you go through songs like ‘Ratiya Karela’ with Yash Raj Mishra, ‘Loveria’, ‘Touch Me Not’ and ‘Du Sau Kos’ and you realise that the versatility people are seeing on Hustle isn’t something that suddenly appeared because a television show has given him different themes to work with every week. That range was already there.
But it isn’t even just the music. The way he dresses, the humour, his identity, the language and references he uses and the way he carries himself all somehow feel connected to the same person. There are artists whose songs I really like but if you removed their name from the record, somebody else could probably have made it. With Raaj, even when he is doing something completely unexpected, I usually understand that it came from him.
Which is why watching the reaction to him on MTV Hustle 5 has been so interesting, because some of the things that make Raaj interesting to me seem to be the exact things that make him so easy to troll for other people.
Do we actually want artists to be different?
We talk about originality constantly in music. We complain about everyone sounding the same, artists following whatever is working at that particular moment and how difficult it has become to find someone with a genuinely distinct identity, but then someone actually does something strange and suddenly we don’t seem to know what to do with them.
I completely understand someone not enjoying Raaj’s music. Being experimental doesn’t automatically make something good, and liking unusual music doesn’t somehow make you a more intelligent listener either. Personally, I have enjoyed everything he has done on Hustle so far, including some of the performances that seem to have divided the audience the most, but someone else can listen to exactly the same songs and feel completely differently.
What interests me more is how quickly “this isn’t for me” can become “this is bad” when something doesn’t fit the version of hip-hop we already understand.
The DHH audience has become much more technically knowledgeable over the years, which is obviously a great thing. People understand rhyme schemes, flows, pockets, punchlines and references in a way that shows how much the audience has grown alongside the scene, but I sometimes wonder whether all of that knowledge has also created certain boxes in our heads about what a really good rapper is supposed to look and sound like.
And I think that is partly what makes the reaction to Raaj so interesting. There are clearly people who don’t connect with what he is doing, while at the same time there are others, including the judges on Hustle, who seem to see something genuinely special in it.
I sometimes wonder whether that gap itself creates some of the frustration. If your idea of a great rapper looks more like Vichaar or Prathmesh, both amazing talents in their own right, then watching Raaj receive the same kind of appreciation for doing something completely different might simply not make sense to you.
But maybe the problem is the comparison itself.
Vichaar, Prathmesh, Siyaahi and artists working in those spaces can be incredible at what they do without becoming the template every other rapper has to fit into. The more music I’ve listened to over the years, the more I’ve realised that knowing what a multisyllabic rhyme is or recognising a complicated flow doesn’t necessarily make me better at understanding an artist. Sometimes it can actually make it easier to look for the things I already know how to measure and completely miss the things I don’t.
Because how do you measure personality? How do you measure an artist building a world around themselves, bringing a cultural reference into their music that half the audience has never heard before, or simply hearing a song and knowing that nobody else could have made it?
That’s why I don’t really understand the need to choose between these different kinds of artists. Indian Hip-Hop can have Vichaar and Siyaahi and it can also have Raaj Babu and Shauharty. None of them need to become the blueprint for what everybody else should sound like. In fact, isn’t that what we should want from a scene this big?
Artists coming from completely different places, with completely different ideas of what rap can sound like, rather than everyone slowly moving towards the same definition of what a “good rapper” is supposed to be.
And with Raaj, even the things people find strange are part of what makes him interesting to me. His cadence is unusual, the humour is his, and Bihar isn’t something he pulls out whenever he wants to make a song about his roots. It is just there in the language, references, food and personality surrounding his music. If you slowly remove all of those things because they don’t fit what we already understand a rapper to be, maybe Raaj becomes easier to consume, but I’m not sure he becomes a better artist.
And that is where I find the whole thing slightly contradictory. Artists spend years being told they need to find their own sound, build their own identity and give people something they haven’t heard before, but once they actually do that, there seems to be another expectation that whatever they find should still be familiar enough for everybody to understand immediately.
I remember being younger and doing exactly that. If something didn’t make sense to me, there were times when my immediate conclusion was that it wasn’t good. It took listening to more music, especially from places and cultures I knew very little about, to realise that sometimes I simply didn’t have enough context yet.
That doesn’t mean learning the context suddenly makes everything brilliant. Sometimes you understand exactly what an artist was trying to do and still think the song is shit, which is completely fine. But at least then you’re judging what they actually made rather than what you expected them to make.
Maybe that should be part of becoming a more knowledgeable listener too. Not just learning how to identify everything happening technically in a song, but becoming comfortable enough to admit when you don’t know something.
That feels especially important in Indian Hip-Hop, where there are so many languages, dialects, regional cultures and completely different experiences feeding into the same scene. I don’t think the responsibility should always be on the artist to translate every part of their world for the rest of us.
And maybe that is the part of this whole conversation that interests me more than whether someone thinks Raaj Babu is good or bad.
I hope he keeps developing what he has already built. Maybe five years from now it looks completely different, some ideas disappear and others become much stronger, but I wouldn’t want that development to come from slowly removing everything people find strange about him until there is nothing left for them to complain about.
Because artists spend years trying to find the thing that belongs to them: their voice, their perspective, their world, something that makes you recognise them before you even see the name attached to the song. Raaj already has quite a lot of that.
And if we keep telling artists to find their own voice, we also have to be prepared for the possibility that when they finally find it, it might not sound anything like what we expected.
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