Vighnesh (Brodha V) and Sumukh (Smokey), who form Machas With Attitude (MWA), a Bangalore-based rap/hip hop/trip hop group, have taken old school rap to Bollywood. An overnight hit on YouTube, the group’s track Ready, Steady Po, although did not appear in the movie Chennai Express, but was created specially for the trailer, based on the film’s tagline.
An award ceremony took the band to the Maximum City and it was here that they hit jackpot. A meeting with Bollywood’s music duo Vishal Shekhar was on their wish list for a while, since they had connected with Vishal over the Dheaon Dheaon song by the Raghu Dixit Project, for which he had given the vocals. As luck would have it Vishal himself handed over the award to them and promptly invited them over to the studio the next day. They were in for a surprise as the Dadlani offered them the chance to compose for Shahrukh Khan’s Chennai Express.
“Once we started recording, Vishal dropped another bomb on us - Shah Rukh was going to visit the studio to finalise the track. It was a crazy experience. He was different - humble and down to earth. We spoke at length about his connection to Bangalore and he recalled his tours to the city. It was surreal,” explains Smokey.
The duo has been working together now for six years. Though both of them are from Bishop Cottons Boys’ School, they never met in school, and connected on a social networking site instead. “For about a year we made music online without actually meeting. But after a point, we decided to take our music live and that’s when we finally met each other,” says Smokey, who is a scientist, researching protein biology at the National Centre for Biological Sciences. When asked to describe their music, Smokey says “It’s a science really. Rap has all the elements of science to it. It involves in-depth research. We can’t just rap about the Prime Minister of the country. There needs to be a point to it. There’s a specific flow and structure to our songs, which is intrinsic to scientific writing as well. So yeah, scientific.”
“We blend hip hop with Carnatic and Hindustani influences. Apart from being fun and crazy, we also want to remain quite relevant to what’s happening in the society around us,” says Brodha V.
The duo are currently busy at the studios, recording their latest album. “Our temporary title is ‘Red plus Green is Brown’. We are upholding the brown culture, our Indian culture. The album will feature artistes like Flipside, Raghu Dixit and others. We have some other interesting things lined up for the album as well but we’d like to disclose them at a later point, perhaps,” says Smokey.
The band has also played music, mostly background music scores, for almost 30 films, including Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi.
“People in Bangalore have misunderstood hip hop for a long time,” says Smokey. “There are a lot of artistes performing hip hop in India. But somehow they haven’t managed to get the exposure we did. It’s probably because we incorporate some Indian elements in our music. The audience here in India wants something ‘hatke’ these days, they aren’t satisfied with pseudo rap songs that just get by, arbitrarily adding ‘yeahs’ and ‘yo’ to their songs,” he adds.
And what do they think of the Bangalore scene? “There are a lot of talented bands in the city. But there are just too many restrictions - with the early shut down on venues. The talent is not being put to use. So they’re all moving to different cities. Once Bangalore used to be the rock capital, but that doesn’t hold true now,” says Brodha V.
Their new album is set to release by the end of the year.