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KRISHAN A lot of people say that you are one of the pioneer rappers in Sri Lanka. Is that true? That’s very true. I started off maybe about ten years ago. What really made you go in the direction of rap? I was heavily influenced by rap music. I was listening to a lot of rap music, and I started writing my own stuff as well because I was into a lot of poetry. Then I started composing original music, myself and my brother. We were rapping to instrumentals of other artists when we were small and later on we got guys to produce beats for us. From there onwards we revolutionized the whole hip hop industry in Sri Lanka. You and your brother. We were called Urban Sounds. What’s your brother doing now? He did bit of solo. He was on my solo album as well. Urban Sounds doesn’t exist anymore. So we’re not functioning as a group anymore. We do music whenever we feel like it, we get together and do some stuff. Did your group have any recordings done? We had a lot of airplay on local English radio stations. They were playing most of our stuff around ‘97/’98. Then I started working with Iraj. We introduced mass rap music, rap music for the masses. We combined other languages—Tamil, Sinhalese—and we made trilingual music as well. It would be good to have a whole record in Sinhalese or Tamil. That would be really interesting. My first album is actually something similar to that. It was Sri Lanka’s first Tamil hip hop album. And it was the first rap album from Sri Lanka to go out of Sri Lanka. It had a lot of mass appeal in South India. Some of my stuff got played in England on BBC radio. It was on the charts and got a lot of exposure on the Asian network. Tamil rap music started to grow, and now there are plenty of Malaysian rap bands doing rap and a bit of Indian people doing rap. My new album is on a higher level than my previous album. It shows the maturity cause I've started producing on this album. I’m doing a bit of singing, rapping, the whole works. It shows my maturity as a musician. Is it different from your first album? Yeah, very different because I'm highlighting all the political issues in the album. It’s going to be loads of gangsta rapping in it. It’s going to quite controversial Tamil rap music. That’s what it is.
A unique thing about people is their language. I love the sound of each different language. That’s what makes them original. I love African rap and Mexican rap when they rap in their own languages. When you hear the different accents it’s real cool. We shouldn’t try to hide it. A lot of artists try to sound like American rap. American rap music started with break beats, break dancing and hip hop culture. It started from African Americans, but it started spreading all over the globe. Now you see Chinese people who live the hip hop culture but they rap in Chinese. You’ve got Filipino rappers, you got different rappers from different geographical areas who represent their own cultures through rap music. That’s why, as a Sri Lankan Tamil, I started representing my culture, my language. That was a pioneer effort I did and I’m still known as the first Tamil rapper in Sri Lanka to launch rap music in Sri Lanka. Are there a lot more Tamil rappers coming up in Sri Lanka? I see a lot more coming, but they need to keep their lyrics up to standard as well. When you are writing rap it involves a lot of poetry. And when you are writing poetry in Tamil it should be very poetic. I write a lot of Tamil poetry and I rap it. That’s why my rap stands out more than what you hear generally. There are new rappers like Yawanan, he raps in Tamil, he works with Iraj. There are Tamil rappers like Yougi B in Malaysia. They are trying to work with Iraj I think. I’m still keeping my game tight; I've got a big album coming up. When I started interviewing rappers in Sri Lanka something I noticed that was real positive was that Sinhalese and Tamil rappers all work together. It’s good to see we are united in music. Yeah, that’s what we started as well. We launched unity in music. Showing people from different cultural backgrounds all working as one team for a positive cause. Music is a place where we can bring people together. Regardless of language, regardless of whatever cultural differences, you can unite people through music. We have been having this ethnic conflict for 25-26 years now. We thought we could make a difference by making songs with positive messages. We did a lot of songs like that. We speak on behalf of our community, show what we go through. This is all communicated through the music. Rap is a good platform to promote unity, because rap music is generally rhythm and poetry, and you express what you feel through that music. I think you can do a lot of wonders with rap music. Now we’ve got Sinhalese people appreciating Tamil music and Tamil people appreciating Sinhalese music. When you combine all of them together you could obviously bring people together. When you were growing up what were you listening to, as far as American rap is concerned? I was listening to a lot of Tribe Called Quest, a lot of Talib Kweli, a lot of Naughty by Nature, Cypress Hill. Public Enemy is amazing. What about West Coast rap? Definitely. NWA, Westside Connection, Tupac, we listened to all that. But then we started localizing. Like in the sense when it comes to gangster rapping, you can’t exactly relate the same things here. Even though that gave us a lot of knowledge about rap music, we weren’t doing the same things that they were doing there. It was a different reality there. We localized whatever we heard and added a bit of a Sri Lankan flavor to it. The real vibe that happens through Sri Lanka is what we highlighted throughout. A lot of the rap that’s coming out in Sri Lanka has a very authentic feel. That’s how we stand out. We stand out by our languages, our cultural instruments, maybe percussions or other ethnic instruments we use on rap music. That makes us distinctive. That’s important because you got many other rappers rapping in English. How you make yourself unique is how you present your music. So we believe in doing the original essence. Rap music is basically like modern tribal music. Sri Lankan people are always with the tribal drumming and percussion. That’s why we’re trying to incorporate that tribal flavor by using Sri Lankan percussions. Everyone can relate to some sort of their roots or their culture. The old roots and cultures we had in our past we can bring it out. We can rejuvenate them resurrect the past music using our traditional instruments. You can do a lot of wonders. What is happening with globalization is not a positive thing because each culture is disappearing. It’s becoming one culture. The unique Sri Lankan music we have will lose its identity. The music of the world will all start sounding the same. With globalization we are losing our identity as a people. What I understand is that globalization has a certain good in it, but at the same time it’s a way to rape our cultures. Things we were born with or were raised with are slowly disappearing. What we need to do is preserve and educate the next generation about our culture. We can do it musically, we can do our part as rappers. Educate them about the culture, keep certain Sri Lankan cultural elements in the music. The only good thing about globalization is it takes our music to a global platform. First you were catering to about a thousand people; now millions through internet, through digital, can hear our music. You have the opportunity to express that music to a wider network. At the same time we have to keep our culture alive. Keep your Sri Lankan or Mexican or African element to it. Keep your originality with you and don’t let that culture die, To me it’s so exciting to go out and eat Indian food or Mexican food. Just imagine if everything started tasting like Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald’s. With globalization the dominant culture will wipe all the other cultures out. Western culture or the western influence in Asian countries is a noticeable thing. You’ve got multinational brands exposing themselves, intruding into the East. Some people are adapting to it and some are not, but what I’m sad to say is that a lot of people are adopting Western culture; everyone’s conversing in one language. English is becoming the one universal language. Certain countries are strong on promoting their own language. A lot of Sri Lankans migrate to other countries and they forget their roots. One thing I strongly advise all Sri Lankans in the global arena is to keep listening to Sri Lankan music wherever you are in the world. Whether it’s Sinhalese or Tamil, keep promoting Sri Lankan music. Educate you children about your language, about your culture, because that’s one thing that’s important. You have to stick to your roots. If we don’t have our roots, we don’t have anything. You are like a tree without roots, you’re not going to grow. Without its roots the tree won’t have flowers or fruits. We as people won’t grow. Our way of living will disappear. No matter what, keep your culture, keep your traditional clothing, keep your food, keep your language. It’s really important. I don’t care what people say. Tamil, Malaysian, Chinese, I love all those cultures. The Western culture is dominating everything right now and that’s not a very positive thing. Not a very positive thing. It gives us a lot of influences. If you do have influences you can try to adapt to them and also localize them, add your own element to it.
Like if we get influenced by rap, that’s the global music right now. We can bring it home and do our own thing, That’s what we’ve been doing and we’ve found a positive way of promoting it. We’ve seen lot of people responding to it. I would say the next generation of musicians don’t forget their roots, even if they’re born in the US, UK or wherever. When is your album coming out, Krishan? My next album is due in May or June. But the first single with a video is coming out by the end of next month. Will you be promoting your album with a video and the single before the album comes out? Yeah, I will be releasing two videos from the album. Also when I was in Australia about a month back I was performing with a friend of mine there. We shot a video there, so I will be releasing that video in about two weeks. They are still editing the video; once it’s done it’ll be released in Sri Lanka. You go by Krishan. Didn’t you have a different name? I was initially known as Nasty K. I decided to stick to the name I was given at birth, that’s Krishan. Do you rap on other people’s songs? I do. I featured with like pioneer artists—I worked with Dilup, I worked with Minon Fernando. And I’ve worked with a lot new talent in our crew like Infaz, and BK (Bone Killa), I worked with Iraj, I worked with Bathiya and Santhush. I do a lot of features, because other artists see value in my music or in my style, that’s why they’ll call me. I’m doing a lot of collaborations with a lot of talented artists. That will be out soon. You’ll hear a lot about Krishan cause I just started re-launching. I will be back on the media quite a lot. I’ve been laying low these days, because I haven’t put out any new material since I put out my last album. I wanna come back with a band. That’s why it’s called “Reincarnation”. It’s called “Awadaram” in Tamil, “Awathara” in Sinhala, which means reincarnation. And it talks about Lord Krishna’s tenth reincarnation. It was originally called “Krishna Awadarama”, but now we’ve shortened it to “Awadaram”. What kind of books do you read? A lot of poetry, a lot of history. I like to read a lot. I like to keep myself informed. I read a lot of religious material and Tamil poetry. I read a lot of Kannadasan, Kavi Nirvali, and a lot of Viramuttu. Ancient poets from South India. I listen to jazz, classical music, to a bit of Tamil film music, Tamil Karnatik music, I listen to a lot of John Coltrane. That inspires me, makes me a better musician. When you restrict yourself to one genre your world is very small. When you diversify yourself listening to other sorts of music, you can combine all of them together and you can put out a masterpiece.
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