Music
The Shillong rapper offers a lethal freeverse for Red Bull 64 Bars season 2.
I always felt like cyphers or rap that’s not really a song – just bars – is nice to showcase, and I wanted to recreate that feel with beat switches on Red Bull 64 Bars.
I also show the various ways rap music can be made – it's like old gen meets new gen. I try to mix different components of rap in this song.
There’s no real story behind the title of the song, we just had to think of something quick. ‘Kill Switch’ was the most related to the switch in styles.
Right off, I rap, “Haters going back-n-forth but ain't pursuing shit.” When I write, I think about the first thing that comes to my head and put it down. It's just a rapper thing, right? Rappers like to always talk about those who are talking shit about them, even when nobody is. It's a funny thing.
Then I say, “No back to being humble me,” that’s about sometimes when you make friends and stuff, but people kind of take you lightly. It's one thing to make friends within the industry with other rappers, but there's always competition. I think we put those friendships aside sometimes. You got to be humble, but you also got to stand your ground.
With “Some say the new gens got just nuisance,” I was showing the contrast of thoughts. According to the old gen, the new gen is a nuisance. But for us, it’s like, ‘Wait, maybe this is the new shit (that we are creating).’ I find the I’m-older-so-I-know-better attitude to be very annoying honestly.
I like the lyric, “Maybe take a walk in these shoes, then we can converse.” When I write a rap song, I like to have inner rhymes. A few lines before, I’ve written, “I'm blazed up with my two cents/Broke the cycle to the maze, found the loop ends/Verse tight, you could never with your loose ends.” Sometimes I don’t like rhyming just the end of the words. So I try to work with inner rhymes; it is at least one checkpoint I try to have in my songs.
For me, it can be any sort of wordplay; the sentence could be simple, but it should be very meaningful.
I also like to have stupid rhymes which are not so deep in thought. It’s like when I rhyme “bitter” and “better,” and I say, “I'm just too thriller, you grew dimmer.” You need to have the nonsense along with the important stuff in your songs. Like my lyric in this song, “That ass the only reason you got the mass shaken” – that’s a punchline. It’s something you say when you end the bar.
When the beat switches, I get into a bitter state of mind. I’m pretty chill in the first verse, but I switch in the second verse.
So this character that I’m rapping about, Mrs Underground, is about how underground artists always feel like they deserve more. It’s the right feeling, obviously. But not everybody who's talented can be successful, and that's just how life is sometimes. But there's always that feeling of, “I need better, I deserve better” with underground artists. I go through that a lot. Mrs Underground is actually me, and I'm just mocking the way I feel.
It's a conversation with myself and that’s why I kept it very basic. It’s self-mockery. Haha!
I rap “Mrs Underground, you got me looking like a clown/Can you fix the conflict that you started round town.” This is talking about how you have a lot of unnecessary feuds with people when you are bitter, because that's what happens in the underground scene.
With underground, you also don’t give a shit. There’s not lot of media attention on you, so you can say whatever you want. It’s usually the underground artists that have the most to say. If they have a problem with anything, they will put it on their social media or in their songs. They will say what they want because they know they won’t lose anything by saying it – because there was nothing to lose in the first place.
There is a lyric, “Now she's acting like a b*tch cuz the numbers went down.” I’ve had those moments too. You get bitter when your numbers go down or things don't go the way you want. These are all the things that affect you and this is everything negative about the headspace of an underground artist.
I’m still an underground artist. I don't think I've broken past that barrier yet. I would say Mrs Underground is definitely a version of me.
With the next beat switch, there’s this part that goes, “You know that I'm thriller like Godzilla cuz I'm godlike.” In this, I’m referencing the Eminem songs ‘Godzilla’ and ‘Rap God,’ but I made that connection subconsciously and didn’t realize it until after recording the track.
With the bar, “Call me crazy but don't test the killer/They all basilar,” I just remember, the word basilar was rhyming with killer, but in hindsight it also made sense in the sentence. So it wasn't such a deep lyric; it just made sense and it rhymed.
When I have free time, I just take my diary and do exercises. For example, someday I may just decide that I want to learn what words rhyme with heap. So I just go through all the words that rhyme with heap, write them down in my diary, and then learn about them so that the next time I have to rhyme with the word heap, I have it ready.
I guess that’s how I got the word basilar also. Maybe, I’ve just written it down and studied it, that’s why it came to me for that rhyme.
The last line in the second beat switch (verse) is, “Now back to being gangster cuz I'm just like all these fuckers.”
With Mrs Underground, I’m talking about a bitter rapper but nobody knows I'm talking about myself. They think that I might be dissing someone else. But then I say let’s go back to being gangster, because just like every other rapper, I also like to talk about how cool I am. That’s when the beat switch happens and I’m basically announcing that I’m a rapper and I can spit bars.
The beat towards the end drove me to write, “Peek a boo, b*tch, I'm coming at you/Dream deep, Imma put that to sleep/Six feet underneath.” The beat had that scary kind of energy, so I was just going with that thematically.
With the last three bars of the song, I’m addressing the metaphorical lobotomization of people. I was thinking about how everyone has someone who they were close to in the past but get forgotten over time for whatever reason. So I’m saying we should all be humble because we can all be forgotten, but then there's also a lethal side to the lyric because I’m saying let’s keep it forgotten also.
The second beat switch is the one that has all the real emotions. The first and third verse are just straight up bars.
You gotta boast about yourself, especially when the beats are nice. And that’s all for fun. It's what rappers do. We get a nice beat and we gotta rap on it. It doesn't have to mean so much. It can just be fun stuff. You can just boast about your skills and burning people with your bars.
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