Dhanji has spent the past four years working feverishly to probe the limits of his genre-blending iconoclasm and restless, larger-than-life imagination. The seven mixtapes he’s dropped since 2019—five in 2020 alone—are all over the map, setting his off-kilter, multi-lingual flow over everything from stoner boom-bap (The Dhaniya Tape) and cinematic trap (Drive-In Cinema) to drug-addled industrial music (Zorba collab DZs Control) and spectral flips of old Bollywood classics (Lab Rats). His trend-dodging alt-rap has won over a small legion of fans captivated by the emotional resonance of his voice and the fragmented unpredictability of his bars, delivered in a loopy, lean-laced Ahmedabadi street patois. But it all felt a little rough around the edges, like lab experiments that broke containment before they were fully formed: Dhanji was still looking for a sound to fit his outsized ambitions.
Not anymore. All he needed was some funk. On his debut full-length, RUAB, the 25-year-old rapper borrows heavily from the genre’s various incarnations—the raucous hard funk of James Brown, the smooth, portamento synth leads of West Coast G-funk, even the mongrel psych-funk of iconic Bollywood composers Kalyanji-Anandji and R.D. Burman—to create the perfect cinematic backdrop to his absurd, off-the-rails rhymes. Propulsive basslines slouch and swagger in lockstep with tightly syncopated drums and bright horns spar with keening synths, all filtered through the dusty, sepia-toned lens of 1970s Indian parallel cinema. RUAB sounds like the background score for a Blaxploitation-meets-Hindi-film-noir movie, with Dhanji and his hometown of Ahmedabad as the main protagonists.
Samples from a 1988 CNN interview with James Brown and the 1954 Bollywood classic Taxi Driver are littered across the record, along with plenty of pop culture references ranging from Bill Burr to Kishore Kumar. The Taxi Driver reference is particularly telling. In the film, Dev Anand plays a cabbie nicknamed “Hero,” an everyman do-gooder who hangs out in seedy nightclubs and gets entangled in a love triangle with two struggling entertainers. At its heart, Taxi Driver is a love letter to Mumbai, as seen through the windshield of Hero’s 1947 Chevrolet Fleetmaster. On RUAB, Dhanji—a self-described cinephile—gives the same treatment to his hometown of Ahmedabad, or as he likes to call it, “Amdavad.”
But it’s not the Ahmedabad of contemporary national imagination that he wants to celebrate, with its prohibition-state social conservatism, its neighborhoods segregated by faith (a legacy of the 2002 pogroms that killed thousands), and its new hyper-capitalist icons (the city is home to at least 49 of India’s 170-odd billionaires). Dhanji’s Amdavad is a grimier place, full of struggling petit-bourgeois traders, chain-smoking gangsters, and corrupt, power-hungry police. It’s a city of narrow-laned pols and dimly lit highway underpasses, where delinquent teenagers hide from the cops as they get drunk on illicit liquor. Dhanji and his pan-India crew of producers and collaborators—including Circle Tone, MLHVR, EBE, and unfuckman—invoke funk’s sleazy vitality as an antidote to the chrome-and-glass sterility the city’s development-obsessed leaders seek to impose on his Amdavad.