MUMBAI: Hailing from the slums of Dharavi in Mumbai, the multilingual hip-hop group is endlessly putting out relatable rhymes with clever music and incredible flow. They’re forging their own paths as unique rap artists in a crowded field – whilst working with the best producers from the industry, and making their own beats. Interestingly, they rap in five languages – English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Marwadi.
Enthralling the audience with their incredible and unique talent, they have smoothed out any rough edges. Perhaps, it’s no surprise that these talented rappers have once again upped the ante with their latest EP ‘Into The Slum’, offering distinct sounds, flows, new moods, and everything original.
With ‘Into The Slum’, these rappers are originating unexplored tracks, once again stretching the boundaries of what rap is, who it’s for and how it’s distributed.
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The EP includes six songs by Mr Scam, MC Notez, Crackpot, Yoku BIG, Lil Damn and Bonz n Ribz, inspired by their individual lives and journeys. The EP consists of six songs namely ‘Energy’, ‘Whole Squad’, ‘In My Head’, and ‘Turn it Up’ with music videos, the remaining ‘Bambaiya Swad’ and ‘White Collar’ with the entire EP will be released in December. The music video for ‘White Collar’ will be released in 2023.
Talking about ‘Into The Slum’, they say, “We have talked about our journey through this album. As the title suggests ‘Into The Slum’, we wanted the listeners to go through our daily lives and struggles through our eyes. Dharavi is like the hub of Indian hip-hop. Dharavi has every kind of person from India living in the same community. We are part of that community in Dharavi, and we are all of those people put together in one rap group. Through this album, we have expressed ourselves how wonderful our life is despite all the hardship, how we enjoy ourselves and the fact that we are still together after all these years. We write our own lyrics. We write about our own life incidents which happen in and around Dharavi. We don’t want to rap about what we have, what we want to have, and how big we want to become. We just want to show people who we are and the reality of where we come from, and we do that through hip-hop. This EP is an extension of it.”
If you are wondering how they overcome their differences, David Klyton from the group says, “God has made everyone different. We do have our creative differences, we do fight and sometimes argue. But in the end, it is all about communicating yourself. We do communicate with each other without any hesitation and we always come to a mutual understanding. We have survived this long for 8 years and hopefully, we will be together for a long time to come. I feel that’s a great thing. We are like one big family.”
Meanwhile, 7BantaiZ recently went all around Mumbai to promote their upcoming EP Into The Slum. The hip-hop group announced the news on their social media sites and urged their followers to join them for a listening party as they performed on the local trains of Mumbai, Bandra Skate Park and the Dharavi slums.
They performed some of their favourite songs, even interacted with other slum kids asking them questions about the concerns and hardships that they are facing in the hip-hop scene and offered them solutions as they experience the same issues. The group listened to their issues, offered suggestions, and shared their knowledge of songwriting, music production, and distribution.
They intend to pass on to the younger hip-hop music fans the same kind of education and guidance they had received from Dharavi’s other rap pioneers like Dopeadelicz, Divine, etc as they grew up in order to encourage and assist them in creating music. They want to keep doing this in order for one day even these children to teach future generations the same things and preserve hip-hop in the Dharavi slums.
They visited Marol Art Village, Carter Road Skater Park, Sunday Street Jam at Marine Lines, and Dharavi. At Dharavi, they were also joined by The Dharavi Dream Project and together they celebrated their EP ‘Into The Slum’. They also printed flyers with the bar code of the presave link of their upcoming EP and passed those flyers out asking people to presave the EP so that they get notified when the EP is out.
The band includes Crackpot (Aditya Vhatkar), Yoku BIG (Yogesh Kurme), Lil Damn (Siddesh Jammi), Bonz n Ribz (Nishant Mohite), Mr Scam (David Klyton), Beat Slayer (Abhishek Kurme), and MC Notez (Nitesh Patel).
Formed in the year 2014, when everyone in the group were only 14 years old – they were India’s youngest multilingual rap crew to make their way into the Indian hip-hop fraternity. 7Bantaiz has been featured in movies like ‘Kaala’, ‘Gully Boy’, ‘Zoo’, Netflix’s ‘Chopsticks’, and has also done the title track for the movie ‘Hitchki’. They were also featured in the Netflix Original ‘The Umbrella Academy’ for the title track – ‘Ajoobe’. Still in their early 20’s these wonder kids have already performed in mostly all major festivals and concerts all across India. With over more than millions of views and streams on all digital platforms, 7Bantaiz have collaborated and worked with many big names, hip-hop pioneers and Indie artists such as Divine, D’Evil, Dopeadelicz, Benny Dayal, Jasleen Kaur, Mc Altaf, among others.
