The politics of convenience at the centre of Arivu's recent erasure

It’s extremely rare in this day and age for an organisation at the centre of a controversy to invite journalists for a discussion where “no questions are off the table”. This is exactly what Noel Kirthiraj, the co-founder of five-month-old south Asian independent music platform maajja, did recently. If you’ve been following social media over the last week, it’s very likely you’ve come across the backlash received by Rolling Stone India magazine for its digital cover for this month (the print edition ceased publication in July 2018). The image features singer Dhee and rapper Shan Vincent de Paul, the lead artists on maajja’s two biggest hits, ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ and ‘Neeye Oli.’ The common link between the tracks are composer Santhosh Narayanan, who happens to be Dhee’s stepfather, and rapper-lyricist Arivu whose verses are one of the highlights of ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ and who wrote the Tamil portions on ‘Neeye Oli’ that are rhymed by female MC Navz-47. Each of these acts are signed to exclusive record and management deals with maajja, which was co-founded by AR Rahman and Canadian entrepreneurs Kirthiraj, Sen Sachi and Prasana Balachandran with the aim of “amplifying the voice of South Asian talent globally”. When Rolling Stone India unveiled their cover, both the magazine and maajja were accused of being casteist and diminishing, as opposed to amplifying, the voice of Arivu, who is among the few Dalit musicians to have achieved a good degree of mainstream success. The most prominent reaction was from Tamil filmmaker Pa. Ranjith in whose recently released movie _Sarpatta Parambarai ‘_Neeye Oli’ was synched. Ranjith  called out  the publication and the platform on Twitter, saying that Arivu, “the lyricist of ‘Neeye Oli’ and singer as well as lyricist of ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ has once again been invisiblised”. “Once again” was a reference to something similar that happened as recently as June when French EDM producer DJ Snake’s remix of ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ was released by Spotify for the India launch of its global Singles programme. To promote the track, they put up a billboard in New York’s Times Square bearing only the images of DJ Snake and Dhee. In that particular case, the erasure was twice over, arriving first in the form of the remix itself, which expunged some of the best parts of the original including a few of Arivu’s fiery verses. During his  media roundtable , Kirthiraj said it “doesn’t have any logic for us as a company that wants to elevate [Arivu] and give him a platform to now turn around and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to now erase you’. It makes no sense.” Regarding the remix, he shared that it was DJ Snake who approached Dhee and expressed his interest to rework ‘Enjoy Enjaami.’ The Frenchman, Kirthiraj said, was given complete creative freedom. While Arivu and Narayanan were credited as contributing artists, because the project was led by DJ Snake and Dhee, they were the faces of its promotional campaign. “We look at moments for artists and in that case the way that DJ Snake wanted to collaborate with Dhee and how that came about was a moment where they decided to feature Dhee,” said Kirthiraj about the controversial Spotify billboard. What’s more baffling is the way in which the remix itself was developed. During a press meet with DJ Snake and Dhee arranged by Spotify ahead of the song’s release, I asked DJ Snake, who has produced and remixed tracks in a range of languages, how much of a role the lyrics of the original play when he reinterprets a tune. He replied that for him, the beat is all that matters, and that when he doesn’t understand the lyrics, he doesn’t necessarily find out what they mean. In addition to ‘Enjoy Enjaami’s irresistible hook and chorus, a large part of its appeal and success can be attributed to Arivu’s ecologically-themed lyrics that speak of his ancestry; it’s curious that nobody from maajja’s team felt the need to inform DJ Snake about the meaning and impact of its words. The remix deletes from the song some of its most visceral parts, the end result of which to my ears at least feels like musical deracination. Kirthiraj said the rationale behind going with DJ Snake was that even though ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ was a huge smash in India, it had not travelled outside the country in a big way as about 75 percent to 80 percent of its streams were generated domestically. The ratio of local to international plays flipped with the remix and the purpose had been served, he said. The data, however, tells a different story. Thus far, the original version has over 18 million streams on Spotify and the remix has less than a third of that figure, with 4.7 million. Just like they gave DJ Snake free rein, team maajja was not in control of how Rolling Stone India executed their story, which Kirthiraj pointed out was about the platform as a whole. Dhee and de Paul were chosen as the cover stars only because they are the ones with upcoming albums. Kirthiraj told us that much of the backlash to the cover could have been avoided if Rolling Stone India has framed their Twitter post about the story more carefully. “The cover is nothing to do with the songs,” he said. “When the post came out, they referred to ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ and ‘Neeye Oli’, people saw it as…I totally get that, what you see from an optics perspective is they are talking about the songs and doing a story and yet Arivu is nowhere to be found. What I can tell you is that we don’t go to Rolling Stone India and dictate what they should do and how they should do it. We saw that post just like everyone else. There was no preview. The only difference is that we had context as to the full story and we had context as to what’s still to come.” He then implied that it’s very likely that Arivu would be on the cover of the magazine at the time of his own album’s release. “When that happens, there’s going to be no reference to anyone else. That doesn’t mean all of a sudden we are ignoring or erasing some other artists.” We didn’t have to wait that long. On Thursday, Rolling Stone started rolling out alternative covers of their August 2021 issue including  one with Arivu . Given the comments on the social media posts, many of those who were critical of the original cover are of the opinion that these were an afterthought in order to mitigate the outrage. According to Kirthiraj, people judged the proverbial book by its cover before seeing the  actual story , which was published a day after the magazine’s first front page was shared. But reading it makes it evident that the reason that maajja has been granted the much coveted Indian independent music real estate of a Rolling Stone India cover is on account of the acclaim received by ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ and ‘Neeye Oli,’ both of which are mentioned several times in the piece. I know the team at Rolling Stone India well enough to know that they aren’t casteist. But as those from privileged backgrounds, we have to constantly check our privilege. How they didn’t think the absence of Arivu on the cover would be potentially hurtful, especially after the response to the Spotify billboard, has confounded me. A huge part of why ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ was so widely celebrated was that in addition to being a great song, it was an ever-too-rare instance of an artist from a marginalised community being given a nationwide spotlight. These two acts of erasure, even if unintentional, seem like taking back the little that was given. The very concept and meaning of affirmative action, which I would hope is at the core of maajja’s manifesto to empower independent musicians, is to uplift those who have been historically marginalised. Providing them the representation they’ve so long been denied often means raising them to a higher level than their upper-class counterparts in order to redress the imbalances of our checkered pasts. For me, Kirthiraj’s argument that there have been plenty of instances where feature stories have been written about Arivu and ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ that leave out Dhee and Narayanan doesn’t hold. “If they’re not mentioned, is that something we see as a problem? Absolutely not,” he said. If, as he says, the Rolling Stone India story is about maajja in its entirety, then why weren’t all its exclusive artists featured on the cover? Sure, they might have put the more camera-friendly female acts Dhee and Navz-47 out front, but at least that could have been justified as placing the women ahead of the men for once (as we know, we have a long way to go when it comes to redressing the  gender imbalance  in the Indian music industry). Rahman, who is known to abhor controversy, has been expectedly but disappointingly silent about the whole episode. Neither Dhee nor Narayanan have commented about it either. Some people have conveniently interpreted Arivu’s silence to say that if he doesn’t have a problem with it, we shouldn’t. The sole artist to  speak out  has been dePaul who rightfully expressed his dismay about being at the receiving end of some hateful comments, some of which questioned his Tamil identity. But he conveniently shifted the onus on Ranjith and did not question Rolling Stone India for their social media post, which Kirthiraj cited as the source of confusion. Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of this all is that while Kirthiraj says that he “understands the anger”, he thinks it’s misplaced. “One thing maajja will not do is play politics and try to please people because I’m personally against this idea of window dressing anything,” he said. “If we do something and we make a mistake or do something wrong, I have no problem correcting it but just because somebody may get upset because they do not understand the full context or the full story, I’m not going to do something to change what we would normally do.” What’s ironic about that statement is that all of maajja’s output so far is deeply rooted in the political. You don’t have to “play” politics when politics is at the centre of your work. You simply have to know your politics. Sadly, in this recent chain of events, both maajja’s and Rolling Stone India’s seemed to be those of convenience.