Raja Kumari on rehashes and recreations: Tendency to sample classics without credit in India

Raja Kumari, who shifted her base from Los Angeles to India five years ago and been here ever since, has observed the Hindi music scene enough. And here’s what she feels about it.

“I visited India when I was a kid, during vacations and all. I came to Mumbai in 2017, and been living here. I have witnessed an explosion of hip hop in India. Obviously this is why I ended up leaving Los Angeles, the mecca of music to Mumbai. It is going to be a new movement, what’s happening in the last few years. We survived through the pandemic. It’s not about gimmicks but real music. We have seen a lot of great musicians rise,” says the 36-year-old.

She recently came out with her song Made in India, which borrows the phrase made popular by singer Alisha Chenoy with a song by the same name. What does Kumari feel about recreations and rehashes of old songs in Hindi films? She confesses they need to be done right. “Currently, it’s just putting one part over and over again, it’s not doing justice to them. We used the song in a different way, inspired by the video. There are ways to pay homage and then ways to take a song and do anything. There’s a tendency to sample without credit in India, which has a troublesome message. If you do it well, it’s always great to reintroduce songs,” she shares.

Kumari, who has sung tracks such as Husn Parcham (Zero) and The Wakhra Song (Judgementall Hai Kya), says her journey has been such that she had to take matters into her own hands instead of relying on others to market her. The singer shares, “It’s been a journey of me trying to experiment and go universal. I have been through a lot of institutions, the one thingI realised is that nobody had any idea how to market me. It’s been a journey of being independent.”