Lets raise a voice

A new hip-hop track holds a beacon for the marginalised and features an unexpected collaborator - Lucky Ali.

Do you measure a musician-s worth only through his art? Or do you also account for the human being he is? If we apply the latter yardstick, Lucky Ali seems like a top-notch artiste, at least going by what Bengaluru-based crew Low Rhyderz — his collaborators in a new hip-hop single that the man who-s starting to wear new musical hats has released — has to say about him. They tell us about how the singer took it upon himself to reach out to the bunch of youngsters, putting him on the same musical pedestal as them to work together on the track, called Sacrifice.

The song deals with the emotional cost of the lockdown, and Akulu Shashank aka Xstacy Sash from Low Rhyderz narrates, "I formed the crew with three others, Main E Yak, King Jassim and Charles Dickenson. All of us shared a similar music taste and Lucky Ali was on top of it. We were always inspired by his music and one day, there was an event called Twitter Meet that was taking place, where he was the chief guest. All of us turned up there because we wanted to get a glimpse of the legend in person. And guess what happened? We told Lucky from the crowd that we are rappers who are huge fans of his music, and would love to jam with him. Lucky, being a kind-hearted human, said let-s do it now, and so we jammed then and there. Later, he told us, -I like what you guys did, let-s perform together sometime.- We thought he was kidding, but he kept his promise. His manager gave us a call one day and said that Lucky wanted us to drop by his farm to jam, and there was no looking back from there. We travelled with him around the country, learnt about music, life and gained knowledge about different cultures. And Sacrifice is a track we started during those jamming sessions, finishing it now, three years later. It is a song that has seen a lot of emotions: happiness, pain, love, anger and hope."

The tune sees Ali mixing the one-love ethos of reggae with the mince-no-words nature of rap music. The man who gave us anthems like Sunoh has moved far from his Indipop heydays. But the sort of path-breaking work he did in the 1990s is not the only thing that stands out about him. It is the "kind-hearted human" that he is that also matters when we measure his worth, as is evident in Sacrifice, a song that emphasises the importance of giving when others are in need.

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