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Music

Horsepowar's Bollywood Aspirations Fuel Her Rap Pursuits

There aren't many artists who would cite Tom Green as a major rap influence.

Photo courtesy of Horsepowar's Facebook

For years, English teachers have been using rap music to try to convince their students that poetry is cool, and Horsepowar is the embodiment of what they’re talking about. When the Vancouver rapper born Jasleen Powar was in the sixth grade, a teacher inspired her to start writing diaries entries and poetry. By high school, she mustered up the courage to perform her poetry on stage, and regular appearances at a weekly youth slam led to her joining a team. She eventually decided to set those poems to beats and a rap career was born.

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“The whole time I was performing my poetry, it would kind of have this rhythmic flow to it,” she remembers between bites of tuna sandwich when we meet at a Vancouver coffee shop. “People would always be like, ‘You remind me of Sade.’ I was like, ‘That’s cool, but it’s just me doing my thing.’ Then it turned out that I should just put that to music.”

Her 2013 digital EP HORSEPOWARxHORSEPLAY was a raunchy four-song collection filled with thumping beats, squelchy synths, and comedically debauched lyrics delivered with brash, in-your-face flow. The songs touched on drugs (“Bill Murray Jane” is a euphemism for weed), fast food (“Mr. Rude Dude” imagines a tyrst between Burger King and Dairy Queen), vaginal bedazzling (the “tiara on my twat” from “Percs n Merkins”) and explicitly sexual revenge fantasies (“Pabst Smear” and its references to “chopping off dicks”), and found Powar acting as a shock-rap provocateur with a raunchy sense of humour.

On her latest EP, Bollywoes, the 23-year-old Horsepowar has found a topic even more revealing than descriptions of her genitals: her emotions. This new collection explores her real life, downplaying bawdy jokes in favour of forthright autobiography and Bollywood samples that reflect her upbringing in a Sikh-Canadian family in the Vancouver outskirt of Richmond, BC. “Bollywood is such a big part of my life,” the rapper explains. “I feel like a lot of brown girls dream, ‘I’m want to grow up and be a Bollywood actress.’ These are our brown-girl problems, my Bollywoes.”

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She freely admits that the sonic quality of Bollywoes is “shit,” as she did much of the production and audio engineering by herself. “One of them I recoded in my mom’s closet with all her Indian suits and the carpet on the ground,” she says of the new tracks. “One of them was [recorded] in my grandma’s room and she has passed and she’s probably looking down like, ‘This shit is fucking wack.’”

“My Motherland” is a particularly personal track, as a wistful vocal loop sets the backdrop for lyrics that touch on issues like substance abuse and the passing of Powar’s brother a number of years ago. “It’s about where I am in life,” she says of the confessional song. “I say ‘haldi stains,’ which is curry on my shirt, because that’s a fucking problem I always have and me and my mom get in fights. It’s me as who I am right now.”

The opening cut “WWW.DESIGIRL.COM” references her family background (“Desi” is a term of Indian people who live outside of India), while “Hold Me Homies” is a tribute to Powar’s group of friends, and “Best Actress Award Goes to Rob Schneider” contains the admission, “I ain’t from Compton, I’m from Richmond.” This line alludes to Powar’s suburban upbringing, which she describes as “super privileged” but fraught with cultural struggles. “I’m dealing with completely different shit,” she points out. “It’s not any less or more than those who don’t live in the suburbs and have a harder time with financial things. But I possibly will get disowned if I don’t marry Indian — that’s some fucking heavy shit!”

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In addition to rapping and handling much of the production herself, Powar sings her own hooks on Bollywoes; this includes cribbing the Moesha theme song on “Hold Me Homies.” She reflects, “I’m not a singer, but I was thinking, Kid Cudi’s not a singer but he speak-sings, so I’m just going to pull some Kid Cudi and who cares? Drake started somewhere and now he’s a great singer.”

For her next release, tentatively due out this summer, Powar will abandon the DIY approach of Bollywoes. She has linked up with some like-minded producers and singers who she met over the internet (including Los Angeles beat-maker MAIELI), and they will help her continue to carve out a unique hybrid of hip-hop and Indian influences. She explains simply, “We’re trying to make more Desi girl music.”

Noisey: Who inspired you to switch from slam poetry to rapping?
Jasleen Powar: Das Racist, Andy Milonakis, Tom Green—those people made me laugh so much whenever they rapped. I was so sick of emotional teenage angst and doing that whole spoken word poetry thing where they move their hands and thrust their pelvis. I was just sick of it and I wanted to write some stupid shit that was just so obscene and so obnoxious that you weren’t thinking about all the shitty things in the world, or all of the shitty things about your life—you were thinking about camels and alligators having threesomes. Just the most random things. I was just trying to be crazy. I wanted to be Tom Green. I started doing joke rap and then I was like, “Maybe I should take this a little more seriously and try to make music that I would listen to.”

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I don’t think there are many rappers who cite Tom Green as their primary inspiration.
No. It was the song “Write Rhymes and Act Like an Asshole.” I was like, ‘I fucking feel that.’ He’s just a shit-head but he does it in the best way. Obviously I have my favourite rappers who are actually good rappers. I love Drake, obviously. But Tom Green, Das Racist, Andy Milonakis, the whole Three Loco group—RiFF RAFF, Dirt Nasty and Andy Milonakis did this thing, so fucking great. I was listening to that while I was writing a lot of my stupid raps in my house, second-year university, with a bunch of a girls at UVIC partying hard. Everything was ridiculous and that’s why my raps were ridiculous. Now that I’m getting older, though, I actually do want to become someone that my niece—I’ve got a lot of cousins and nieces out there—something I could play in front of them and not be like, “Oh, plug your ears.” A lot of my stuff was about how wet my pussy was, so I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to stop that and become more of role model.”

Why Bollywood?
That’s my culture right there. I grew up listening to so many Hindi songs and watching movies. My mom is so into one of these actors named Shahrukh Khan, he’s like the king of Bollywood. I became obsessed with him, and it brings me back to my childhood. I love Hindi music. I DJ this night sometimes at [Vancouver nightclub] 303 called Jaloos and it’s Indian-inspired. We have samosas and other treats, we have a Bollywood selfie wall and I DJ, and I’m not even a DJ. But I’ll play my Hindi music there—90s is my shit. I learned how to speak Punjabi because I watched so many Hindi movies and they’re very similar [languages]. My family always laughs at me, they’re always like, “You’re speaking Hindi right now!” But it’s just because I’ve learned it through Hindi movies.

What inspired the song “Best Actress Award Goes to Rob Schneider”?
Rob Schneider. Hot Chick. Have you seen that movie? Hot Chick was just a moment in my life. It’s fucking great. He’s super underrated. He makes me laugh so much, and he’s always a side-character. He gets the fucking best actor award. I chose to say “Actress” because [of the Bollywood award-show skit] at the beginning of the track. It’s just my love for Bollywood films. I remember being a little kid and putting a big fan in front of me and it made this crazy echo and I’d pretend I’d be presenting at the Filmfair Awards.

You go by Horsepowar, but Powar is your real last name, right?
It’s pronounced Po-warr. When my dad came here, he opened up a trucking company, and the guy typo-ed it — instead of “ar” he did “er.” We didn’t start calling ourselves “Power” because this guy did it, but it was something that we were doing and it was a good selling point for his trucking company. It sounds crazy, but if you have a white last name, you’re more likely to be trusted by a lot more people. It’s a little racist but it’s true. It’s better business.

Alex Hudson is a writer living in Vancouver - @chippedhip