The hip hop beef of SOS vs Seedhe Maut has culminated and hiphop community has announced their winners. The dust has settled and the noise has faded. The rap beef was dark, murky and personal. There's a lot of allegations levelled against both parties and those allegations go far beyond music credits, backbiting or being blackballed.
A rap beef is usally seen through two angles. One who had a stronger performance on the track with perfect rebuttals, story, values and ofcourse the replay value of the song. Other is the long term format in which audience judge the career graph of artists involved in beef, to see if their careers actually catapulted upwards or they fall off slowly over the years. We are not going to be judging the winners here but take this time to analyse the allegations levelled by both rap duos against each other.
Seedhe Maut Vs SOS (Straight Outta Srinagar)
The animosity between the rapper duo had been brewing for quite a while and fans got the whiff of it when SOS' diss against Seedhe maut got leaked online. However, artists from both sides did not choose to reveal much until recently, when they indulged in a full fledged hip hop battle of diss tracks.
I'm not here to decipher the rap bars or count who got the best penmanship in terms of writing, lyricism or imagery. Lets leave it for the fans to decide their favourites. We will take a look at the allegations raised by both sides in the rap beef and what we get to understand from the whole tiff.
Allegations against SOS (Straight outta Srinagar)
1) Leaking pictures of unsuspecting women
Seedhe Maut in its diss tracks alleged that SOS slept around with girls and took unsuspecting pictures of those girls to later used it to blackmail them for reciving favours and bragging about it about it among their friends.
2) Using Seedhe Maut for Clout
As soon as SOS got signed to Azaadi records, they used Seedhe maut's influence to get in touch with people. They idolised SM and used them as an inspiration but this adulation turned bitter when they could not get much recognition from their own label. Unable to make their mark with music, they resorted to a quick fix, a short cut to get attention from the fans and thus leaked a diss track online from parallel channels to get attention from the fans.
3) Holding an anti-India agenda to push propaganda of islamist stone pelters against the country.
Encore ABJ shared a story of one of SOS' song that had a flag of POK as its art cover. This point was raised in the diss track that both Aatanki and Tufail were anti-India separatists who pelted stones on security forces. SM insisted SOS to say Jai Hind / Vande Matram to pledge their allegiance to the nation.
Allegations against Seedhe Maut
1) Stealing Album concept
Seedhe Maut stole the album concept of 'Keef' an unreleased album of SOS. The concept where each song in the album was supposed to titled after a same syllable 'k' We saw the same concept by Seedhe maut when they dropped 'n' album here each song was titled with letter 'n'
2) Sleeping with minor girls
SOS pointed out Seedhe Maut had a lot of link ups with underage girls and even pointed it dubious lyrics of Seedhe Maut's trackswhere Encore ABJ says 'She looks like 20 but she's 14" SOS just doesn't stop there they adds on to say that the core fan following of Seedhe Maut is that of molesters.This comes in light after several girls have complained of getting groped and molested in Seedhe Maut concerts in garb of Moshpits. This has been repeatedly reported in Reddit hip hop subreddits where girls have reported of being inappropriately grabbed.
3) Using Ponzi Scheme of Azaadi.
When the article 370' abrogation was a hot issue in the news, Azaadi records positioned itself as a voice of marginalised communities and co-signed a lot of kashmiri artists and asked them to write controversial lyrics that would attract the attention of international audiences. SOS rappers in their inverviews say Mo Joshi consistenly asked them to write "conscious music" aimed towards resistance. This was a azaadi's hot sell to international market to collect funds. SOS alleged that these funds were then used for Seedhe Maut citing favourism.
Conclusion
Pop culture is a strong medium to revolt against the government. It's easier for the government to order a clampdown on instituions or circles that publish propaganda that hurts the national interest but pop culture often goes unnoticed. There was a viral "red display picture" campaign spread throughout the country to show solidarity for Jammu and Kashmir when article 370 was removed. Even by people who had no idea of who, what and how of J&K's history or present. This is the power of social media and infusing this with the hip hop makes it doubly powerful.
The whole beef boils down the character assassination of both rap duos for their invovlement with girls (minors or otherwise.) Speaking of, Holding anti India Agenda and and using the ponzi scheme of Azaadi. Seedhe Maut's allegations against SOS of holding separatist sentiment do not hold much weight when we realise that Seedhe Maut also benfitted from the same ponzi scheme that Azaadi records used. Seedhe Maut recorded tracks like "Scalp Dem" that accused gau-rakshaks of murders. The provocative conscious rap which was later removed from the record label.
We can strike off the third allegation from both duo's list. Both SOS and Seedhe Maut ate from the same plate. Both rap duos have their hands dirty in this business of attracting foreign media like VICE to pain a picture of rebellion. Recogniiton for awards, money for writing provocative and sensational lyrics makes the both rap duos guilty of the ponzi scheme.
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