Hip hop is a culture you have to live, not a sound you can copy

Seventeen years in, and still a lyricist first

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming one of the longest-standing figures in Pakistani rap and noting how hard the meeting was to arrange. Sunny, Hashim — everyone Muzamil had spoken to pointed at the same person. “Xpolymer Dar is the real person you need to speak to,” he says they told him. Dar is in Pakistan for a short stretch only, and the conversation almost did not happen.

When Muzamil asks how it started, Dar does not begin with rap. He begins with literature. His mother wrote. He read. He could never sing, but he wanted to do music. He found his way in through Tupac and Nas — the first two rappers he properly listened to — and through them realised what he actually was. “This is where I can express myself as a lyricist,” he says. “Always been a lyricist. Rapper is an extension to it.”

He traces the rest of the path quickly. Born in Saudi Arabia, schooled there till fifth grade, then SLS in Rawalpindi, where a visiting English teacher from England made the class write comprehensions while he wrote poetry and was encouraged to keep going. Then Punjab College — “a complete shift in dynamics” — then Bahria University after UET and LUMS did not work out. He had wanted to do business studies. He fell into electrical engineering on everyone’s recommendation.

How Rap Engineers got their name

In his very first week at Bahria, Dar discovered four other guys in his class who were also writing rap. The first week was awkward — everyone observing everyone else, each of them quietly performing for two or three friends at a time. The seniors noticed. At the freshers’ welcome, the host put the group on stage and introduced them under a name he had just coined on the spot: Rap Engineers. Because they were in the engineering class.

“They gave us this name,” Dar says. “I don’t even remember who the host was, but he coined the term, and it’s been stuck with us since then.” The crew has stayed together since. The name was never a brand decision. It was a label someone else handed them, and it held.

He graduated in 2011, left for Saudi Arabia in early 2012 for work, returned in 2014, started a project-management job in Islamabad that pushed him to begin an MS in Project Management, then dropped out when he realised the syllabus was teaching him things he already knew. The PMP certification, he says, he still intends to do. The degree, he gave up on.

Music, throughout all of it, was never the career. “For me, music has never been a thing of jiska maine career banana,” he says. “It’s been a passion. Whenever I have time, I start working on it. Doesn’t matter which part of the world I’m in. I’ll find someone to work with.”

Rap, hip hop, and the difference Muzamil wants explained

Muzamil opens a disclaimer early in the conversation — he does not listen to a lot of rap, the scene is complicated, and every time he records a rap episode the Twitter and Instagram tags start flying. He asks Dar a plain question. What is the difference between rap and hip hop?

Dar’s answer is the spine of the conversation. “Hip hop was a culture that was born in the streets of New York,” he says. “Those people adopted and lived it.” When he hears someone in Pakistan or anywhere else in the subcontinent claim they are doing hip hop, he calls it “kind of a cringe.” Hip hop is a culture you have to embody. The few places outside the United States where he sees it actually being lived as a culture — the Philippines, the UK, parts of Brazil — are the exceptions, not the norm.

He sharpens the point with a distinction most listeners will not have heard before: the MC. “An MC is someone who does not just rap or write,” he explains. “He also does freestyle. He also does battles. On-spot battles. MCing means being a full-blown public speaker.” A real MC can be put on any stage and represent the craft on the spot. By that standard, he says, “a hundred percent of rappers don’t do that in Pakistan.” Most Pakistani rap, in his read, is phase one — the rapping — with the rest of the culture missing. He is careful not to dismiss anyone. “Nothing to take away from them. I fall in the same category.”

The local flavour, and the artist’s responsibility

If hip hop is a culture you cannot fully borrow, the question is what to do with the form. Dar’s answer is direct. Bring something of your own.

He points at the dying art forms in Pakistan — ghazal, qawwali, mushaira — and the way they are quietly slipping out of the country with the families that carried them. He despises, he says, the artists in the subcontinent and globally who replicate western sound wholesale. “Where is your flavour?” he asks. “You need to do that. You need to keep that alive. Being an artist, it’s a responsibility to keep the local flavour alive for as long as you can.”

Muzamil presses the point. He brings up the principle of “think global, act local” from his own world of creators, and asks whether Dar sees any rising names actually doing that. Dar names a Facebook live-session rapper from the Quarantine Artist Platform group whose name he cannot place in the moment, then talks about Punjabi artists — Sidhu Moose Wala, Guru Randhawa — who are not pure rappers but who lay Punjabi flavour over hip-hop and R&B beats and are now the biggest names in the genre globally. In Pakistan, he points at a Gujrat-based group called Puthi Topi Gang and a Gujrat artist called Hockey as the kind of voices he believes will actually take it forward. The Lahori Punjabi, he notes, has become DHA-fied. The Gujrati Punjabi is still alive the way it is supposed to be.

Why the mainstream attention does not move him

By 2021 the scene has changed. Muzamil reads aloud from a 2011 Express Tribune piece on Pakistan’s emerging rap scene that mentions Xpolymer Dar by name, then from a recent News piece headlined “Rappers, music’s new royalty.” Pepsi, Coke, ISPR, Free Fire — everyone with a budget is looking for a rapper. The boys lined up in the side of the frame. The thematic mood. The acceptance.

Muzamil asks Dar how it feels to have worked for sixteen years and watch newer kids — working in a way he might not have preferred — finally receive the mainstream attention. The answer is unusually grounded. “My ambition to do music is to do music only,” Dar says. “Even when Conflict Management came out in 2011, it went viral and I had no idea. I was thinking, I have to make a track, then I have to go to my job. I left for Saudi. Then YouTube got banned. A lot of artists got affected. People protested. For me, I was never connected to music in a way that I have to get something back from it.”

On the brands, he is equally clear. They still approach him. He has rules. “There are certain things I won’t do. There are certain things I won’t say. If you want me to do four-by-four ki beat pe simple rap and jaake kahoon yeh bhi acha hai woh bhi acha hai, sab sahi hai — things I don’t believe in, I won’t do that.” He calls his disconnection from the corporate side “on me and nobody else.” He does not like a lot of attention. He distanced himself in 2011-12-13 when the attention came. He distanced himself again after Power of the Game. His wife Madia, he says, is the one pushing him to put more out — and even she knows that the moment too many people start calling and expecting projects, it pushes him away. “I cannot fabricate things.”

Battle rap, mainstream rap, and the ceiling of lyricism

Dar is no longer a casual listener of rap. He listens very selectively. The reason, he says, is that he has crossed the threshold where rap songs amuse him. As a lyricist, what he is looking for is the next level of writing — people who can actually entertain him. He found it in battle rap.

“Battle rap,” he says, “is a realm in the west where elite level lyricism is happening. The beats are gone and the lyricism has taken over.” The battle rappers, in his telling, are the people Jay-Z, Drake and Kendrick now publicly cite as their favourites — the writers training the writers. Mainstream rap, by contrast, is “getting dumber and dumber.” The formula is the formula: charsi, bachiyaan, sharaabi, shaken in a new box every time over a new beat. He helped run the Desi Battle League — the wordplay is t-h-e-y — with the first battle held in Riyadh in 2013.

Muzamil names the rappers whose lyrics actually pulled him in despite not being a rap listener — Hashim, Faris — and Dar agrees on the principle. The question, he says, is what the artist’s personal goal is. If you want to reach masses and make money, the formula works. It worked before rap, in pop and rock. It will keep working. If you want to bring yourself into the music — the way Faris does, the way Hashim does, the way Mooroo and Hashim Nawaz do — that route is harder, and it occasionally does not pay off. Both routes are valid. The choice is personal.

The dissing, the drama, and the audience that takes it personally

Muzamil mentions that of the 175 conversations he has hosted, the only two times he was tagged into open social-media fights were both after rap episodes. He did not even know what was going on. He explains the discomfort plainly: people he had on as guests were attacked, snippets were clipped, accusations flew, and he found himself being told he had a responsibility to do due diligence on a culture he had openly said he was still learning.

Dar steps back from the moment and frames it historically. “Remember when Atif and Jal broke?” he asks. “These are the same people, same emotions.” Rap, being the lowest-overhead form on social media, just dominates. There is always drama. There is always a bunch of people aged thirteen to twenty-one who are involved. They have role models. They have jazba. They take it personally. Within rap itself, the competitive emotion is inherent and good — “my pen should be better than yours, sharper than yours, my delivery should have more impact” — but the moment audiences attach personal emotion to it, the trouble starts.

He is not worried. “Two, three years rah gaye,” he says. “Set ho jayega. Khud hi set ho jayega.” Until then the artist is the beneficiary either way. Views are views.

Where Pakistan goes from here

Muzamil closes with the question he asks most guests: at sixty-two, in 2050, where does Dar see Pakistan? Dar refuses to predict. The last ten years have been too unexpected. The new generation has reacted to things in ways no one foresaw. What he hopes for is sustainability — that whatever comes, people manage to “play nice when it is time.” He acknowledges that the older generations operated in survival mode by necessity, that the kids today are out of survival mode, and that the question is whether they can hold the line if the situation forces them back into it.

Before they get there, he and Muzamil spend a section on Pakistan as it is now. Dar’s diagnosis is that the entire region — Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka — is plagued by group identity politics. People find their identity in a group because they do not believe in themselves enough. Punjabi, Urdu-speaking, Pathan, religious, ethnic, sectarian — pick a herd. Add the inferiority complex toward the west, the nationalist overcorrection, the absence of a middle ground, and the absence of a real national identity that holds up to a single follow-up question. “Ask the kid who is screaming why he likes Pakistan,” Muzamil says, “and he might not have an answer.” Dar’s fix is unfashionable and slow: education and tarbiyat. A uniform syllabus, at minimum, so the country at least starts on the same page.

He is also, by the end of the conversation, on his way out. His wife Madia is a US citizen, his daughter has just been born, and the family is processing his move to Dearborn, Michigan. He is not leaving Pakistan permanently. The plan is back-and-forth depending on work, with the education system being the part he wants the best version of for his daughter. His new solo album — his first ever full-length project after sixteen years — is roughly halfway done, with four music videos shot with Aves Khan, production from Goree, Sheroze, and a producer named JNP he is convinced no one in Pakistani hip hop has properly worked with yet. It will come out as Dar. A Rap Engineers album, he says, is something he still wants. Just not yet.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil thanks Dar for the time, wishes him luck on the album he is openly indifferent about promoting, and notes that Dar’s answer has finally landed for him: for some artists, the music is the point, and the attention is not.