Why Hashim Nawaz tells aspiring rappers not to obsess over rap

A guest two and a half months in the making

The episode opens with Muzamil acknowledging that this conversation took a while to land. He had reached out to Hashim Nawaz roughly two and a half months earlier, and the rapper finally had time to come on the show. Muzamil names him plainly — “Hashim Nawaz, he is the you know he is a hugely successful rapper, he is the guy Pindi A” — and points to Ek Bhai as the track that pulled him in. Most rap from Pakistan, Muzamil admits, does not connect with him personally. Hashim’s writing did. It read less like swagger and more like a young man translating how he saw his society into lyrics. Hashim, characteristically, brushes off the framing. “Thank you for having me,” he says, “and for inviting a small artist like me.” Muzamil pushes back on the “small” — the YouTube numbers are well past a billion plays in aggregate across the scene Hashim moves in — and the conversation begins.

The first rap song, and a father who taught him both piano and rap

Muzamil opens with a deliberately granular question: what was the first rap song Hashim ever heard, and the first artist he was introduced to? Hashim cannot remember the exact song, but the artist memory is sharp. It was Eminem. Then D12 and G-Unit. “All the boys who listened to rap, they listened to Eminem, Eminem, Eminem,” he says. The method that followed is the one he still recommends to anyone trying to learn the form. He would download an instrumental of an Eminem track, memorise the verse, and rap it over the beat until the relationship between syllable and snare became automatic. “That’s how I developed an understanding of where to catch the beat, and how to stay on it.”

Before rap there was piano. Hashim’s father bought him a keyboard when he was in second class, and for a full year he studied under a teacher he remembers only as Muheed Bhai. The lessons went deep enough that he eventually started avoiding them — “I’d run away from the keyboard” — but the foundation stuck. Asked whether it is true that learning piano gives you access to every other instrument, Hashim agrees without hesitation. The general logic of how notes move across a keyboard, he says, is the spine of music production itself. Producers who do not play any traditional instrument still work on a MIDI keyboard. If you have that, you can build almost anything.

The detail that gives the early section its weight is that his father taught him rap too. When Hashim was memorising English words as a child, his father used rap as the device. “Most fathers would hear rap and say, what nonsense have you picked up?” Muzamil notes. Hashim’s was different. He passed away two years before this conversation, in 2019. “For me he will always be an inspiration,” Hashim says. “He is the reason why a lot of what I do is what it is.”

The first track, and three years of writing in silence

Hashim’s first released song, Janleva, came out in 2013. He was not on Facebook or Instagram at the time. The track went up on his cousin Asad Malik’s SoundCloud account because Hashim did not have one. It was, he says now, gangster rap — the kind of thing audiences still like but he cannot listen to himself. “People like it even now, but I don’t. I can’t hear it anymore.” He frames this as something most artists eventually feel about their early work, and Muzamil agrees: every art form starts in imitation. You copy the rapper you love, you localise his flow into Urdu, and only later do you find the thing that makes you stand out. Hashim is direct about who he was copying. “I’ve lifted plenty of flows from Eminem, and from some other rappers.”

He recorded Janleva properly at the studio of a Pindi producer named Jonathan Jones — one of the few people working seriously with rap in the city at the time. The session cost four or five thousand rupees, which he scraped together from saved pocket money. The response, in his own telling, was “one or two compliments and a lot of move on.”

Then he disappeared for three years.

He kept writing. He kept memorising his own verses. He did not record anything. “I wrote and I memorised and I blew it off,” he says. “Nothing kept, no recordings.” What he gained in that period was practice — the structural sense of how a verse is built, what its sensitivities are. When he came back, it was through a cipher organised by ExPalmer DAR and the Rap Engineers, alongside Sama-Gomladey and OCL — Hashim rapping in Punjabi and Urdu, the others in English and Punjabi. That cipher is the moment he points to as the door opening. “Along the way, a lot of people met me who are probably the reason I’m still rapping. They motivated me, they gave me opportunities.”

Goky Records and the crew that handles everything

The cipher led to Goky Records. The pitch was simple: you write and you rap, we handle everything else. The crew was based in Lahore at the time, and Hashim names them carefully — Ramis, Aqeel Sarfraz (who won the Pepsi rap battle), Pardesi from the Pardesi Squad in Lahore, and another Muzamil — Muzamil Wahid — who runs Hashim’s YouTube channel to this day. Most of the crew were in Riyadh when Hashim came in. The arrangement, he says, gave him a record label, a management layer, and a friend group at the same time.

Muzamil presses him on whether he ever performed live. Not really, Hashim says — a Pepsi rap battle appearance, a Giga Mall show — but the run of shows that opened up after Ek Bhai blew up was cut short almost immediately by COVID. The pipeline he describes feels deliberately patient: he is not chasing a tour, he is building a catalogue.

What “technical” means when Hashim sits down to write

The most craft-specific stretch of the conversation is about writing itself. Hashim has, by his own admission, not fully decoded his own process. Some weeks he writes nothing. Other weeks he writes more than he can use. But the priority order is clear. “My first priority is being technical,” he tells Muzamil. “Then relatability.”

He explains technical rap as wordplay and references — and, when Muzamil asks for an example, by breaking down the Urdu word “kartab” into “kar tab.” Used in a sentence one way it is a noun; broken apart it becomes a clause. That is the kind of move he is after. The verses he posts as Instagram exclusives — one-minute clips, off-the-cuff, no full song attached — are where he lets that part of himself off the leash. “On Instagram I just go technical and enjoy it. The goal is to enjoy rap.” When the project is real — he names Sajdar as an example — he writes for depth, for a lesson the listener can carry, for something accessible enough that someone who does not normally listen to rap might still feel it.

Why rap can brag without sounding arrogant — and where the line is

Muzamil raises something he finds genuinely interesting about the form. A vlogger who brags about being the best gets cancelled the next day. A rapper does it every other bar and the audience leans in. Why is rap the one space where this works?

Hashim’s answer is about execution. “It depends on how you do it. If a rapper brags, he has to make sure it doesn’t sound cringey, doesn’t sound lame, doesn’t sound too gangster — because if he isn’t actually a gangster in real life and he’s pretending, it’ll feel forced.” Beef, in his reading, has been part of rap’s DNA from Tupac and Biggie onwards. The form was partly built on it. What makes it healthy or unhealthy is whether the diss raises the level of the writing. “The main focus should be on the level of rap. If one verse disses someone, the response shouldn’t just be a diss back. The goal should be to write a better verse than the one that came at you.”

He also draws a line he refuses to cross — one some rappers do. “There’s a line you do not cross. Unethical things. Some rappers cross it. They know that if they pulled that in a village, the consequences would be serious. Here, somehow, people let it go.”

Staying neutral when the crews fight

Muzamil names something that has visibly defined Hashim’s career: he has collaborated across factions. Karachi, Pindi, Islamabad — including with rappers who have had loud public beefs with each other. In a scene built around crews, that is not a default position. It is a choice.

Hashim’s framing is plain. “There’s one thing I keep above everything else, which is respect for the artist. If two rappers are dissing each other and I’m closer to one but I respect the other’s craft, the respect for the craft is what I have to weigh. On that basis, I’ll collaborate, I’ll give him importance.” He adds a second factor that matters as much: tolerance. If a line gets thrown at him, he lets it pass the way it deserves to pass. The bigger picture is the work.

The new wave — Umer, Abdullah, and a 16-year-old who already sounds finished

Muzamil names a name that Hashim picks up on immediately: Umer Music, the 16-year-old he discovered the day before recording. “If he’s doing what he’s doing today at 16,” Muzamil says, “I’m shook about what he’ll do at 28.” Hashim agrees — he points to another young rapper, Abdullah, whose Shaheen Shaheen track recently broke out. The scene, in his reading, has more talent coming through than it has platform to absorb. “There isn’t enough platform for as many artists as are coming up. YouTube is basically all there is.”

What has changed, he says, is the gating. Twelve years ago there was nothing. Now a talented kid with smart-work instincts can break through on Instagram videos alone. “Now if a guy is talented, he comes up. Earlier, even if he was talented, he had to make links, run around, waste time. Now if he’s talented he just posts on Instagram and Insta will bring him forward.” The condition is that talent has to be paired with smart work. Talent alone, Hashim is clear, is not enough.

A toxic fan base is a young fan base

Muzamil asks who actually listens to Hashim’s music. The honest answer, Hashim says, is that rap’s audience in Pakistan is heavily male — ninety-five to five, by his read — and very young. And the toxicity that everyone complains about is, he thinks, downstream of that. “A toxic fan base forms when your audience is young. They aren’t mature enough to understand the actions you take. They misread you. They go to war over something you said in passing.” His wish is for rap concerts in Pakistan to draw a thirty-plus crowd — people who genuinely love the form, not the war around it. Muzamil pushes back gently: you cannot be introduced to rap at 30. The zone has to start in your teens. The audience Hashim is hoping for, he points out, is sitting in school today. They will arrive. The question is whether the rappers are still working when they do.

Young Stunners, Pepsi, and the door that opened for everyone

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Hashim are talking about Young Stunners — Talha Anjum specifically — and what they have done for the scene as a whole. Hashim does not hedge. “Talha Anjum’s clarity of words, how relatable he is — for every young rapper he’s an inspiration. There’s no doubt about it.” The pair’s commercial breakthroughs — the Pepsi spot, the Coke Studio track from a year earlier — did not just lift them. They lifted the category. Brands began to see rap as a place to plant national campaigns. Muzamil credits that pipeline directly for his own decision to start exploring rap seriously.

Hashim adds the working-class point underneath the fame. “If Anjum’s track hits a million, other rappers benefit. People see the craft is strong, they send him verses, and if he likes them he collabs. Anjum and Younus don’t look at status. That’s their bigness.”

Don’t obsess

Muzamil’s last real question is about where this all goes for Hashim. The answer is the cleanest piece of advice in the conversation. “I don’t know. It depends on a lot of things.” He did not predict Ek Bhai. He wrote the hook in three hours. He thought it would cross a hundred thousand, maybe two. That is not how it played out. The lesson he takes from it — and the one he keeps offering to younger rappers — is the same one Muzamil lets him close on. “Enjoy the process. Don’t obsess. Don’t take it to heart. Go full at it, push everything you have into it, but don’t make it the meaning of your life. People write lines like ‘my rap is my life’ — it doesn’t make sense.”

It is a quietly counter-cultural note to end on. In a scene that runs on cult followings and identity-as-art, the rapper telling the room not to make rap their identity is the one who keeps writing.