Agencies
Mumbai, May 29: It really seems like a season for Bollywood to flex its muscle for a ‘cause’. But we’re not surprised when Bollywood’s favourite rap star Blaaze comes up with a song called Ban The Crooked Police, against all the lathi charges and ‘official duty’ against students during the reservation protests.
Blaaze and Sagar Desai’s group ZambeZi FunK has previously spun songs themed on Sankaracharya and Gujarat rape victim Bilkis Bano.
“It wasn’t just one TV or press report that inspired us to come up with Ban The Crooked Police,” says 30-year-old Chennai-based Ramesh Blaaze Raman in a telephonic interview, “A couple of weeks ago, we kept noticing too much stuff about the reservation issue to be unaffected.”
So one night, the reggae number with lines like ‘Ban the wicked police, Ban the crooked police… love the police,’ came into being. “I was very inspired by Bob Marley too, who did his stuff and died. Even today, we’re looking upto him in songs like Get Up, Stand Up and Freedom Song.”
But why include phrases like ‘Love the police’ in an anti-cop song? Blaaze assures us that he’s not sitting on the fence - it’s as simple as bad cop vs good cop.
“I also think that the police are usually portrayed in a way that only highlights their negative side. We are not against the system in this song, but only ban the police who are not good.”
ZambeZi Funk plans to release the number as a single as soon as it finds a record label to promote it and is extremely satisfied with the support it has been receiving from music channels such as MTV, VH1 and Channel [V].
“We didn’t even have a record label backing In My Father’s Words, our song on Sankaracharya last year, but these channels played it for three months because the audience wanted to see it,” adds Blaaze. A video, which “will break the tension and surprise but the not shock” is also in making.
A favourite with A R Rahman, Blaaze will next be heard in Pray For Me Brother, a song commissioned by the United Nations, while Sagar is composing the background score for a yet-to-be-released film Valley of Flowers, starring Milind Soman.