A R Rahman yet to pay Enjoy Enjaami,' fame Rapper Arivu - blacked out of Rolling Stone cover

 

Rapper Arivu was not paid by A R Rahman backed music label Maajja  for his work in the viral track Enjoy Enjaami. He goes missing from the Rolling Stone  mag cover that did a story on Dhee alongside Canadian singer Shan Vincent de Paul. Social media is full of comments alleging that  the man who wrote the songs Neeye Oli ( sung by Paul) and Enjoy Enjaami (co-sung by Dhee) also lending his voice to the latter was avoided as the magazine and music label Maajja of “marginalising” rapper-singer Arivu, allegedly due to his caste, and side lining him from promotions of songs that went on to become global hits.

 Arivu is a 27-year-old rapper from Tamil Nadu whose  song “Sanda Seivom” criticising the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens went viral. His father is a professor in a government college and mother works as a school teacher. Growing up, Arivu faced discrimination at school for his caste and skin colour. “I faced huge discrimination there (his school), but until recently I never realised it was discrimination. There were teachers who abused me by my caste name, students who taunted me for being dark,” he told The Wire.

 Arivu released his first poetry collection after finishing his engineering course and while completing his MBA degree. Incidentally, it was director PA Ranjith who gave the rapper his first big break with a song for the Rajinikanth starrer Kaala. 

An angry woman reader wrote- “Enjoy Enjaami’s core is Arivu’s lyrics, his story, and the social context of displacement marginalized has to go through. Not giving a separate feature or precedence and instead, only focusing on Dhee only puts the performer at the front, whose concern will hardly be to overcome the barriers.” She further added that Arivu should have been on the cover and the magazine should have featured a separate interview with him, instead of reducing his work to “dark lyricism” within the piece featured.

 Activist Shalini Maria Lawrence pointed out in her tweet how despite writing and co-singing “Enjoy Enjaami”, the song’s title read “Dhee ft Arivu” thus indirectly making it Dhee’s song. Writing that Arivu was “systematically erased” from the picture, Lawrence wrote, “Yes caste here played a major part and they exploited Arivu and his talents and betrayed him. This has happened in the past to lot of Dalits…” 

Noel Kirthiraj, one of the owners of Maajja said, “Maajja's ethos is to empower artists with rights to their songs. This is to eliminate precisely this practice of artists giving up rights for a nominal fee. Artists own the rights and share the revenue earned on an ongoing basis, instead of a token payment. No artists were paid.”. The music is by composer Santhosh Narayanan, Dhee’s stepfather, and the song is the first release under AR Rahman’s Maajja banner, an initiative launched in January to promote independent musicians. This is Dhee’s first video, though she has previously sung hits such as Rowdy Baby from Maari 2 (2018), alongside actor Dhanush.