Meet CJL, the latest Tamil hip-hop artist from Malaysia
The Hindu
Logeswara Rao, also known as CJL, is the latest of the many Tamil rappers from Malaysia. He gets chatting about ‘Lepal Mamak’, his recent hip-hop single
Tamil film music, it seems, is inescapable if you are a Tamilian, irrespective of where you grow up. The explanation is simple: songs are an important part of pop culture and almost all songs in the Tamil space are film songs. This is now changing. Take Logeswara Rao’s case, for instance. Logeswara is on the verge of releasing his first hip-hop single, ‘Lepak Mamak’, under Sony Music Entertainment’s label. Growing up in Johor, Malaysia, he used to listen to the popular film songs of AR Rahman, Ilaiyaraaja and Yuvan Shankar Raja, among others. When he was about nine, his father would occasionally play hip-hop tracks by Malaysian Tamils, especially Yogi B. These songs stood out for Logeswara. They were distinct from the film songs he had listened to till then. He liked them so much that he started performing them for Crowns of Johor, a cultural group he was a part of in high school. “I used to do cover versions. Then, slowly, I started writing my lyrics... my friends really liked what I wrote,” recalls the 25-year-old.More Related News