022 | Hanumankind Live
and a tale of two hip-hop shows
This edition has two parts.
Part 1 is a gig review I wrote for the Hanumankind concert at The Academy in Dublin. It was published in the online music site Golden Plec. Thanks to James Hendicott for giving me a chance to attend and review the gig.
If you scroll down soon after the gig review ends, Part 2 consists of reflections on how I am both a spectator and a keen student of live performances.
Hanumankind Live at The Academy
How much effort does it take to make things look effortless and smooth?
You may have observed it in elite athletes.
In people with captivating oratorical skills.
In artists and performers who show up on stage and do things to draw you in, do things that feel near hypnotic as you experience a transfer of energy.
The performer gives it their all. You are compelled to reciprocate in kind.
That’s how it felt when I got to watch Hanumankind live at a sold out gig at The Academy in Dublin on Monday, 14th July 2025.
Hip-hop is big in India. Well, to be fair, any subculture is big in India because it is one sixth the world’s population.
Indian hip-hop as a genre exists on a sliding scale between two extremes. On the one side, there’s all the swagger and bravado associated with guns, gangs, gold and girls. Rappers like Yo Yo Honey Singh and Badshah often come to mind. On the other, there are stories of how people uplift themselves out of challenging circumstances by the concentrated power of will and shine a light that allows others to see the road better. These are the likes of Naezy and Divine, who grew up poor and wrote their way out into a better life.
Hanumankind flits between both ends, but not in a way that gives the listener whiplash. It only makes him more fascinating as an artist and as a performer.
Hanumankind a.k.a Sooraj Cherukat was born in India, in the state of Kerala. A state many reading this might be familiar with as a tourist destination, especially if you feel Goa is too mainstream to visit and you still want to feed your need to experience lush tropical weather and hang out by the beach.
As a kid Sooraj moved around a lot because his father’s job took him all over the Middle East and eventually to the US in Houston. He returned to India to study, worked briefly in a corporate job and also as a personal trainer.
When in Houston, Sooraj was exposed to hip-hop in the US, which influenced him in a big way. His journey as an artist has taken him many places and his resume is impressive.
He brought intense energy to his performance at Coachella earlier this year, bringing Indian origin hip-hop onto the mainstream in a big way. He has been featured on the soundtrack of Squid Games and partnered with A$AP Rocky for one of his chart-topping singles.
At the Academy, he showed us all how the accolades and recognition he has received were justified. From the moment he set foot on stage with his opening track Damnson, he showed swagger. His lyrics reminded us of the kind of self-love, confidence and devil-may-care energy that Kanye shows through his choice of words in his 2010 album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Plenty of folks in the audience were from Kerala, where the local language is Malayalam. Hanumankind played to the gallery with style, switching between English and Malayalam as a way of talking to the crowd and connecting with them.
We were hanging onto every word he said, whether it was during his songs or in between, when he was bantering.
You know someone has the crowd when they can say – “This is a new track, you don’t know the lyrics yet, but imma teach you and we can all rap along together. I want to feel your energy.” Then he played the call and response game and by the time the track was through, he had us all jumping to bring the house down.
The ease with which he was able to work in appreciation for everyone showed how many reps he must have put in to refine his stage craft. He had good things to say about the people he worked with. He shared how people in Ireland made him feel at home, and as someone who moved here from India eight years ago, I wholeheartedly concur.
His songs also had themes that didn’t speak to me. I find that stories that focus on oneupmanship and glorification of power and status no longer resonate with who I am today. Experiencing art, after all, is intensely subjective. However, as a wordsmith and as a charming, powerful performer, Hanumankind was an absolute delight.
The crowd kept asking for “Run it up” and “Big Dawgs”, the two tracks that made him go beyond being a South Indian hip-hop artist to a globally renowned hip-hop artist who just incidentally happened to be from South India.
“We went from nothin’ to something
Got all of ’em jumpin’
to shit that we made from the air
We went from running and gunning
with nothing in stomach
To feeding the neighbourhood, bruh”
That’s the hip-hop story.
Start with nothing.
Turn it into something.
Something that travels across space and time. Something that elevates people.
Allows us all to leave our distractions and our life’s worries at the door as we all crowded around in The Academy, jostling for space as Hanumankind had us moshing, moving in waves from left to right and jumping up and down in sync with him.
It felt like a workout of the best kind. A 21st century tribal ritual augmented by technology, great acoustics and brilliant lighting.
One that allowed us to lose ourselves in the moment and to groove to the beats and words of a man who decided to pick up a pen and go from nothing to something and have us all jumping with our hands in the air.
— end of review —
I've reviewed gigs for years on end in my twenties when I wrote for an Indian rock and metal music magazine named Rock Street Journal.
However, things have changed.
Not just the passage of time wounding all heels and knees etc. That has happened, well of course.
The other change I see is in how I observe and what I pay attention to.
When I wrote reviews before, it was with a few goals in mind.
I wanted to help anyone who went to the show relive the experience through my words. I wanted that someone who wasn't there got to experience the show and know what to look forward to in case they had a chance to see the artist(s) in the future.
Lastly, I wanted to be seen as being cool and clever.
What that meant, at least the cool and clever bit, was that I indulged playing to the gallery. Nitpicking. Identifying things that didn't go well. Feeling good that I noticed subtle things - such as when the drummer dropped her stick but kept playing without missing a beat, when something wasn't going as smoothly as it should and the guitar tech was scrambling to replace the instrument mid-song and so on.
Now, I pay attention to different things. I have ulterior motive.
The Hanumankind gig that I went to was my first ever hip-hop concert. I'd never been to one before.
Hip-hop ass-backward
I've got this entire immersion into the hip-hop world ass-backward.
Most artists start with one track and go from there.
Not me. I was deeply entrenched in my own reality distortion field. I saw a musical that changed my life. Said to myself and anyone who cared that I will write one of my own. I kept reading, researching, writing, got stuck and hit a dead end.
From there, I started writing hip-hop verse that was like “Dear Diary” entries. Four lines a day. Day after day. Wrote enough, trashed plenty of verse on the cutting room floor and came up with ten tracks. Dropped an album.
Most artists I am aware of perform and build up, and eventually work towards an album. I hadn’t performed at all. Ass-backward, see?
Something within me said that I should start performing. I began a year after the album was out. Went to an open mic each week for four months. Sucked the first few times. Started to suck less with more reps. Understood that there’s no such thing as success. I just have to keep sucking less with every iteration and keep going.
I landed a show where I got to perform stuff I had written (and got paid yay). I have more shows lined up to perform at.
Two days after my first paid gig, I am at the Hanumankind show - first hip-hop concert. Ass-backward. I told you.
Spectator and Student
I am a big fan of the genre and a keen spectator. I am also a participant in the hip-hop games, and therefore an observant student.
When I went to the show, I stood behind the lights desk. Looked at the set list and the timings. Understood a little bit about the lighting setup in conversation with Dan, who had a bunch of things programmed already with instructions on which tracks should have what lighting themes.
I found a vantage position from where I could observe the entire stage. I didn't want to be in the crowd.
I've been on enough Mumbai local train journeys to last me a lifetime, please and thank you.
Here are the kind of things that I paid attention to, and that’s because I was not just getting to witness a stellar artist live for free, I was also getting to witness a free masterclass in how to work a crowd, how to believe in one's own words and how to not give a fuck what others thought and to set oneself free.
I observed little things. Like when Sooraj drank water during a song so as not to interrupt the flow of words. How he held the mic. The position and the angle of the arm. How he switched it from one hand to another. Which sections of his songs he moved to the most, in which sections he moved the least.
How he moved from one section of the crowd to the other. The manner in which he constructed his banter and linked the sections between one song and another.
How he played the call-and-response game with the audience. How he sustained high levels of energy, how he felt his emotions and the manner in which he mad eye contact on a consistent basis.
I wanted to understand the effort that went in. I want to put in similar effort in my stage craft.
Not that I will be able to match the athleticism and agility of someone ten years younger, healthier and with the physique that this guy has.
The pinpricks of constant reality checks ensure that my distortion field is like a leaky tire, much like my attention or my sense of contentment.
This concert was a study in how I should feel a lot freer in the way I should express myself. How there is no shame in trying hard for something that I love.
And how I need to let go of the inhibitions that sometimes play in my head about what others might think about how I am on stage, instead choosing to feel safe in the knowledge that I am on the stage because I worked my way up to it and if I respect and love whoever helped me get here and whoever is witnessing what I do, I will have more chances to keep stepping up and spitting bars.
This was edition 22 of The Weekly Shuffle. Thank you for reading. I don’t take your time and attention for granted. Please like / restack / share with just one person who might enjoy reading this. I am grateful.
If you’d like to listen to my first album (Man of Substance), please look me up under the name Thought Brownie on all streaming services.
I’m like a sensible edible. Mostly harmless. Tame.
I’m a man middle aged, in a role on this stage,
who wrote page after page and broke out of his cage.