The Emiway Bantai & Raftaar battle is finally over, & it left us a dope body of work. 

Hip Hop is a competitive sport. And, much like Curries are a part of Desi culture, rap battles are a part of the Hip Hop culture. With the spirit of competition, Emiway and Raftaar jumped in the ring and went at it with full force.

And, this was not a boring battle like Drake Vs Pusha T. This was a real battle where both parties went at it hard with multiple shots fired… well, figurative shots. And, gladly, this is a beef that did not harm any one physically. But, a lot of notepads and studio hours were demolished.

It all started when Raftaar did an interview with Raaj Jones. In this interview, Raftaar spoke about a number of issues and shared a lot of his experiences. One particular subject that he touched on was the matter that a lot of artists don’t get paid according to the value that they present. He went on to say that talented artists are struggling to make an impact in the larger industry due to various reasons – and some of these faults lie on the major labels. In this particular conversation, Raftaar went on to provide an example using Emiway.

Fast forward to 8 mins.

Emiway did not like that. So he dropped the first diss track.

Raftaar felt attacked and mis-judged. He fired back within a matter of days and dropped Sheikh Chilli.

Emiway decided that he won’t stand down, and he dropped another diss track titled “GiRaftaar”. This also dropped within the space of a couple of days.

And, of course, Raftaar decided that he had more to say, and he dropped Anime Hentai.

And if that wasn’t enough, Emiway took to the mic once more, and laid it all down. He ended this song with a barrage of machine gun fire and made a braggadocios statement with it.

Was that the last diss track from these two?

Probably.

Hopefully.

Raftaar then got on social media earlier and went live to share some of his thoughts, and to squash the beef. This Raftaar live video was uploaded to youtube and it was trending in India as one of the Top 10 videos of the day.

Now, of course it’s not nice that it required a ‘beef’ for the general public to take a look at the Hip Hop movement in India. But, this ‘beef’ became a conversational topic among teens and the youth in India. Although, the negative nature of the whole thing should always be avoided, we can still look at some of the positives from the entire thing.

The positives are quite simple: This beef put mainstream Hip Hop in the minds of everyone in India. Almost all of the videos that released from this ‘beef’ reached multi-millions of views.

None of it was planned, but that’s pretty interesting for something that had no planning at all!

In the record industry, labels & artist managers spend weeks and months carefully planning the release of each and every single. So many man hours go behind releasing a quality product. However, when this situation propped up, it spread itself… and it spread like wild fire.

Another positive that we can focus on is the fact that the two artists shared their thoughts and expressed themselves in the spirit of Hip Hop. They both broke their shackles and expressed their thoughts using the power of their music.

Instead of posting facebook statuses and tweets, they verbally assaulted eachother using their art and music. For rappers, that is a much healthier path to take than to beef on social media.

It requires great confidence to do that – and we can all learn something from that.

What are your thoughts on this entire situation? Did they do the right thing?