Beat Mode

Look alive: Yung Raja’s the fresh prince of South Asian hip-hop, ready to blow up big time.

- Nidhi Gupta

Yung Raja wants to be the Marie Kondo of hip-hop. More precisely, he wants his songs to be those items in your over-stuffed cabinet of Spotify downloads that “spark joy”. “If something isn’t centred around creating positive vibes, then it isn’t for me,” the Singapore-based rapper of Tamil origin tells us.

In two short years, and merely two singles old, Yung Raja has emerged as one of the most talented rappers in South East Asia, repping both the island country and his Tamil roots. He broke out in 2017 with “Poori Gang”, an amusing cover of Lil Pump’s chart-topper “Gucci Gang” – swapping the American hip-hop artist’s braggadocio with comical rhymes about South Indian dishes and “dancing with the nagyen”.

Months after he gleefully danced on that home video, Yung Raja dropped his first original, a track called “Mustafa”. With that tribute to the famous shopping mall in Little India, he established himself as a pink-haired “brown superstar”, spitting rhymes like “If you’re looking for that beef/I got it in my shopping cart” under Singapore’s street lights.

In February, he collaborated with Prabh Deep at the St+Art Festival’s Singapore Weekender for a knockout performance, and a week later he was rapping the walk-out song for Singaporean MMA supernova Amir Khan at his big One Championship bout with Ariel Sexton. “My barber, Ceejay, introduced me to Amir at one of his fights last year,” he says.

“It was my first time at an MMA fight and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. We clicked immediately – our struggles and goals were in line.”