Alien Invasion

Acquaint yourself with the multiculti rhymes of Abhi the Nomad, the next big thing on the international hip-hop scene .

- Nidhi Gupta

Kanye West’s outrageous 2004 track “The New Workout Plan” introduced us to many things: Tracee Ellis Ross’ comic timing; the idea of parody in rap videos at a time when gangs and rivalries ran amok; and Ye’s outsized production talent. Turns out, we’ve also got Ye to thank for the eclectic and bold musical stylings of Abhi the Nomad, the Indian-origin, Austin-based rapper whose Spotify ratings are off the hook these days.

“My dad had it on his iPod from a gym playlist,” he says. Even if his dad didn’t get the irony, a teenaged Abhi Sridharan Vaidehi certainly did. Ye, along with Lupe Fiasco, he says, “held the torch for my musical growth. Their ability to shift between being socially conscious and rapping effortlessly about nothing made them stick out.”

Born in Chennai, Abhi’s lived in about eight countries – his diplomat father was posted around the world – before arriving in the US for grad school in 2011. While he did grow up with Carnatic and Tamil film music in Chennai (“The soundtracks of Ghilli and Pudhupettai had some hip-hop in there for sure,” he laughs); and was lead singer in a school band, Felix and the Cats, while in Fiji (“We often played Rage Against The Machine covers and did a funky rendition of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love””), it was hip-hop that stuck. “It’s always had a sense of ‘me against the world’,” he says. “And I think I felt like an outsider pretty much everywhere I went.”