That’s Gill’s thumb in the air, India haven’t taken another wicket just yet…
[Video]
[6.00]
John Seroff: I know embarrassingly little about the UK Asian and Punjabi charts, enough so that AP Dhillon, a trap artist with a 62-million-view single, is completely off my radar. “Brown Munde”s video and lyrics preach pro-capitalism color-line and class solidarity, interspersing the song’s leads fixing trucks and pulling shifts as contractors and line cooks amid a host of the usual clichéd money-phone and Lamborghini signifiers. I’ll need someone with a better understanding of the culture than me to explain the finer political implications of the posse of armed Sikh uncles flipping off the camera, but I daresay I got the gist. The harp hook is plenty catchy and the beats and the rapping get the job done.
[6]
Andy Hutchins: “C’mon, man. Gang shit, man,” AP Dhillon appears to say to someone on FaceTime in the first seconds of the “Brown Munde” video. Apart from that, non-Punjabi speakers won’t understand much of it save its signifiers and jargon borrowed from English — Lambo truck, clown, trap, lean, four-door to G-Class, game lag, contract breach — without looking up a translation. It doesn’t matter, because all involved understand the more universal language of hits and bangers, most importantly producer Gminxr, who assembles a sturdy chassis of trap fundamentals under hypnotic guitar.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: All trap songs should come with a guitar motif this nice. Raise that ceiling up a tad.
[6]
Thomas Inskeep: I like Gminxr’s production on this track, layering a classical-sounding guitar loop over a trap beat, but none of the rappers on “Brown Munde” do much to make themselves stand out.
[5]
Alfred Soto: A classic case of getting wowed by lyrics that neither the beats can toughen nor the singer inhabit.
[4]
Andrew Karpan: While sounding nothing like them, the energy of this reminded me of those great Atlanta trap records that Gunna or 21 Savage put out every year, where the depictions of fame and wealth roll off the tongue with such a heavy sigh that the high life ultimately seems as tedious any on earth. I love these songs: they suggest that a better world is not truly possible in this material one, rejecting the unearned aspirational qualities of the pop song and, consequently, the beats do not reach for the stars but do only what they must. The beat on “Brown Munde” feels like a similar kind of slog — in a good way — letting the voices it contains speak frankly and freely.
[7]