When Indian classical Carnatic meets pop music
Washington, D.C.-based artist Hrishi’s unique musical blends of East and West have been making waves across social media — and now on stages nationwide.
Issue #50
Hi all —
This is the 50th issue of the Red, White and Brown newsletter. To celebrate that milestone, I’m excited to share a conversation I recently had with a South Asian American rising star in music.
If you’re the social-media-browsing type, you might have run across Hrishi’s unique Carnatic-pop music fusion songs on Instagram or TikTok. Check out our interview below.
It’s such a joy to see such creativity and risk-taking by artists like Hrishi to follow their passions.
Wishing you a happy holiday season.
Thanks for joining the conversation,
Vignesh Ramachandran (@VigneshR on Twitter)
Co-founder of Red, White and Brown Media
Artist Hrishi’s music is beautifully reflective of his own background — Indian and American, fusing Carnatic roots with pop influences
The last couple years have been a true test of passion for Washington, D.C.-based musician Hrishi: Give music a real shot or go back to a data-science/math career.
Fortunately for Hrishi — and his growing fan base — his dedication to create unique musical blends of classical South Indian Carnatic tunes with Top-40 pop hits have resonated.
Born in India and raised in the U.S., Hrishi, now 24, is classically trained in Carnatic music and has fused that background with songs from the likes of Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Bieber, OneRepublic, The Weeknd and Charlie Puth.
Hrishi now has 125,000 followers on Instagram and more than 62,500 followers on TikTok. Superstar Camila Cabello has even re-shared one of his remixes of her iconic “Havana” hit.
Hrishi, who can speak Tamil, took his talents across the country in his first tour this year. He even performed for more than 10,000 in New York’s Times Square for a Diwali festival that also featured Jay Sean.
From his roots taking lessons on the American East Coast to studying music in India with his musical guru (a Carnatic musician based out of Chennai), Hrishi’s experimentation and dedication to his art is paying off.
Hrishi recently released an underground demo, with a wider release for his debut album planned in early 2023.
“I don’t know what the next year may hold — or what the next couple of months even holds — but it’s just a very exciting time,” he said.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vignesh: I started seeing your music on TikTok and Instagram. And then I know your Carnatic remix of Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” blew up. What was sort of that tipping point where you realized people are into this unique fusion that you're creating between Carnatic and pop music?
Hrishi: I was trying to build my TikTok at the time, because I had been working on original music for a long time. I wanted to understand how to be a content creator on TikTok and get that under my belt. So I did that for a month, and I made a bunch of videos, two of my original songs. Nothing was really working — was all like 100 views, like 200 views, which is pretty taxing at the end of month one, which really is just the beginning. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I need to think of something else.’
I just never thought of straight-up Carnatic music as something that the West or American people would like. We recorded this remix — we just pulled up the instrumental of the song [“Astronaut in the Ocean”] and then I noodled around for a little bit … and then we recorded the video right then and posted it. And then it was like: Boom, boom, boom — the views kind of just kept climbing.
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Then from there, it was like: ‘Oh, sh*t, well, this works. Let me try to recreate this.’ And then a couple of days later, I went back to the studio and we just spent a whole day making remixes … And then scheduled them out to post one every other day.
“Levitating” was the one that kind of just took a life of its own.
This was a really interesting moment because a lot of Indian classical dancers started taking it in and making videos to it themselves — and then their videos started going viral. It was a pretty unbelievable moment. I’d been making music for a long time but it never had been heard by a bunch of people before. That moment led to other moments and … the snowball machine hasn’t stopped.
Vignesh: What got you into music and what were your musical influences growing up?
Hrishi: The basis of my musical journey is probably my dad, because he’s been singing my entire life. He sings Tamil film songs, as well as Carnatic songs. He’s been performing on stage my whole life. So when I was 6 years old, my paati (grandma) was staying with us, and she was like: Hrishi needs to take Carnatic classes, he has to do this. That was the inception of me going to Carnatic class learning the basics of swaras and … those beginning songs. I became introduced to the world then.
But funny enough, at that time … it wasn’t for me. I was just doing it because it was the thing that my parents drove me to class every Saturday morning. So I was probably the worst in the class by far. I was so disorganized. I would never practice at home.
Then I stopped [in middle school]. I picked up other things. I started playing the violin a bit more seriously. I started doing Western music — maybe it was more on the forefront of my mind.
And then I got back into it … in seventh grade. There was this youth show … That was a really good confidence boost moment for me. … It seemed like singing was a talent that set me apart a little bit.
So then, I’d sing every day. That was the same time as my voice was breaking and was losing all my upper registers. I was constantly practicing two to three hours a day.
A lot of Indian film songs have a lot of classical bass to them — you have to understand raagas and some level of classical music to sing them well. So that was the reason why I got back into classical music.
At school, I would be singing pop music and I would do musical theater in high school. So I was balancing these two worlds constantly.
When I got into college, that’s when I got more into songwriting and making my own songs, which became its own kind of journey.
Vignesh: You’re Indian American. Can you talk about what your music means as far as representation of your background and community?
Hrishi: My biggest goal with my music is to try to stay as true as possible to the different sides of my musical upbringing and taste, while kind of hitting that representation in a true and honest way.
Carnatic music is definitely a world of its own. It’s not pop music. Part of what took a really long time for me to wrap my head around was: How do you bring these two worlds together?
It’s really easy to lose the honesty in either of those genres. I feel really excited to make music that doesn’t fully fit the status quo. There’s a certain level of honesty — or dharma — that every genre or every musical aesthetic has. So the question becomes: Are you abiding by the dharma of that music, which is a deep question, especially when a field like pop music is so evolving, and it’s not fixed in the way that maybe Carnatic music is fixed.
The exploration process is figuring out: Is there a space where these both can intersect in a way that stays true to the aesthetic of that form in enough of a context that this is justifiable to someone who only knows Carnatic music or knows pop music? I’ve been blessed to have the ability to spend the time to try to figure that out for myself and to run these things by my guru (Hrishi’s guru is a Carnatic musician based out of Chennai, India). With any kind of fusion, there are a million ways to do it. But, what aligns with my own musical values? Discovering that is what took me the longest.
The cool part with that journey has been playing shows, and then fans walking up to me afterwards and telling me their stories of how represented this music has made them feel to hear Carnatic swaras next to English pop lyrics. It was a realization point for me even realizing how important that was, because in the music creation process it is really easy to just be in your basement, just circling your own thoughts.
To hear a fan say: ‘Wow, this actually made me feel really seen — like I have been listening to these two genres my whole life’ … I need to double down and really treat this as the musical mission that I’ve been tasked with in this current era.
Vignesh: What’s the reaction from the Carnatic community to your unique fusions?
Hrishi: I’ve been really blessed that I haven’t really gotten any reactions from anyone that weren’t based in positivity and love. People seem to be really happy that Carnatic music gets to be seen by more people when it’s placed next to these music beds that people understand — Top 40 with Carnatic music just allows more people to be exposed to the idea of what is the swara, what is that aesthetic?
If I can create a pipeline into which they can appreciate Indian classical music and be able to go to a concert and listen, that would be so cool.
The whole mission is to have the Western world hear South Indian classical music — because it’s just so rare. When you think of India, you think of North India. You don’t think of bharatanatyam, you think about bhangra. South India is almost written out of the equation. Right now, there are moments of bringing it in — like “Never Have I Ever” on Netflix, the lead character’s family is from South India.
Bringing as much South Indian representation as possible is the goal for me.
Listen and learn more about Hrishi’s music on his website, as well as YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok and Instagram.
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Been following Hrishi for a while. The whole family loves his music. Great interview