When musicians tune in to politics

In January 2020, Nepali rapper Balendra Shah—better known simply as Balen—released Balidan, a scathing, no-holds-barred takedown of the Himalayan country's political elites. In the song, he paints a desolate picture of a political landscape dominated by corrupt government officials, opportunistic politicians, dysfunctional governance and perennial conflict. “All leaders are thieves, looting the country and eating it up,” he raps in Maithili over a sparse, shuffling beat. “They’re all united in dividing and devouring the nation.”

It’s a classic bit of agit-prop conscious rap that struck a nerve with young Nepalis, who were just as sick of the corruption, nepotism and political instability they saw all around them. The song racked up millions of views and helped propel Balen to national popularity. Most rappers would call that a job well done. But Balen wasn’t satisfied just being an outsider critiquing the system. He wanted to change it, give the Nepali political landscape the electro-shock therapy it sorely needed.

So Balen the conscious rapper had to become Balen the firebrand politician. In 2022, the former civil engineer and rapper made history by becoming the first independent mayor of Kathmandu, beating out candidates from established political parties with vastly more resources. His image as a politically insurgent rap artist certainly helped, but so did a smart social media campaign that reached out directly to the capital city’s young voters and promised real disruption, a decisive break from the political status quo.

Four years later, that same promise—and a wave of angry anti-establishment sentiment that found its apotheosis in last years’ Gen Z protests that brought down the incumbent government—has carried the 35-year-old into the country’s highest political office. The scale of the victory is emphatic—Balen defeated the deposed former Prime Minister Sharma KP Oli in his own political constituency with almost 50,000 votes. His party, the Rashtriya Swatantra Party, is on course to win a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament. The rapper who “used to diss politicians” is now Nepal’s politician numero uno.

Balen is perhaps the most high-profile recent example of a musician who reinvented himself as a politico, but he’s not the only one. Over the years, plenty of artists have tried to make the jump from the studio to the ballot box. Some have been successful. Some less so. Others have bordered on the ridiculous—think of Kanye West sobbing at a campaign rally for his bizarre 2020 Presidential run. But they’ve almost all been eminently memorable.

Let’s start with the ridiculous. Jello Biafra, the former frontman of iconic American punk band Dead Kennedys, signed up as a mayoral candidate in San Francisco in 1979 after a bandmate told him that he had “such a big mouth that [he] should run for mayor.”

Biafra took his slogan from an advertisement for gelatin dessert brand Jello (“there’s always room for Jello”), and his platform included promises to force businessmen to wear clown suits, hire workers to panhandle in wealthy neighbourhoods and ban cars from the city. He managed to come in fourth in a ten-candidate race, winning 3.79 percent of the vote. Apparently San Francisco residents have quite the sense of humour.

Baifra is one among a long line of contrarian musicians who would run for election as a joke or satirical gag—the list includes American singer and satirist Kinky Friedman, frontman of the Texas Jewboys, who ran for governor of Texas in 2004 with the campaign slogan “why the hell not?” and English musician Screaming Lord Sutch, who would run for 39 parliamentary elections as the founder and leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (he lost his deposit in all of them).

Other musicians took their candidacies a little more seriously. Sonny Bono, one half of American pop duo Sonny & Cher, was so frustrated by the red tape he faced while trying to open a restaurant in Palm Springs, California that he ran for mayor and won, serving for four years. He would later get elected to the US house of representatives, where he served until his death in 1998. Blur drummer Dave Rowntree ran for a series of local and parliamentary elections starting in 2007, losing four times before he finally bagged a seat on the Norfolk county council in 2017.

In Uganda, reggae and Afro-pop superstar Bobi Wine has become the main opposition leader and a perennial thorn in the side of President Yoweri K. Musuveni, who has run the country for four decades. Despite heavy state repression, including arrests and death threats—and the killing of his driver by police—Wine got 35% of the vote in the 2021 presidential elections, which were widely denounced as fraudulent. He remains the main opposition leader, and the target of a sustained campaign of arrests and police violence. Two other Ugandan musicians—Geoffrey Lutaaya and Hillary Kiyaga—have also become members of Parliament as part of the Wine-led National Unity Platform party.

Closer home, we have Hans Raj Hans, the Punjabi folk and Sufi singer who jumped from the Shiromani Akali Dal to the Congress before eventually landing in the BJP. He became an MP in the 2019 general elections, but then lost in 2024, coming in fifth. Then there’s playback singer Babul Supriyo, who won from Asansol on a BJP ticket in 2014 and 2019 and served as a minister of state in the NDA government before jumping ship to the Trinamool Congress in 2021. He’s currently the cabinet minister for Information Technology and Electronics in the West Bengal government.

Though my favourite Indian music-to-politics story is that of Daniel Langthasa. A founding member of Guwahati electro-punk band Digital Suicide—known for their oddball sense of humour and anarchic, anything-goes live sets—Langthasa returned to his hometown of Halflong in 2015, where he began uploading simple, satirical ditties about local political issues under the Mr. India moniker.

Soon, locals were sending him problems they faced or saw around them, hoping he’d turn them into a song. His growing popularity eventually propelled him to public office as a member of the Dima Hasao autonomous council. His most popular Mr. India song? Goo Khao, which translates to “eat shit.” Finally, a campaign slogan I can really get behind.

Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based journalist.