“All the labels told me that this (song) wouldn’t be successful. The 30-year-old Indo-Canadian musician, rapper, and producer AP Dhillon is the executive producer of the upcoming Amazon Prime docu-series ‘AP Dhillon: First of a Kind’, which he also stars in. The four-part series on Dhillon’s four-year career, which was directed by Jay Ahmed, depicts the story of a Jatt lad from Gurdaspur who struggled in school and was sent to Canada by his father to try to make a living like many people from his land had.
Shinda Kahlon and Gurinder Gill, two more “brown munde,” entered his life and helped him start Run up Records. They jammed and wrote songs in typical Majha Punjabi.
Dhillon and his friends symbolise a generation that grew up with a smartphone and the Goliath that is social media. While the self-worth came from the easy flow of attention, the music ticked all the boxes of what could pass off as ‘cool’ in Punjabi rap. While it worked for many, especially those zipping around in fast cars and brought up on a diet of machismo, high-end brands, and Jatt pride, for the South Asian diaspora, the beat was infectious enough.
Soon Dhillon spread like wildfire in the party circuit.
A sizable portion of the movie is devoted to Dhillon’s tiny staff autonomously planning major arena events in the US and Canada. Overall, the documentary feels curiously out of place when it is being directed by a musician who is only three to four years old in the music industry, has a very small discography, and has little to offer lyrically.
