Hip Hop Assimilates Cultures at The Pahari Goat AM PM Festival 2023

Tunes of Dr Dre and Ludacris boom from the huge speakers in front of the stage while the technical team of Pahari Goat makes soundchecks in the afternoon. As you pan your eyes a little further to the right, a group of dancers is huddled up and grooving in their circle of sharing, cyphers, as they call it. To the left you’ll see various pop-up stalls of Tibetan business owners, displaying everything from street-style clothes to bookmarks, and tattoo designs.

As the sun starts setting, people make their way to the audience area. Kalsang Tsering or KT, the creative and marketing leader of Pahari Goat, takes his son, who is playing with the mic, off the stage before the big show begins. Little kids running around, youngsters giggling in anticipation of their favourite artists’ performance, and volunteers rushing to make last-minute checks before the first lineup of artists featuring Youns Bob, Gyatsa, and Non Dual, hits the stage. The mood is set for the second edition of the Pahari Goat Festival.

The AM PM festival, held from the 3^rd and 4^th of June 2023, is an annual music and art festival. First organized in 2022, it brings together musicians, dancers, designers, and artists for a two-day celebration, set up on the beautiful grounds of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, Dharmshala, Himachal Pradesh. For KT, the two days are only for the culture and community, “The purpose is keeping up the energy within a circle, not for the whole year, just for two days… for nobody, not for the customers or ticket buyers, just for us, the people who love this [Hip-Hop]”, he tells me as we sit behind the main room building, away from the loud music, for a quick interview.

A fashion designer by profession with a passion for Hip Hop culture, KT realised the importance of community-building responsibility. The Tibetan believes that if one becomes part of a circle that shares similar interests and passions, it connects individuals with the same dreams, creating an environment that ushers their growth and upliftment. The seeds of Pahari Goat as an initiative were sown during the lockdown when Delhi-based KT went back to Dharamshala, colloquially Dhasa Town, for a retreat.

He teamed up with his childhood friends to build a space with people who share their love for art, fashion, and music. They started as underground parties with rap showcases, cyphers, and independent DJs playing sets. After three years in the making, they hosted the first AM PM Festival. He mentions, however, that what they’re bringing is nothing new in general, but for the local people in the small town, it is an unfamiliar affair. So, he aims to inform and educate them, to make sure that people don’t see it only as a concert but as a festival, a celebration of art.

Dhasa Town is also one of the prominent Tibetan settlements in India. Many artists from the festival lineup, such as Gtashi, Youns Bob, and Tnammy, are residents. KT acknowledges how young Tibetans lack a connecting space between homegrown artists and themselves. Thus, he feels that Pahari Goat, in some way, is successfully becoming that link between the two.

He says, “I think it’s the perfect time to expose them because they [Tibetan Hip-Hop artists] have banger potential.” Although the festival lineup boasts a stellar list of top Tibetan artists, KT empasizes that he is not doing it as a Tibetan exclusive brand, “For me, music, art, skate is my subject, that’s my nationality, my identity… if people love Hip Hop, I love Hip-Hop. So, we are the same nation when it comes to our passion” he explains.

His philosophy takes form in his collaboration with his friend Sahil Aneja aka Sazzie, a dancer with more than twenty years of experience. Sazzie is the founder and director of Bada Brooklyn, a dance studio in Delhi that annually hosts Fly Jam, an all-styles underground dance battle event. A chance meeting between the two at a Holi festival in 2017 led to a beautiful friendship where they share their love for Hip Hop.

“We both were serving the same community, we’re both part of the same culture, the vibe got us together,” Sazzie tells me in another chat, recalling his bond with KT. They’ve done quite a few projects together, and at the heart of each lies the zeal for sharing and diversifying the culture and community. The duo also added the Fly Jam pahari (from the northern hilly regions of India) edition to their collaborations, with almost seventy dancers participating. “We wanted to continue it since the first volume of Fly Jam in 2019, and we wanted to do something different,” KT added.

Hip-Hop, ever since its inception in the 1980s America, has been about creating, sharing, and accepting. Whether that be culture, art, artists, or people who simply enjoy it. This culture stands at the core of KT and Pahari Goat Team’s vision and mission, which continues with their anthem slogan, “Goat must be crazy,” and if you take my word for it, it sure was this time.