The Real MC Stan

The superstar rapper’s journey from Tadiwala Road to Times Square has been an eventful one, from weekend gigs in his home town to beefing with Indian hip-hop’s biggest stars to a season-winning performance on Bigg Boss. But through it all, MC Stan has kept his music at the forefront, setting his sights on building not just his rep, but an empire.

- BHANUJ K APPAL

THERE'S A CONTRARIAN streak that runs through MC Stan's music and public persona, a tendency to zig when everyone else is zagging. In 2018, when Mumbai's Divine and Emiway Bantai were absolutely dominating Indian hiphop, the Pune rapper came out swinging for the fences with "Samajh Meri Baat Ko", taking potshots at both and igniting a redhot beef that simmers till this day. A couple of years later, when everyone in the game was rushing to replicate Migos' triplet flow and bass-heavy beats, he took a leftfield turn into the mumble-and-autotune style of SoundCloud rap with "Snake". The song earned him plenty of brickbats from the gatekeepers of Indian rap, but also 110 million views on YouTube and legions of adoring fans.

His recent stint on season 16 of Bigg Boss oozed with so much "I don't give a fuck" energy (including asking to be evicted multiple times) that regular fans flooded the Bigg Boss subreddit with threads complaining about him, digging up his past controversies in an effort to discredit him.

But when the season ended, it was Stan who walked away with the crown. MC Stan, it turns out, just cannot stop winning.

"If you do anything, there will be some backlash," he says when I bring up his haters, peering at me from behind a pair of dark shades, a massive gold rupee sign hanging off a chain around his neck. "You make one person happy, and someone else will get angry. It will happen regardless, so I've stopped caring about it."