Exclusive: Karma Discusses The Making of His New EP ‘How Much a Rhyme Costs?’

It’s not necessarily a rhetorical question that Dehradun rapper Karma aka Vivek Arora asks with his new EP How Much a Rhyme Costs?

He says over a call, “Apparently for an artist, it costs zero, right? But to make a proper rhyme, you have to go through a lot of shit and I’ve learned that.”

The artist had 14 songs in the bank for this project and whittled it down to just four. “I didn’t want to compile songs and say it’s a project. I want everything to be connected,” he adds. To that end, How Much a Rhyme Costs? flows intersperses mellow, laidback cadence with hard-hitting bars on songs like “Sort It Out,” “Snake Bites,” “Bada” with Indian-origin American producer Kshmr and “Karta Kya Hai” with Raftaar (whose previous team-ups include “Main Wahi Hoon” in 2019) and producer Bharg.

The first glimpse of the project came with “Bada,” which was a full circle moment for Karma. He recalls rapping on beats constructed from Kshmr sample packs on his first track with a major label. “Then, him approaching me after all these years and saying, ‘I wanna work with you, let me produce,’ it’s a full circle. It gives you this feeling that ‘Okay, I’m doing good.’ I felt big when I wrote that song so I called it ‘Bada,’” the rapper says.

In addition to Bharg and Kshmr, Karma worked with producers Vision (on “Sort It Out”) and Retro Blxxd (“Snake Bites”). The rapper says all of the sessions – with the exception of Kshmr, who worked remotely – were in the studio with the producers.

Taking it track by track, Karma describes “Sort It Out” as an intro track, “[It’s] where I talk about the expectations of society from me as an individual.” Fiercely unapologetic, Karma says his advice is, “Do not sort it out.” He adds, “It should be like, I know I’m doing good and I hope you should too.”

On “Snake Bites,” Karma and Retro Blxxd employ a trap beat and amp up the idea of opps and snakes. “They are the people who were with us and now they’re on the opposite side. I talk about the challenges I faced as an individual. I think the people who were with you when you were riding a Scooty [bike] should be the people with you when you are in a car or a fucking private jet, or anything. So you have to keep the snakes away and the family close.”

With “Bada,” the rapper sums up that it centers on his “current mindset” of how “you have to say a lot of no’s to hear a lot of yes.” The closing track “Karta Kya Hai” takes aim at the oft-heard question posed by parents and society at large around artists. “I’m tired of responding when people ask me, ‘What do you do [for a living]?’” Before, he would give the straight answer that he raps (“I don’t sing, I don’t dance, I don’t act,” he says), but the song gets a new context for Karma. “Now it’s a kind of skill flex. I got Raftaar on this one. This track is the most aggressive and bumpy from the project. It has a fun vibe to it, going from lo-fi to a hardcore trap beat,” he adds.

The note on which How Much a Rhyme Costs? EP ends is Karma conveying that he does more than just rap now. “I’m exploring my artistic boundaries more. When I write, I feel that a statement can be hard-hitting in terms of penmanship. I don’t have to scream about it. Plus, I’ve been hearing a lot of jazz, a lot of Bollywood, so it keeps me sane and oriented toward my audience. So this year has been amazing,” the artist says.

The EP – released via Warner Music India – marks a prolific year for Karma among his desi hip-hop peers so far. “My mindset this year was that I need to get my… I read this quote once that said, ‘It’s not supposed to be out of this world. It’s just supposed to be out in the world.’ That hit home. Art can never be perfect. I can take one year on a song and be like, ‘This snare is not hitting right’ but all I’m doing is expressing myself and I have to do that. Nothing else should be perfect.”