Las Vegas rapper Kurian probably isn’t old enough to remember the day a hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center, but the 24-year-old certainly remembers the aftermath.
The eldest son of two Indian immigrants who relocated to Las Vegas in 2004, Kurian credits the 2010 Bollywood film My Name is Khan with opening his eyes to the discrimination Middle Easterners faced following 9/11.
“When I watched it as a kid, I didn’t really fully conceptualize what was going on, but when I grew up, I started reading more about how things have changed and even the media that we consume, with the portrayals of the Middle East and this idea of barbaric brown people coming to shoot us all. It was pretty insane that we were all kind of obsessed for it,” says Kurian.
Ever the outspoken one in his family, Kurian dove headfirst into politics at a time when many of his peers weren’t willing to engage with it, “because they [didn’t] want to think about it.” Turns out, analyzing social and economic systems and government structures proved just as exciting as his discovery of rap.
“I remember really getting into rap when I listened to Yeezus for the first time in high school. That album kind of changed my life,” he says. “Then I got into other artists like Lupe Fiasco, and I really enjoyed rap because I’d never really quite heard anything like it.”
Drawn to this uninhibited form of expression, Kurian started rapping over his own self-produced beats. In 2022, he debuted I Would Throw Another Shoe at George Bush, a provocative 14-track LP teeming with references to the Bush Administration and Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist who chucked his shoes at the president at a press conference in 2008.
The opening track begins with a news anchor warning about the Great Recession and devolves into a melting pot of panicked broadcasts that conclude with a man angrily growling, “I find your capitalistic ways repugnant.” That intro sets the tone for the LP, as Kurian deploys a scatter shot of bars, targeting the political landscape and what it means to be a brown person caught in the middle of it.
“I wanted this album to be agitating,” Kurian says. “I drew a lot of it from my time coming out of the Bush years into the Obama years, where, quite frankly at least for me, it didn’t really feel like much had changed. I think a lot of people can feel the same way. There was a great promise in 2008, but it was never fulfilled.”
Kurian’s followup, 2023’s The Desert Will Not Shed Tears for You, buffs out the edges of I Would Throw Another Shoe, improving in both production and tone as the rapper finetunes his fleet-footed flow. Ultimately, Kurian sees his music as a driving force, a rallying cry for Gen Z to be “doers rather than spectators in this world.”
“Awareness is not enough. It’s one thing to be aware of the problem, it’s another thing to do something about it,” Kurian says.
He stresses the importance of building communities, learning new skills and engaging in open dialogues with family and friends about issues that matter. And Kurian’s upcoming album, Iron Kurtain, will expand upon that message with a funkier, more “out there” sound.
“I want them to get angry. I want it to be a productive anger. I want them to always realize that a better world is possible,” he says. “I want this music to spark an energy in people and to get stuff done.”
KURIAN linktr.ee/kurian.1111
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