Aman RA

Before he was a “BudakFlat” in 2016, Aman bin Jamaluddin (born in 1987) wasn’t always Aman RA. To dedicated hip-hop heads, he’s immediately recognisable as an active player in Kuala Lumpur’s underground scene, where he’s been in the gigging and battle circuit since the mid-2000s. Casual fans might have recognised him on Hitz. TV Blast Off as one half of College Dropouts. Going by Kraft at the time, Aman first attempted to break into the mainstream in 2010 as an English-language rapper modelled after the post-bling-era Roc-A-Fella mould. Then came Aman RA. With a flow that’s octaves lower than before and lyrical content in street-level Bahasa, this iteration of Aman eschewed the empty bragging rights of Kraft, replacing it with the gritty realism of his background and upbringing. No mere persona change, this metamorphosis was a statement that announced his detachment from the mainstream. But “BudakFlat” served a greater purpose, too. Not only did it ground him to the titular low-income housing projects spread across Malaysian cities—giving them much-needed representation—it also gave him his greatest commercial success that led to his signing with Universal Music. Much of label debut Rebel (2018) is as guttural as the singles that preceded it, but Aman does manage to balance it out with radio-friendly fare like “Cinta Atau Cita Cita”. More importantly though, he stayed true to what brought him here—a voice to the underrepresented budak flat.