The Noise of Music

We live in loud times. These are times when understatement and subtle nuances are completely passé. Take music, for instance.

Indian music directors are an extremely collaborative lot. They’re completely unified in dishing out the same stereotyped, loud kind of music these days. In a world where Himesh Reshammiya is worshipped as a musical messiah, you know something is grossly wrong.

As a country, we seem to have this incurable penchant for catering to the masses. Our musicians seem to imagine that “the masses” only like loud, foot thumping numbers. It has to be loud and in-your-face if you want to be heard. To make it more difficult for them, they’re expected to belt out catchy music for “item numbers”

It would be paltering with the truth to say that Ennio Morricone or Nino Rota didn’t face these kinds of pressures in some form when they sat down to pen the music for “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” or “Godfather” for instance. It isn’t as if that generation of audiences was discerning and this generation isn’t. I guess it just boils down to the courage to do things that spring from your heart rather than bow down to external pressures and try to imagine what kind of music might sell.

It’s a pity to hear what our folks can do with a guitar – the same guitars that The Edge (U2) uses to produce deliberate, reverberating and understated melody that takes time to sink in or tearing riffs like Guns N Roses’ Sweet Child o Mine which are likable the first time you hear them. And then there’s Travis, that little known English band whose music sounds like an impromptu gig in the garden (in Flowers in the Window, especially) with only vocals and guitars.

Plain guitars (Spanish) and vocals can sound heavenly even with no accompanying percussion – just try it on simple songs like “By the Rivers of Babylon” or “Chukar mere man ko..”. And plain percussion can give music a direction – take Zakir Hussain’s percussion arrangement for Ketaro in an album I used to hear a lot in earlier years (it was either The Spirit of Sound or The Sound of the Spirit)….its a heady combination of drums and tabla. Alternately leave the instruments aside…if you’ve heard Pandit Bhimsen Joshi in Bhaje Muraliya. Without disregard to Lata Mangeshkar, it’s good that she had to sing the initial part and exit the song. Nobody could have had any chance of gripping the listener’s attention after Pandit Joshi had finished with his part of the song.

Our musicians of today blend vocals, percussion and electric strings all together to produce mayhem. Just the kind of mayhem that Young India seems to love – it suits that jiving, active form of dance where you flail your arms, legs, torso and pelvis wildly in a form that’s more rigorous exercise than Art.

The West is getting progressively worse too. I have nothing against young female singers…but they tend to work on the videos more than the sound itself. Many of them are more models than singers. I wish music and videos could be disconnected altogether so we can have formless artists whose only mode of communication would be through their music.

Must we only go back to the past for refined music?