Songs that fail the ‘bathroom’ test

A young girl drew my attention to the Bollywood song ‘ Meethi Boliyaan’ . It happened like this. I was checking my Gmail account and her name popped up on the sidebar of the inbox page, along with a host of others who happened to be online at that precise moment.

Google had helpfully included the additional piece of information that she was just then listening to a song on some internet radio station or a Web site which had a recording of that song.

I thought the reference was to a song from Kinara , a Gulzar-directed movie which had somewhat similar lyrics ( Meethi Bol Bole, Bole Paayaliyan — may the jingle of anklets resonate with the sweet sound) set to tune in the raag ‘Bhairavi’.

I was about to mail her, complementing her for the discerning taste in music. I mean, one thought that youngsters these days got turned off by anything that didn’t have ‘Sufi’ as a music label and, additionally, some high pitched human voice filling the occasional void left by rich orchestration and rhythmic beats resembling the rattle of a ‘Shatabdi’ train on the home-stretch to its destination. I decided against it, preferring instead to listen to the song it as memories of a bygone era had turned me nostalgic.

No favourite lasts

I was disappointed. It turned out to be a song from a more recent and altogether different film Kai Po Che . (Such is my ignorance of the modern movie world that I actually thought that a Hindi song was being featured in a Tamil film. The title suggesting to me, as it did, an idiomatic rendition in Tamil, of the wailing of someone who has strained his arm from lifting a heavy object!).

As film songs go, it was alright. It was, on the whole, quite pleasing to the ears. But it had a complicated pattern of melody. The male and female lead singers moved from bass to soprano with effortless ease to fill those brief moments of silence in the music from a hundred instruments filling up the atmosphere.

The song is currently topping the music charts. Although I could be wrong, quite frankly, I don’t see it having an extended run.

Film music, these days, simply lacks the hold over public imagination that it enjoyed not too far back in time. Consider this.

The current list of top 100 songs in the musicindiaonline Web site features almost exclusively songs that were released in 2013. In other words, almost all of it is less than three months old. Take another piece of statistic.

Remember the Kolaveri song? Not too long ago, you would be hard put to it to find someone who has not heard of it. A college cultural festival is never complete without someone rendering it to a thunderous applause. Any list of chartbusters today is unlikely to feature ‘Kolaveri’.

Contrast this to ‘Binaca Geetmala’, a radio programme for music that defined popular taste in Hindi film music.

Back then in the 60s and 70s, it was not uncommon for songs to feature for pretty much the whole of the year as a favourite among the listening public. Has the public taste in music altered?

No, rather I think, it is to do with the fact that today’s film music lacks that ‘something’ of yore to form an enduring bond with its listeners that they are discarding one current favourite for another within a short period of time.

Pass the litmus test

For music to stay connected with consumers over an extended period, it must possess certain simple attributes. The lyrics must be easy to understand.

The melody must have so simple a structure that even a person with the most rudimentary ear for music must not only be able to appreciate it but, more importantly, be able to pull it off in the safe confines of his bathroom!

The problem with much of today’s music is that it does not pass the average consumer’s ‘bathroom’ test!

If modern film music requires you to possess the musical virtuosity of a Ustad Amir Khan rendering the raag ‘Yaman’ to the orchestration of a Zubin Mehta for it to have a lasting connect with the listener, you might as well forget about it.

In contrast, a simple bhajan by Mukesh expressing his anguish in soulful melody to the lyric, ‘ Sur ki Gati Main Kya Jannon ’ (What do I know such things as ‘beat’ and ‘melody’) draws listeners by the spades, even today. Many decades ago, Warner-Hindustan — the Indian arm of Warner Lambert, the makers of the mouthwash brand listerine — ran an ad campaign.

Pulse on the market

The central idea was that each one of us needed to add listerine to our monthly grocery list.

There was one particular ‘creative’, which said that you needed to gargle with listerine whether you are a professional musician or a mere bathroom singer.

The company certainly had a pulse on the market alright.

The changed approach to light music can’t be dismissed as an issue of popular culture that is best left to be debated in the Sunday magazine sections of general newspapers.

Fortunes of mobile telephony service providers, their handset makers and manufacturers of digital audio equipments are dependent on it.

If music is not going to be preserved as a precious piece of antique to be showcased and enjoyed at regular intervals, it stands to reason that the mode of its consumption and the value that consumers would attach to individual pieces of musical compositions would also be different.

At a time when Apple was delighting customers with its iPod and the market couldn’t have enough of it, the company surprised the analysts and pundits alike with the iPhone.

Smart phones, smarter…

The company quite rightly discerned back then that customers would soon be consuming music through a hand-held phone device rather than a digital recorder that had music ported to it, from a desktop computer. But consumer behaviour was changing.

A mobile phone was beginning to make inroads into the way the public was consuming music. Apple quite correctly reckoned that if it didn’t have a mobile device, it would be left behind in the race for a share of the market for gadgets. iPhone was born and the rest, as they say, is history.

As phones became ‘smart’ and customers even smarter, they are no longer dependent on phone companies for their daily fix of music.

You simply downloaded music from any number of Web sites for free and stored it in 20 GB storage space on your handset. Phone companies are suddenly without a source of value-added-service revenue! The commoditisation of music is now well truly complete.

One wishes the producers of Kai Po Che all the luck in their efforts to make the song, Meethi Boliyaan establish a long-term connect with its consumers.

It is just that the odds seem to be stacked against it.

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