Sick Songs...

Lately, a disturbing trend has started to bloom among otherwise sensible people around the country. This tendency, in my opinion is a much greater cause for concern than say… bird flu breaking out again.

Reason… to quote some pretty well known bugger (yeah I don’t recall his name at the moment… but he was famous I assure you)… is that, while anthrax would mess up your body, this screws up your mind.

(I know that those could not have been the exact words that he may have used… but you get the gist, right?)

Anyways… this trend is an inexplicable fascination for songs that bear names like ‘Tunir Ma’, ‘Ooh La La Ooh La La’ or the latest one… ‘Kolaveri Di’.

When the first of these ear-sores began searing through the speakers around the city, I figured it was something like a morbid curiosity. Sort of similar to… say poking at a wound to see when the pain would come. Of course, in retrospect I should have been wary at how long the song (for want of a better word) made its rounds.

And sure enough, before too long, the ‘success’ of the first atrocity spawned more little demons of its genre… each of which to my horror and dismay lasted almost as long on even the intelligentsias playlists as their groundbreaking forefather had done on the radio channels frequented by the mindless rabble.

There wasn’t really much to be done apart from shutting one’s ears near any public gathering… and limiting one’s discussion of music to the most select of groups. Until… even that was snatched away.

I doubt that anyone can have the slightest idea of what you feel, when… while jamming with a bunch of friends… all lovers of metal or jazz or grunge (it would suffice to say fans of REAL music every last one of them), a douches cell phone starts to ring to the tone of one of the very things you had been sneaking around to avoid.

I still hold that he deserved being punched in the unmentionables.

But the incident proved a vital fact… the disease was spreading to every strata of society… from the blokes who couldn’t distinguish between psychedelic rock and thrash… all the way up to the dudes who actually composed and played them. There was nothing more to be done… I felt compelled to try and answer the all important question… WHY GOD WHY?

I did manage to find some possible solutions eventually… each catering to a different cultural sect of a diverse and multi ethnic nation… and while not based in iron clad surety, they do seem somewhat likely.

I felt compelled to answer the whys in segments, focusing on each group responsible for the creation and subsequent propagation of this new… music. (Taking great care to use the word in its loosest possible sense.)

1.     The creators- or more aptly the Dr. Frankensteins of the music world.

I figured desperation and hopelessness played a role in the birth of stuff with lyrics like, ‘white white light light’… with horrifying accent included. There’s only so much of hard work you can see failing to make it big, before throwing your arms up and saying ‘what the hell’. And then you write this rubbish… get amazed at its success and write more of it… all the while wondering when the dream (nightmare to the likes of me) would end and the public would stone you to death.

2.     The producers- snuffing out real music since… they came into being.

I really wonder how decent stuff gets rejected and these horrible perversities of songs get promoted. Ok… ever since the first one, I guess, the rest were thrown out into the world to get a piece of the action. As for the first one itself… blackmail, life threats, bribery, abduction of a family member, maybe even a forged signature or two…were undoubtedly implemented by the crazed writer to get his ‘work’ broadcasted.

3.     The Masses- Mostly dorks with subzero music sense.

Probably this is the only kind of thing that can reach them, you know. We cannot explain to everyone the intricacies of the riffs that Petrucci plays… we cannot inspire certain people to feel the smoothness of Gilmour’s solos… we cannot force some clowns to understand the timelessness of Denver’s lyrics. To these… beings… this is probably what music is. (Physically painful, this possibility.)

4.     Music Connoisseurs- Blokes who treat music like wine... appreciating its age.

This was one of the trickiest parts of the assessment. Why would people with a proven taste for classy beats… go in for its perfect foil… having a hacksaw dragged over your eardrums? Could it be that once in a rare while these respectable men and women feel a need to cry? Sitting through an entire track of mindless, haunting sequence of scattered words and notes would cause the most ardent follower of grade ‘A’ compositions to go through a mild case of hysteria. In fact… the more you appreciate the real thing… the more you would be broken by these pins pricking your nervous system.

5.     Other Musicians- The people who should be leading the mob heading for the composers house… with pitchforks, stakes and lit torches (or equipment necessary for the upcoming exorcism… whichever one you prefer).

I think most of my fellow compatriots of this… the final group of people in ‘thrall’ of the latest development in music, tolerate its pain bestowing existence, for a simple reason… relief at the fact that they would never sink so low on their worst and most uninspired day. Like saying, ‘I may not be great… but I’ll always be miles above the bugger who wrote that pile of garbage’! And hence, the mass burning of all copies of the songs… gets stayed.

Oh well… sooner or later people will definitely have had enough, and start sharpening the stakes. I just hope that it isn’t too far off. It would be a shame if I killed myself from having listened to one of these pieces (by accident not choice… the listening part not the suicide) before stabbing the guy who wrote it a hundred times with a dull table knife. Payback shall be sweet.