Distance makes the heart grow fonder!

To avid readers of this blog and to those of you who know me well, I probably come across as a guy who doesn’t particularly enjoy Indian pop. Well you wouldn’t be too far from the truth, but on an innocent question from a very good friend I dwelled into the world of Indian pop music and lo and behold I actually ended up missing it.

Now before you go ahead and read assuming there is a catch of some sort, there isn’t, I truly miss it. You see Indian pop is, sadly dead. Think about it, when is the last time you saw a song on TV or heard it on radio that wasn’t associated with a movie of some sort. Gone are the days when we saw Shaan, Lucky Ali and the likes belting out rather wonderful songs with actual music videos associated with them. Gone are bands like Strings, Silk Route etc who gave us some lovely music.

That to me feels wrong, I’m of the opinion that the process of creating music should be, for all rights and purposes, free. And that can never TRULY be the case with a song from a movie. You see movie songs are requests, a request for something that can fit into the perspective of the movie, a request that needs to conform to what the director or the producer wants. Something that gets the public interested and that’s it. This is completely different from an artist sitting around with a guitar or a piano humming something and thinking to himself that he might have something on his hands. The artist in that case is free to say what he or she wants to say through that song. These days “music” channels such as MTV and Channel V only play reality shows or some other load of crap most of the time, and half or less, “a teaser”, of a song from a movie the other times.

This in a country with some great Indian pop/rock talent out there, what do those do? They play college competitions, clubs, pubs and the lucky ones get recognised and tour in parts of the world like Swarathma and the Raghu Dixit Project, the rest either move into some music related work or just fade away into obscurity. There is no other way to put it but that is WRONG, and for that I feel bad.

We need a music channel that plays music, and not just the crap the bollywood brigade doles out. We need our bands to be recognised and played all over, signed and touring by recording labels that are not just happy having them playing some clubs but put some money behind them and have them sell concerts and albums. What the hell makes Swarathma and the likes any less good than that doctored bubble factory stuff the US roles out in droves? Heck I feel bad even making that comparison (watch Pyasi and you’ll understand what I mean).

So it was that on one innocent question that i reminisced and this post came to be. What will come from it? Probably nothing but what needs to be said, needs to be said. For now I take solace in the fact that the music existed in the first place. And thank God or Google (hmm same thing?) for Youtube.