The New Beat!!!

Last Saturday, there was a party at my place.
That’s not a big deal in itself, but this one was an ultra male fantasy!!!

It had almost everything a well-grown Indian man dreams about, except a great cricket team….
Booze, Babes and Beats!!!!
And what’s even greater, the babes were fantastic preparing the booze!!!!
There were 6 breezers, 1 smirnoff, 1 Sula wine, 2 buckets of KFC, 15 songs and 6 hotties to go around, with me as the only taker!!!!!

You must be thinking, I had a time of my life!!!
Well, I did.
But for more reasons than you might imagine. In fact, the most overwhelming part of the party was neither the booze, nor the babes.

It was the beats………… because of its novelty!!!!

Upon request from my party colleagues, I prepared a list of songs for the party comprising mostly of party songs from contemporary mainstream Bengali movies and music videos. We had “O Tunir Ma”, “Poran jay joliya re”, “Le paglu dance”, “Mon mane na”, etc.
Till then, I had a very vague idea about these songs. I thought they were some uncultured blabbering, which appeals only to a lower middle class pepsi culture. They are good for making jokes about, but I’d be hanged if I’m caught dead with a group people dancing to them.

Ok, that was mean, conceited…and extremely snob.
And trust me, I got this revelation bang on my face. Within only a few minutes, we were shaking our hips to the beat, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The music was very smart, the beats - very sleek, the lyrics - genuinely entertaining and the tune….. extremely catchy. We kept on humming them even during the lunch. I doubt if I would have enjoyed more if a Ricky Martin or Shaggy hit was going on.

And that made me seriously revise this snob, conceited notion of mine about the “meant for lower middle class pepsi culture….” Now, I don’t have any clear idea about the background of the people who write these songs. But, one thing is for sure. To compose such lyrics and fit them to those tunes one needs a degree of education, a certain amount of ear for music and albeit a little rustic, but of course, a good sense of humor. There is no reason why the funny aspect of the lyrics that appeals to us, would not appeal to them. And they add to it very consciously. It gets them the participation of a section who would tune in just to crack jokes about the lyrics and then……the tune to take over.

Furthermore, I realized something else listening to these songs. Till then, I had grossly underestimated my mother tongue’s abilities in some aspects. That was once again from a sense of snobbery. I had a couple of grossly misplaced notion about the Bengali language.
1. I am an authority on it.
2. It is essentially a very soft language and is good only for expressing the sensitive and romantic side of life.
That its inventory can gorge out words that can give the wildest hits by Enrique a run for its money, - was something beyond my imagination. I obstinately shut my eyes (and ears) to the evolution of the language.

I guess as I tried to understand the works of the geniuses like Tagore, Bibhutibhushan, Bankim Chandra, etc. my mediocre intelligence could grasp only a part of it, and my enormous ego shut everything else out.
And, as you know, the catch, in constantly trying to convince yourself that you are blind and deaf - is that you can succeed easily.

However, even with all this realization, I still feel there isn’t much to the songs once the novelty factor dries down. And if it is to be called an evolution, I guess it should be something more deep. For this new Bengali language to become the language of a new era, I feel it still has a long way to go. The path for this renaissance was paved long ago by a genius called Sukumar Ray and some truly inspiring works are being carried out by the band Chandrabindu as well. I hope the mainstream Bengali music directors can learn more from them. The commercial appeal of this form, I feel, will soon become very limited unless it completes its evolution.

But, nevertheless, it’s a beginning and now at least I trust the music composers of “Poran jay joliya re” to be successfully inspired by the works of Sukumar Ray.

Now, coming from an obnoxious brat like me, that’s a big step…………. and I sincerely hope, the evolution will live up to it.