The Internet brings many pleasures, not the least, talented people sitting at home making music of various sorts, interacting with other musicians and creating magic sometimes. This music competes, of course, with people posting links on social media to their favourite ‘classics’, rare bootlegs (both video and just audio), old concerts and new, from famous musicians. In the peculiar compression of the isolatory time and space that has been created over the last few months, all sorts of realisations bubble up. Some songs you previously loved become oddly unbearable, musicians you didn’t think much of suddenly begin to appeal, some previously ignored tracks reappear like fresh gems, and all sorts of new connections and comparisons emerge.
For example, the series of YouTube videos titled Playing for Change has provided me with great pleasure — for those who don’t know these, the producers have taken the tried and tested device of getting musicians in different parts of the world to play the same song together to put together new versions of well-known Western songs such as ‘Guantanamera’, ‘Chan Chan’, and ‘The Weight’ by The Band.
The ones that work do so brilliantly, becoming memorable not only for the varied tributaries that flow into the main river of melody, but also for the montage of changing personalities, locations and styles.
People are also posting really precious material from exponents of Indian classical music, both famous and obscure; for those privileged enough to continue in a voluntary lockdown, time is now available in a way it hasn’t been since the advent of global TV and the Net: long renditions can unfurl as you go about your business or maybe just do nothing but sit and listen. These ragas aren’t always accompanied by a video of the performance.
Quite often, this actually enhances the experience, again taking you back to that thing we used to do, put a record on the turntable or a tape into the cassette player or on the reel-to-reel and just listen.
All Yankeefied
Through all this, a question has bubbled up. At one level, it’s an obvious one but somehow it’s never come into focus the way it has now.
Rock music has been part of our musical landscape for over half a century. Elite or very niche at one point in the 1960s, ‘rock’ (if we can use that umbrella term for all sorts of modern and contemporary Western Blues-based genres including Anglo-American folk, Soul, Country & Western, etc.) has since spread across urban, English-speaking India.
Bombay cinema (as also that from other cities) has been influenced by rock, the beat and the melodies showing up in songs from fairly straight copies to great, indirect reflections. Over the decades, several generations of urban youngsters in India have been belting out classics from famous Western groups as well as obscure ones.
Besides these, there are now rock songs in almost every Indian language, where the beat, the tune, the changes are all recognisable as coming directly from the mother industry in the U.S. and the U.K., or owing it a lot. It is also unsurprising that Indian musicians have composed and performed quite a few rock songs in the English language.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen several such performances online, either solos or two or three people jamming together. Many of these have been truly wonderful, revealing or reiterating serious song-writing and musical talent. What I have yet to come across, however, is a single song in English that is sung with a recognisable Indian English accent. Whether it’s a cover of The Beatles, The Stones or Dylan, or an original song about something in Shillong, Calcutta or Hyderabad, the accent used is almost always ‘American’. Even the typically British songs are sung with an accent that is some kind of an estimation of a twang from the northern half of the U.S.
It’s as though the moment any Indian singer starts to sing in the genre of rock not only their speech but also their thinking becomes Yankeefied. This happens across generations and across regions and one has to ask why.
For many of us, just as English is as much an Indian language as any other subcontinental tongue, so too are all the components of rock now very much a part of our contemporary musical repertoire. Why, then, can’t we have Indian rock songs in India’s many English accents? As I listen to the many different Spanish or English accents within the same song in one of the Playing for Change videos, I wonder why our musicians are still shy of singing in our own English.
The writer is a filmmaker and columnist.