Meaningful Music of the Ages

       

                                       

When we look at the state of music today, some things appall us while some things bring our hopes back and keep them there until we’re forced to lose it again. Truth be told, if we are from the early 20^th century we know the olden music. For those from the late twentieth century, the likes of Beatles, Queen, The Rolling Stones, and not to mention Led Zeppelin are the definition of music for us. If we’re from the 90s we definitely have seen enough of everything because of Guns n Roses, One Direction, Backstreet Boys, Blink 182, and Spice Girls. We also look back to the previous times and say “Those were the days”. We can but hope that they still live in the hearts of the coming generation as well.

Truth be told, Western music hails supreme among many of the people in Kolkata as well as other parts of India alongside their own. The situation however with Western music is less of a debate as we see less meaningless songs being produced by them.

Now calm your horses for one minute if you think I am trying to lead a revolution against regional music and our musicians, what I am saying is that like in every case, we have many variations in our musical pieces also. That acts as a double edged sword to some extent.

We make music based on crowd, and still have the “for the movie” thing going on which Hollywood doesn’t do anymore and focus more on masterpieces ranging from crazy hip movers to soulful tear jerkers.

Let’s talk about Bengali music, our’s is a lot of Rabindra Sangeet and Rashid Khan which contributes to our classical taste. Bengali rock has also taken birth quite a long while back, which is the main conversion of the Western style to our own. We still have people old and young who praise the old war/unity songs as one would call them.

Western however dominates interests with it’s way of always providing us with soulful songs, songs with good lyrics, basically “meaningful” songs which commercial Hindi and Bengali music doesn’t do cent percent of the time. We bring in international singers and DJs for events. To me, a good song must have good lyrics with a catchy or fitting tune.

From my own perspective, quality of music everywhere has deteriorated over the years in exchange for it’s evolution side by side with mankind, but Western music has clearly acquired the least number of scars.

Talking about western music with the majority of emphasis from people in my own city, when I say even western music has deteriorated over the years, I mean to say that feeling has changed. The meaning you get out of songs of McCartney, Lennon, Jackie Wilson, Hendrix, Abba, Elton John and so many more is always going to be different from the present day’s Adam Levine, Katy Perry, Coldplay, Pink Floyd, Script, etc. Both generations will be loved as much but to a lot of us there’s just something more magical about listening to “Let it Be” than “Firework”.

We just need to sit back and learn from our predecessors a bit more and then we too can bring in the extra magic they brought in Hindi and Bengali. Once we do that, we’ll be one step away from producing only good songs. Personally, it is not really right to make music based on a movie but then if your deliverance is good we will know your philosophy was great as well.

By:Aritro Ghosh