The point of pop culture isn’t some imagined idea of quality – just a sense of throbbing with a common pulse.
The last column of the year. Should I devote it to best-of lists? A more cohesive meditation on the cinema of a year that, at the end of this day, will vanish from the physical present, the here and now, and take up a more permanent residence inside our heads, alongside other years, like files in an airless cabinet with sheaves of memories? Or something more overarching, something to do with the very nature of what I write about, something that encapsulates the ephemeral essence of pop culture? I speak, of course, about Kolaveri, the undoubted sensation of 2011, something that – like a bug in a bad science-fiction novel or a star-studded Steven Soderbergh movie – crawled out of nowhere and infected the planet. The Japanese are dancing to it. The hits on YouTube are too numerous to count anymore. Even Sonu Nigam’s son performed a version, a cute little boy voicing unknowable feelings about murderous rage – papa must be so proud.
Why did Kolaveri become such an uncontained rage that it would barely cause a ripple of excitement, tomorrow, if the newspapers showed us spacecraft pictures of little green men on Mars hopping to the tune? Why did this song, of all the year’s songs, go viral, crossing linguistic and geographical borders with the greased ease of a Harry Potter blockbuster? Was it the pounding percussion, hardly new to Tamil ears but perhaps a novelty to others? Was it the laidback-slacker way in which Dhanush delivered the number, as if he couldn’t be bothered to rouse himself to the levels of indignation demanded by the opening lines? Was it the ingenious way the whole thing was presented, artfully packaged like fly-on-the-wall visuals from an actual studio recording? Or was it just the ungentrified English, a decisive gesture of defiance suggesting that our former rulers can cross their t’s and dot their i’s but leave us out of it, thank you very much?
No one can say for sure. The reason for the success of Kolaveri is as mysterious as popular culture itself – if they knew why something worked, the formula would have already been patented and bottled and sold. That’s why Javed Akhtar missed the point by a mile when he tweeted something to this effect: “KOLAVARI-D. Every one is praising the robes but the emperor is naked. Tune ordinary, singing substandard. Words an insult to sensibility.” His is the hilariously misbegotten assumption that consumers of pop culture buy into quality (and even that contention is troubling, for who’s to decide what constitutes “quality”?), and that we are somehow misguided because the lyrics aren’t lofty and the singing isn’t ethereal and the tune isn’t the kind that wrings tears from rocks. He may be right on all those counts – where he is wrong is in that none of this matters when it comes to pop culture, which doesn’t always welcome the deserving and the worthy but sometimes the sideshow carnivals that make modern life such an entertaining merry-go-round.
Akhtar’s sniping is like the criticism of the thesping talents of a great light of a golden age that was extinguished this year. We didn’t like Dev Anand because he was some sort of great actor in the timidly defined sense of “great acting” – oh, he can play the hero and the villain and the cross-dressing heroine’s aunt, and he can laugh and cry and race through acres of dramatic dialogue. Those are valuable skills, but they do not necessarily determine why an actor captures the affections of a large mass of people, why he becomes an inextricable part of popular culture. Even as I write this, even as I use the term “popular culture,” I realise that there may be in it an ingrained speck of snobbishness, as if Kolaveri and Dev Anand and anything seized and claimed by millions, the great unwashed masses, can only be recognised and respected in a “popular” context, and for true culture, “high culture,” we have to seek out Waqt ne kiya and Dilip Kumar. But who cares how a thing is labelled if it provides, if only for a diverting instant, a sense of diving into a great ocean of communal joy?
Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.
Copyright ©2011 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
vijay
December 30, 2011
I think Akhtar was just as mystified as some of us as to how this song, if it can be called that, got kudos from someone like say, Abhishek Bachchan or his dad. We have already had Loosu Penne and Where is the party? kind of songs in colloquial Tanglish after all. Marketing lessons out there for those who want it. The “hits” in youtube was , not just for the song or for the music but for the whole package(video+appearance of celebrities+curiosity factor). It was not as if this was released on FM radio first and became a musical hit. Akhtar should take note of that and have a chill pill
Rohan
December 30, 2011
I was hoping you’d say something – maybe not in this piece – about the ingrained casual sexism in the song’s lyrics and how that had something to do with how popular the song has become.
Aurora Vampiris
December 31, 2011
Beautiful, beautiful last sentence. I know people have said this a gazillion times, but you write beautifully.
And this might be a completely random statement (or not – I was just completing an online job application before I read this) – but I can’t help but wonder what a cover letter from you would read like. Heh.
As for Kolaveri, there you go. CNN just called it the most popular song (for the rest of the world) in 2011 for some mysterious reason. I sincerely thought it would’ve been something like LMFAO’s Sexy and I Know It, but I guess that’s American enough not to qualify for “rest of the world.” Oh well.
Arun
December 31, 2011
“But who cares how a thing is labelled if it provides, if only for a diverting instant, a sense of diving into a great ocean of communal joy?”
Couldn’t agree more. I wonder why there is an attempt to misinterpret Kolaveri’s success, as if it presages an apparent degradation in people’s tastes. Who are you to determine what ‘we’ should listen to? I find that extraordinarily condescending. It’s a fun song, period. And hats off to Danush for verbalising in such basic writing the indignation, bitterness and pain of millions young men. That’s because the senses the lines appeal to are also the most basic. There are a lot of girls who love this song, but I think its popularity with young men far outstrips its vogue with them.
A lot of young men who love this are not the english-educated, sophisticated, fair-skinned Arrow-clothed specimen we see in adverts. These are the guys that WATCH these ads. They’re too hesitant/scared to chat up a sophisticated woman and hence, ever ready to straightjacket them into a stereotype. It may not be right. But it is human. I watched an utterly boring ‘The Last Time Saw Paris’ a couple of days back on TCM but it had a great scene.
Van Johnson is a struggling writer who has become depressed and irritable with his low-paying job at a news agency in Paris as one after another of his novels are rejected by publications. One afternoon, he’s banging away in his typewriter in the office when a colleague discovers he’s won the lottery for a huge sum. As co-workers rush to the newly rich colleague to greet him, Johnson doesn’t budge from his seat, a look of absolute disgust on his face. He leaves office, and meets Elizabeth Taylor, playing the wife, in the street. Seeing him in a foul mood, she enquires what’s wrong. When he spits out that his colleague has just won the lottery, she asks, “And you’re jealous? Honey, that’s so wonderfully human of you!” and gives him a hug. We see Johnson smiling for the first time in many a minute. This is why this song is so good. It’s so human.
venkatesh
December 31, 2011
Super maama….
B.H.Harsh
December 31, 2011
I can’t believe you took a dig at Akhtar so justifyingly… I felt as strange at the way he reacted to the song, completely missing the point of it all..
And as Rohan has pointed out in comment no. 2 above, I would have liked to hear your views about, how much the “sexism” under-currents in the song lyrics could have helped the song to reach out (to the male youth section in particular)
Arthi
December 31, 2011
What does thesping mean? Or is it Thespian..
rameshram
December 31, 2011
Rangudu,
As an experiment, write a piece that says the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you just said here , and focus group it on your typical reader demographic, and see if they react any differently.
My personal view is that rednecks are critic proof, so redneck worship is a pointless exercise. you’ll lose your shirt and no one will notice.
but your journey..you gotta walk all the way…I can’t walk it for you.
rameshram
December 31, 2011
intha gnanamellam thanni adiccha mattum than en varuthu? che antha scenela otharitta da ramesha!
vijay
December 31, 2011
I think Akhtar was just reacting to it like a critic would. Ko and Naan Mahaan Alla and Endhiran and Mangaatha and many other movies were big hits, but why did BR had so much to nitpick about these movies instead of “diving into an ocean of communal joy”? Because he played a critic. And music is something that has quite a few objective parameters to gauge it in the first place. So if Akhtar doesn’t want to join the rest of the herd and celebrate what he thinks is mediocrity, more power to him. Much like how I would’nt criticize BR if he thinks all those films didn’t deserve a second viewing
radhika
January 2, 2012
Now if it had been Gulzar who had quibbled about the lyrics being low-brow, I could have understood. Javed Akhtar? The man who wrote the oh so beeyootifull countup song?
“Ding dong ding ding dong ding dong ding dong,
Ding dong ding, ding dong ding dong
Ek do teen, char paanch che saath aath nau, dus gyarah, barah tera”
what was it he said? words an insult to sensibility? right
Gigi
January 4, 2012
I’m laughing at radhika’s outrage at Javed Akhtar. You go girl, forgot about such gems from him in the (yuck) 80s.
rameshram
January 5, 2012
Radhika is all about the jollies.
radhika
January 6, 2012
rameshram! you remembered! and that was so long ago! i almost feel senti, like we’re trading cute family inside jokes, now. aaaaaaaw.
rameshram
January 6, 2012
Stop ! please! Im commitment phobic.
Ajai
January 9, 2012
Right said!!
Rahul
January 3, 2012
@Vijay , Akhtar is implying by his “emperor’s clothes” reference that mango people didn’t really like the song but just jumped on the bullock cart like an over ripe fruit..This is what Brangan is disputing, he is making a case for the unpredictability of mango taste.