Between Reviews: P.O.T. (Pretty Old Thing)

P.O.T. (PRETTY OLD THING)

FEB 17, 2008 – DO YOU HAVE A PAPER BAG NEAR YOU? Good. Now, before you read any further, take deep breaths into it and count to ten slowly. Feeling calm? Okay, here’s the news (and you’d better be sitting down for this): Thriller has been re-released to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary. When I first read about this, I thought they had the math wrong. I mean, albums of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones celebrate silver jubilees, along with well-scratched LPs from The Carpenters. Cliff Richards you can imagine as someone who put out a record a quarter of a century ago. But Michael Jackson? Wasn’t he King of Pop just yesterday, when we were screwing stubby little pencils into compasses and trying to create perfect circles for our geometry exams? So 1982 is really that far back? And if Moonwalking were a person, he’d be a strapping young adult today, out of college and neck-deep in a fulltime career and getting ready to tie the knot? So how old does that make us? Now you see the need for that paper bag?

Speaking of great pop soundtracks of The Most Maligned Decade Ever – and closer home – do you realise Biddu’s Star has turned 25 too? Yes, I’m afraid so. It’s really been that long since Jaana, where Kumar Gaurav and Rati Agnihotri expressed undying love to one another by zipping themselves up in tinfoil spacesuits and performing somersaults in the vicinity of exploding nebulae. It isn’t everyday that I’d freely admit to being crazy about numbers that go Boom Boom and Ooie Ooie, but we’re talking silver anniversary, dammit, and this is no time for shame. (Besides, if you’ve lived through the eighties, it’s a fairly established fact that the good taste police didn’t get to you.) And this isn’t just nostalgia. All that waxing in this column last week about muscle-men heroes of the eighties, triggered by a viewing of the new Rambo movie – now that was nostalgia, nothing more. The only reason I wanted to see this movie now is that I saw the earlier installments once upon a time.

But Thriller and Star aren’t just relics to be dusted off and lovingly examined under rose-tinted eyepieces, before packing them back into silica-gel storage. These are great albums, period. The instinctive reaction to a track from the eighties is to snigger and point out that they were built on strident synth loops and nothing else – yes, Bananarama, I’m talking about you – but Thriller is a thrilling mix of pop and funk and R&B and disco and even rock. And Star, what a fascinating curio it is in the annals of Hindi film music – unbelievably lush melodies harking back to earlier decades (strip away the arrangements, and you can imagine a Rafi, say, launching into Teri zindagi mein yun to kai dard aayenge), but rooted in the studio-controlled, machine-made aesthetic that anticipates the AR Rahman era by almost an entire decade. Sure, RD Burman was doing a lot of work on synths too, but Star sounded like nothing before, and sounds – even today – like very little since. Then again, I’m hardly the authority on the music of since. As I write this, rapper Kanye West and British soul singer Amy Winehouse are expected to dominate this year’s Grammies. But for their names, there isn’t a thing of theirs I’ve heard.

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Posted in: Between Reviews, Music: Indian Cinema, Music: Western