Tamil Music and me

date

Dec 29, 2024

slug

tamil-music

status

Published

I like music.

I have been listening to songs since my memory started making posts. And I'd like to credit my dad for it. He was a nut for S.P.Balasubrahmanyam, a singer with individual wiki pages to list the songs he sang in 3 different languages. My dad was also a nut for M.S.Viswanathan, a man who made music for 61 years.

My dad was a fanboy before fanboying was a thing.

Anyway, flashback to my childhood, we had this cassette player - which I think was a Panasonic player/recorder - that used to sit on the third level of the shelf we had in our living room. Third level meant it was way above what I could reach and every time my dad played something on it, it felt like music came from above.

But how did we get music?

The backend

He had a lot to play. A lot. But this was the 80s and 90s. You didn't have streaming or the internet to purchase songs (or help pirate them).

We apparently had places to buy cassettes. In case you’re too young, they looked like this -

And the places that sold them, sold them as whole albums - which is how you'd expect businesses to operate. But that's not what the consumer wanted, or at least my dad. He wanted to cherry pick songs from albums. Just the ones he had liked from listening to them on the radio.

So, he would go to these shops, ask them for specific songs from an album and record it on a blank cassette for him. That’s the one-liner for this activity.

However, this had too many steps and stuff to consider-

Cassettes could hold a few songs (depending on the era and the quality of recording). So, dad had to take his time, write down songs from different albums in a period - say a month - and then give that list of songs to the recording shop

Cassettes weren’t really cheap and my dad wasn’t doing that well on the wallet. He had to take his time to fill the list. If the list didn’t fill up with enough songs, he would wait for some more time for a new song to be in his liking.

The recording part itself was funny. The shops had to play the song from an album cassette and then patch it on to the custom cassette. Basically ripping songs if you are from my generation. I do not know the legality of the whole process but it sure as hell is comical.

But after all this is done, the cassette shop would give you the finished custom product after a few days.

I’ve told who my dad likes and how he gets what he likes. Now let me explain the extent of this expensive hobby.

We had a total 2 cassette players - 1 Panasonic branded player and the newer one I can’t really remember. The Panasonic one crashed out sometime in the late 2000s.

Over a 100 custom cassettes, a good number of album cassettes and a few devotional/religious song cassettes.

His hobby kept going even when we were short on money and I respect him for that.

My mixtape

This was his timeline.

Old songs. Songs that weren’t peppy. Songs that were only advices. Songs that were just.. songs.

But honestly, it was annoying at times to listen to the same voices and the old songs when I was a kid. Even in my teenage years, “Enough with the SPB songs, can we listen to something new?” my mom or I used to say after he played his playlist on the USB stick. I am laughing at that kid right now.

But let’s get to my journey now. He was the only one to shape my music knowledge till the point I could get songs on my own. My era was much simpler. Internet was fairly new. Piracy was the only way to sail the seas, considering finance and accessibility. But it was great. I could download any song I could. And I freaking did. Every single movie’s album. We had a Windows at home, ~4MB a song or ~25MB an album. My internet could support that and downloaded it in a few minutes. I had a folder called “Songs”, inside that you would find folders with years instead of names. And within each of the folder, you had albums from that year. Every year, the number of albums in a year increased.

We had a set of Logitech speakers connected to the computer and I blasted the songs on them. All the time.

I then got an iPod nano some time in 2009. Painfully copied all my favorite pirated songs from my computer to the iPod using iTunes and listened to it. Then it was the era of music phones with pirated music and then it was the smart phones with pirated music and now, smart phones with music streaming. And.. I haven’t pirated a single song since 2016. Didn’t expect the random ego boost, eh?

The backend to my music listening process was fairly simple and it still is.

Now to the quality of songs -

People with their childhood in the 80s and the early 90s usually fall for Ilaiyaraaja and for good measure. That man is a god. I can say a million good things about him and it still wouldn’t be enough.

People who had their childhood in the 90s fell for one man and only that one man. A.R.Rahman. The songs friends used to chat about. The songs that played in the public. The songs that played on TV. It was all him.

To give you timeline -

ARR was every hit song in my childhood. His songs before 2000 were golden. The disclaimer is, I hadn’t listened to them before 2000 because I was too young but I did catch up. There were others in the period but it did not matter. Like at all.

But this is it. Nothing long like my dad had.

Late 2024

Music in the tamil film industry has been tragic to say the least. Social media and streaming app algorithms decide which song is amazing.

And lately, I’ve been very conservative with music. I’ve been calling everything trash. I refuse to listen to songs for more than 2 minutes. My “recaps” have been few new songs on repeat.

And I’m blaming my dad for it.

Well, crediting my dad, really.

He (unintentionally) had a huge influence on me and the songs I listened to when I was a kid. His choice of songs, the quality in them, the music. It was SPB, Chitra and Hariharan, and a couple of others maybe. All extremely strong technically in their singing. I listen to songs today and I have nothing but doubts.

High pitch segments from the singer? Could it be software aided?

Bass segments? Could it be software aided?

Chorus portions that should give you the goosebumps? Could it be software aided?

I go back to the Duet album from 1994. SPB nails the high pitches in En Kaadhale track like he does it for fun (he probably does do it for fun, he was THAT talented). I’ve listened to the Mettupodu track, again by SPB, at least 5 dozen times in the last few weeks. I’ve added a dozen such ARR albums to my library and I only hope the count increases.

I had a chat with my friend regarding my recent rediscovery of ARR songs and the feedback I got was nostalgia. Maybe. But I know there’s a lot of technicality in the songs that I’m figuring out. And I like that. And I feel thats what a hobby should be - figuring out why you like something you like.

Also, we don’t have the cassettes that my dad collected. All the custom made playlists. Decades of hard work. My dad gave them away.