The point is, it’s almost only these songs that now grab our attention. Hey, I have nothing against funny, nonsense songs and they abounded in the glory days of music as well. Mostly, a song gets talked about when it jumps the shark, like Kolaveri or Gangnam Style. Some would say in comparison to how things were at the start of the 90s, it has lost much of its relevance. True enough, the last three decades (since the 1990s) have seen music lose some of its earlier cultural relevance.
He referred to music being near-sacred (in not those very words, but it’s a view he’s espoused before) and having once occupied an exalted place. My father said perhaps he is going through what Einstein did in later life, wondering whether he had achieved anything of significance in his endeavours.īut let’s go back to what he said. Of course, you never know, he may live to be a 100 but as he lives on, he sees everything he believed in falling apart.
Uncharitable ones may decry him as a bitter old man but more perceptive observers would sense a profound disillusionment as Ilayaraja senses he is in the twilight of his career and life as such. The rant is in the first couple of minutes of this video: He said music had gone to Tirupati and returned with a clean shave (the true meaning of that analogy does not translate at all in English, unfortunately). Trust Ilayaraja to embark on a bitter rant during his birthday celebrations! He said the era of music making per se is dead and composers, musicians and singers are only keeping up a make believe pretense (drawing a colourful parallel to make believe fight scenes in the films!), but there are, he asserted, no tunes, no nothing.