Sunday, December 14, 2014

Lingaa->Rajni->Balleilakka->Choirs : How mass movies lead to high music

So I watched Lingaa yesterday.

Because of which I was googling and youtubing for rajni's impact outside india; and was largely expecting to find videos from japan - which I did.

But what was really interesting is that I found at least 5 to 6 videos of one song from Rajni's last movie - Sivaji - being sung by school choirs across US.

The song's called Balleilakka, and here's the original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tma8zoLEPJU

Here's a sampler of schools choirs singing it:

Best that I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQWLqcNr9B8
Really fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvo1_vLGAGo
Pretty good, but smattering of indians :) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUhMQYW-xmk
Pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09C8s1QhgqE
Shitty accoustics, but points for the effort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJYVAB8XQU


.. and I began to wonder: why this song alone? None of them actually mentioned the source of the song; they usually called it an indian song in tamil. I think one mentioned that its AR Rehman's song.

So they were actually using it because it was a complex song musically - it was a tongue twister even for natural speakers of the language and what was really obvious from listening to it when sung by a chorus is that it had many layers and voices to it. I dont obviously know the right musical terms here, but in programming terms, it was a mutlithreaded song - multiple concurrent voices had to be active to make it happen, and each voice was sure to get knotted up in the tongue twister lyrics; not to mention that the beat was really fast! No wonder the choruses are taking it up as a challenge.

Its amazing that I live in a time when composers like Rehman have enough commercial clout to put complex music into a movie meant for the masses. Even better: not only do the intended audiences love the song, so do people who are serious about music!