Music within

I grew up in the era of pop music and boy bands....music videos with style and dance, and sometimes, if you were lucky, a great concept to boot. We had desi bands, IndiPop as it was fondly called....and then there were the English songs that were all the rage!!!! Being a teenage girl, it was almost impossible to not fall for the charm and charisma of bands like Backstreet Boys and Boyzone....4 cute guys singing out their love, now how can any girl resist!!! Considering that I have always been a sucker for emotion, the songs and their sensitivity appealed to me all the more!

Even after I got out of my teens (man it feels like eons ago that I was a teenager!!!!), my fondness for these songs remained. Of course there were a lot of meaningful additions to the kind of music I heard.....I became (and still am) a huge fan of Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Elvis Presley to name a few. During my masters, I was initiated into rock by some of my friends, listening to songs from bands like Pink Floyd, Mettalica, Linkin Park and so on. Even though I haven’t got converted into a rock fan, I pride myself on the fact that I could broaden my horizons just a bit. My music tastes seemed to cover a bit of all genres (even though classical still remains untouched) and that was good enough.

However, my friends wouldn’t let me get away that easy!! I can’t count the number of debates and fights I’ve had over the years over the fact I continued to listen to pop music!!! It wasn’t just the boy bands, that I could’ve understood, but even the likes of Bryan and Celine weren’t spared and for the life of me I could never understand why!!! The argument was straight and simple, pop music exists simply to please the masses, especially girls! Serious musicians play because it is their passion, not for anyone else, and they sing about stuff that matters to them, rather than sing the words written by a random lyricist. But it’s just not possible for everyone to be a lyricist and a music composer and a singer, now that’s just unrealistic!! And I still stand by my argument, that many rock bands don’t even have songs with meaningful lyrics!!! So all said and done, my choice in music was my choice....and hence not open to debate!!!!

But recently, things have changed a bit. It happened while listening to the soundtrack  of a movie called Once (a beautiful movie I’d recommend to everyone) and just took off from there. I simply love the way each video on youtube links to so many others. You can go on this great journey of discovery and get to listen to songs you would’ve never known about otherwise!! Along this journey, I got to listen to songs by Adele and Alanis Morisette among others and I began to see the difference. All of their songs had a quality to them....raw emotion that seemed to connect to me in a very real way. You can listen and know, they’re singing about things that are close to their heart....expressing themselves in the way they know best...through music!!! Their music evolves with them, as they go through different experiences and you get to share that journey with them. As long as they are true to their music, success is theirs to have!!! I’m not saying that I hereby denounce other forms of music. Our good old Bollywood music (old and new alike) will stay with me right till the end, as will all the other stuff I listen to. But I can see now, the passion that can go behind composing a song and I have a greater appreciation for it! So I guess I just wanna say...”Thank you for the music....for giving it to me”!!!!