Was music once a purer pursuit?

Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs at the 66th Grammy Awards in February this year. Pic/Getty Images

I woke up with a smile on my face a few weeks ago, when I was told that the legendary Tracy Chapman had the Number 1 spot on the US iTunes chart. It happened a day after she performed her song Fast Car at this year's Grammy Awards, and she was reportedly as amazed as the rest of us who happened to be paying attention. It was beautiful, not just because the song itself is timeless, but because of how devoid of embellishment her performance was. It was just Chapman and a guitar, with back-up vocals from an artiste who recently found success by covering her song.

It feels like another lifetime when I try and remember the first time I heard Fast Car on a cassette purchased at a small music shop in Malad. I remember the album vividly though, and how seriously I sang along to its lyrics printed on the liner notes. Listening to it again after all these years made me nostalgic not just for the music, but for the way so many of us once used it as an important touchstone to every aspect of our lives.

It makes little sense to discuss pop stars from the West in a country that cares little for them, of course, but I know a lot of people in Bombay who grew up with these artistes, which is why I choose to indulge myself by writing about them. Chapman's performance was a reminder of how seriously some of us took those rockers and singer-songwriters, all those years ago when one could walk into stores that sold greeting cards and leave with books of lyrics. They were called ‘Archie's Smash Hits' and my classmates and I would save up for months to purchase them, before painstakingly copying out lyrics to songs we liked, then sharing them.

The Grammys aired during an interesting week for me because, a few days prior, I happened to watch a documentary about We Are The World, the charity single originally recorded in 1985 by a group of American superstars. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that almost four decades had passed since it appeared. It also made me feel as if the way music was created as well as consumed, at the time, was somehow purer than how we treat it today. Now, it feels less like an art form and more like a distraction, an extension of every other form of entertainment with which we divert ourselves from the fact that modern life continues to be rubbish. Music is now a form of content, to be played in the background or to underscore videos of us dancing to feed a viral hashtag.

I acknowledge that this could be a common argument made by anyone of my vintage, given that every generation has an annoying habit of pulling on rose-tinted glasses while looking back. And yet, there's something to be said about how so many of us in Bombay took those songs so seriously. Ask older Bombayites about Rang Bhavan or Rhythm House, that little-known concert by The Police or the time Michael Jackson shut down traffic in Andheri west. Ask them about Jazz by The Bay and Rock Around the Clock and watch as the pleasure on their faces gives way to something sad and wistful.

I think of those times when I consider how impersonal the act of ‘listening' has become; how it has been reduced to the streaming of singles rather than the intense study of albums, and how cover art or lyric sheets have been relegated to a long-forgotten past where the meaning of a song is less important than how catchy it is for its increasingly short lifespan.

I have no way of proving this, but it's presumably safe to assume that this is the case with music in our regional languages too. We have moved away from treating it as art, and turned into people who play a song for a week before moving on to the next film's soundtrack, or next piece of music that goes viral on TikTok. It feels as if we have lost the ability to sit down and engage with the music, and I wonder if shorter attention spans compel those who create music to invest a little less of themselves in the act of creation.

Tracy Chapman's return still left me with hope though. Maybe we'll start listening to albums again. And, who knows, maybe we'll even take them seriously.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira

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