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sanuka-wickramasinghe

Some notes on the popular (music) culture

May 24, 2020 by shamilka
Nadeemal Perera, Ridma Weerawardena, Sanuka Wickramasinghe, Uditha Devapriya

The young of today are caught up, I think, in a curious contradiction. They want to rebel, to let the world know they are not satisfied, but they also want to hide behind a certain welter of security. Their heroes are the singers and the actors who adorn the recent popular culture: heroes shirked as outsiders, who indulge in the cosmetics of rebellion with the privilege of returning to a more secure life once their rebelliousness is done away with. The urban youth, in particular, are transfixed by this fusion of opposites – security and rebellion – and they shape their preferences in the arts based on their preference for that fusion. (They want to have the cake and eat it too, in other words.) A long way from home, but still near that home, the young are confused. Not that they need a guide. But they seem to be lost. And they seem to revel in the fact that they are.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the art form that appeals to these youngsters and teenagers the most is music, because music, with or without accompanying visuals, is the one art form that depends for its endurance on the doing away of a barrier between the artist and his or her audience. The tastes of the latter are at the outset the tastes of the former; there’s no effort made at mediating the consciousness of either group to equalise it to that of the other. For that reason, the milieu that the artist – in real life or in his work – belongs to happens to be the same milieu that his or her fan base comes from, and moreover revels in. Those who vouch for, and adore, Sanuka Wickramasinghe and Nadeemal Perera and Ridma Weerawardena don’t take to Chamara Weerasinghe, for instance, because Chamara isn’t “sophisticated” enough for their elegant, urbane tastes.

Sanuka and Nadeemal and, to a certain extent, Ridma are exponents of a specific variety of Sinhala music. It’s the sort that thrives on youth and sophistication: the careful inflections, the precise accents, necessitate a balancing act between the urbaneness of their fan base and the Sri Lankan-ness of their other listeners. Largely secular, cosmopolitan, and cut off from the wellsprings of our traditional art forms, their most ardent fans affirm a musical idiom that is closer to the city. And because the city flourishes through a contrapuntal mixture of rebellion and conformity, these three vocalists appeal, not to adolescent dreams, but to the rift between those dreams and the lives that the adolescents in the city have to put up with. One night stands, romances that never take off, first romances: these experiences can be articulated only by those who have the luxury of an alternative life, and this life Sanuka and Nadeemal celebrate.

Nadeemal Perera

For some reason, beat bands are, in Sri Lanka, considered populist. With a few exceptions, such bands have been associated with cheap, easy music, having very little instrumentation and virtually no acoustics. Even the vocalists who opt to sing with these bands are judged harshly and put down. Such an attitude, of judging them on how sophisticated their voices are, betrays a set of insidious class prejudices: you don’t like Chamara because he isn’t “cool” enough, because he isn’t equipped with the symbols of chic sophistication (the slick, combed hair; the alienating, imposing sunglasses; the casual, reluctant smile) that Bathiya, Santhush, and Sanuka project. With his idiosyncratic and sun-baked face, Chamara is a hero to the downtrodden and the dispossessed, who listen to him while travelling in the bus and who don’t have the money to repair their own broken radios (and lives) back home. Musically, those who dote on Sanuka et al are sophisticated, or at least THINK they’re sophisticated (when they are not).

Chamara Weerasinghe

The same can be said of Saman Lenin, whose popularity is, however, different to Chamara’s just as Chamara’s popularity is different to Sanuka’s. The music that Lenin affirms is the music of the past, which comes up from the wellsprings of the Sinhala language, i.e. the rural and spoken variant. Chamara Weerasinghe is not a purist like this: he is willing and he has made compromises over the years to win at least a section of the pop audience that Sanuka has monopolised, even those who don’t usually take to beat bands that easily. Lenin doesn’t really make compromises like that. He has been singing of the village and he returns to the village in song after song; music videos are at best expendable to him, and if he will resort to it, it will be the type of video we see every day on television (which focuses on the vocalist, and spares little time for the unfolding of a narrative).

Saman Lenin

Broadly, there are two types of people who don’t take to Chamara and Lenin: One, the sophisticated, or as I prefer to call them, the “chichi” crowd (who believe they’re “posh” or if not have girlfriends and boyfriends who want them to be “posh”), and two, those who appreciate music in general but have been conditioned to prefer individual vocalists to beat bands. In this conflict, we come across a segmentation of the popular culture, a segmentation that has always been there and has itself helped segment art forms which were thought to belong to a specific group. Perhaps a recounting of the evolution of baila might help us.

Baila began with the Kaffirs, i.e. their dialects and dances. It found its 20th century indigenous proponent with Wally Bastian, right before we attained independence (in the forties). From Bastian and his successor, Desmond Kelly, we come to M. S. Fernando and Anton Jones, both of whom appealed to a different milieu: more vernacular, more home-grown, they were despised by the upper and middle classes, who shirked them and pandered to the likes of Clarence and The Moonstones and Calypso. From Fernando and Jones, we come to Dalreen and Desmond Fernando and Mariazelle Goonetilake, who more or less returned to the classist exuberance that Bastian and Kelly had revelled in. Like Clarence, they thrived on a separation of the householder from the servant (a separation which M. S. and Anton refused to make or continue, since they sang almost completely about the hard done by petty bourgeoisie, along with the urban proletariat), and from them, we come to Paul Fernando, Christopher Paul, and Punsiri Soyza, all three of whom hailed from Moratuwa and all three of whom took baila to the milieu that M. S. and Anton had celebrated before.

My point here is that, while there can be no divorce between a musical form and a milieu, such forms have tended over the decades to be segmented, sometimes even within the same genre, between different milieus. There’s always a state of flux, in other words, a given since no art form can remain static and impervious to change from the outside for long. This can, I believe, be applied to what’s unfolding in today’s popular culture, as an extension of what we’ve seen in the last few decades as well as a new, fresh sort of segmentation between certain compartmentalised class bound sensibilities, this time between the urbane and sophisticated on the one hand and the ruralised and rooted on the other.

Perhaps it’s pertinent to note that even a vocalist like the late (and forever unequalled) W. D. Amaradeva evoked different responses from different audiences. Amaradeva’s early period, as some have observed, comprised of compositions and songs which tried to keep up with the experiments that Sunil Shantha was conducting. His second period, after his return from Bhathkande and before he fused the raghadari tradition with the Sinhala quatrain, saw him dabble in calypso and baila: these songs (“Atha Gaw Ganan Durin” and “Pipi Pipi” being two of them, the former written by Mahagama Sekara) are the songs we have that remind us that the man came from a coastal environment, which reacted, not to the profundity of Sinhala poetry, but the saltiness of a genre that brought their community together, in dance and drink.

In abandoning this phase for the phase in which he gave out “Kumariyaka Pa Salamba Saluna” and “Ma Mala Pasu” and so on, Amaradeva, I think, was inadvertently appealing to the same milieu which had helped prop up the cultural revolution of 1956: not the peasantry, who reacted with mixed feelings to the (supposedly) Sinhalised movies of Lester James Peries and ballets of Chitrasena, but the petty bourgeoisie. The children of this petty bourgeoisie grew up listening to Amaradeva on the one hand and Clarence on the other; it was a bifurcation of tastes within the same milieu which ignored if not marginalised the efforts of Lionel Ranwala, and Piyasiri Wijeratne (if you search for “Badde Pura” on YouTube, almost all the search results will make you think that it was sung by Amitha Wedisinghe only; Piyasiri is forgotten today because he was forgotten in his time), to take our music beyond the raag and Western melody.

Going by this, the grandchildren, of the children who were responsible for 1956, have evolved to appreciate Sanuka and Nadeemal and Ridma over Chamara and Saman Lenin because their tastes are somewhat genetic, conditioned at the outset by the environment they are in and the families they are born to. In one sense, I think such a separation, mostly hereditary, is to be welcomed, because it helps us understand the complex array of sensibilities which goes into the shaping of vocalists and musical forms. On the other hand, if we continue to make this an excuse for ignoring the musical Other, we will only be poorer. The true aesthete, I’ve always felt, sheds class-bound sensibilities. The tragedy is that we are not a nation of aesthetes. We are a nation of human beings. And we are flawed.

Written for: Daily Mirror, May 8 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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For the love of today, or why the young take to Sanuka

May 9, 2020 by shamilka
Sanuka Wickramasinghe, Uditha Devapriya

When you listen to “Saragaye”, and watch the video online, you get enveloped in complete happiness. In some vague, indefinable, almost magical way, Sanuka Wickramasinghe has given a form to our collective experience of one night stands and crushes and unrequited romances. And yet the elders don’t like him: they lambast him over every little detail. Even the choice of title, for these puritans, is a gross misdemeanour (“Saragaye”, in case you were wondering, is the apotheosis of ragaya, or passion and lust) which may lead the young astray (as if the elders weren’t doing a despicably good job of that already!). I can’t understand how one music video, and a 24 year old vocalist with around three or four minor hits to his name, could bring about this heightening of an already terse conflict between the elders and their offspring, but there you have it: the former criticise him because he appeals so ineffably and directly to the latter.

Many of those I’ve met with, and interviewed or chatted with at length at some point, who are not elderly, see in “Saragaye” a facile novelty that barely transcends its limitations (more on those later) because of the vocalist himself, and the electronic percussive rhythms that we’ve not heard for quite some time. While the elders see in it the kind of music that can corrupt our youth, these people see in it a perpetuation of a form of music that does not thrive on words or a literary sensibility. Even the young, armed with their Sinhala Honours Degrees, offer an excuse for their mixed feelings towards the man: that despite the percussive rhythms and the daring monochrome visuals, “Saragaye” offers nothing by way of summing up the human condition through poetry.

This attitude of rabid scepticism, while not excusable, isn’t entirely without reason. As I pointed out in my article on Bathiya and Santhush some months back, and last year in my article on Ajantha Ranasinghe, in the Sinhala sarala gee a balance was always kept between the personal and the aesthetic. The narrator became, in the early days of the Amaradevas and Victor Ratnayakes, the embodiment of a collective experience, because that poetic tradition provided a multitude of metaphors and rhetorical devices through which that experience could be refined, formalised, aesthetised, and turned into a popular tune. This was true of Ranasinghe’s work, and even truer of, on the one hand, K. D. K. Dharmawardhana (whose best lyrics are laden with so much poetry that they are difficult to take in, in one go) and, on the other, Premakeerthi de Alwis (whose rich vocabulary he discarded in favour of a simple, almost verbal form of poetry). As the years went by, however, we missed out on the word, and substituted for it the glosses of technology.

Because technology, no matter how alluring it is, usually isn’t very interesting or enriching, the older generation fell out. There had been production houses in the seventies and eighties, but they had all been primitive in the way they were operated: if you got your recording wrong, you had to repeat, again and again. That sense of meticulousness gets lost in the blur of money-making processes, and the new production houses, owned by second generation artists and the offspring of the first generation artists – Ranga Dassanayake, Raj Seneviratne, Bathiya and Santhush – unleashed a New Wave. But that New Wave operated on a fatal rift, between technology on the one hand and the profit motive on the other. (Can they ever coexist?) They entranced the millennials, from my generation, and predictably alienated the old.

Ranga Dasanayake

The only kind of novelty that attracted this generation, as the years went by, was the kind that thrived on technology, and technology, once it became intertwined with the melody in ways that had not been seen before, became a byword for peotry. Youngsters who respond to a song like “Saragaye”, the elders I know keep on telling me, aren’t responding to the words or even the meaning that those words evoke, but instead reflect on and allow themselves to be carried away by what lies on the surface. These elders point at Iraj, and even Bathiya and Santhush, and claim that they began this trend, forgetting that while technology clearly cannot, should not, and will not be a substitute for lyricism, we can’t avoid resorting to it either. The millennials went for this technology-induced music; they were what Pauline Kael referred to decades ago as “brutalists”, who were tired of the “sanctity” of the songs they were being forced to listen to.

After Bathiya and Santhush and Iraj, all three of whom spawned a generation of imitators who never transcended their imitativeness despite the superficiality and the facileness of their work, we come to Sanuka Wickramasinghe. Sanuka represents a different kind of facile novelty, not just in terms of the electronic percussiveness and the rhythms of his music, but the themes he goes for in song after song. When you read (into) the answers he has given to those questions asked by interviewers in those countless gossip websites, you are enthralled by the simplicity and naiveté of the way he sees the world. (He’s still a schoolboy, even in the way he croons.) If his songs – and there haven’t been many of them since he started out in 2011 – reflect a vibrant youthfulness, it’s because he’s young and very much so. (One year my senior, to be specific.) Sanuka has gone beyond those earlier imitators before him in taking the young beyond technology, but if he has failed at least a little in this venture, it’s because the old, having responded to this endeavour of his warmly, are instantly repelled by what he thematises in his works: in the case of “Saragaye”, a one night stand and the temporariness of uncommitted love.

Bathiya and Santhush

About a year after he released “Saragaye”, Sanuka released “Perawadanak”, which was manifestly different, especially in terms of the themes it tackled. If “Saragaye” belonged to a young demographic that hailed from an urbane, chic, and school-going milieu, “Perawadanak”, with its vignette of an unfulfilled love, appealed to a considerably elderly population. A schoolboy I know once asked Sanuka why, and his reply was that this shift in the targeted audience was an effort to get his songs beyond the youth; it was an attempt at pleasing the elders who shirked him. (“Saragaye” was about giving into passion; “Perawadanak was about the catharsis of a broken romance.) Did it work? I should think so: many of the elders I know, and talk with, while disdainful of “Saragaye”, reacted less coldly to “Perawadanak.” That Sanuka has not done a song since then speaks volumes, I believe, about the fact that he released it just a year after his first big hit just so to get out his themes to a wider public, since in Sri Lanka, the young, while comprising 25% of the total population, are just not enough for someone of his calibre to reach stardom.

These two songs, I think, reflect the kind of songs we’ve been missing out for almost a decade. They are not perfect in any conceivable sense – which begs the question, why should we demand perfection in any art form? – and they do leave the purists, the elders, and those who look for “profound poetry” in the dark. But the indictment that there is no meaning in “Saragaye”, that the lyrics lack the requisite complexity for us to elevate it to the status of ART, are, I firmly believe, lopsided at best and wildly inaccurate at worst. “Saragaye”, for instance, opens with these mystical, almost otherworldly, and deliberately fragmented lines:

නිය රටා
මවනවා
අපතරේ වූ කතා
රැය පුරා
උණුහුමේ
මල් පෙති තලා

It’s fragmentary for the simple reason that the love story being described here has no proper structure, or for that matter order: unlike those conventional music videos you see everywhere here, there are no walls to be surmounted or for that matter no lovers bemoaning failed romances. The narrator of “Saragaye” has no standalone voice either, because Sanuka is not the protagonist of his video; he’s observing from the sidelines, reflecting on what he perceives. The fragmented lyrics add depth to this already lopsided romance, and in the end, we don’t really understand what the hero or protagonist sees in the woman.

Those who argue that contemporary music has become a mishmash are, while not wrong, aren’t entirely correct either. The most common excuse dished out is that the young don’t look out for complexity in the lyrics, that they are entranced by the allure of the surface – in other words, technology – so much that they don’t bother reading into the work. Nothing could be further from the truth. In deceiving themselves about the young this way, the elders, or at least those who aren’t willing to compromise or give their offspring the benefit of the doubt, are forgetting that we are seeing a revival of sorts in our musical sphere. It’s the kind of pop revival Europe underwent in the seventies, with the rise of ABBA and Brotherhood of Man and Lulu, all three of whom won at the Eurovision Song Contest for tunes we remember and treasure and hum for their innocence and simplicity, despite the fact that, yes, the elders of that time derided them.

The elders have spoken. So have the young. We can choose a side, or we can enjoy what’s on the radio. Perhaps we’d better switch on the radio. That’s what I’d do, since that’s the only real option we have.

Written for: Daily Mirror, April 12 2018

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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