Let the music play
A few months ago, Spotify sent out Spotify Wrapped to all its users. It’s annual gamified promotional thingy that allows you to flex the cool shit you listen to. I got mine, and it told me I listened to a cool 120000+ minutes of music in the last calendar. I think that’s definitely above average but I don’t have any stats to back me up. But it made thing one thing clear to me, music is an integral part of my life and now I have data to back it up. Why though? 🤔
The earliest memory I have of really vibing to a song was Rahman’s OG “Humma Humma” and Shah Rukh Khan’s “Hosh Na Kho De Kahin Josh Mein Dekhne Waala”. My enthusiasm was exploited to make me perform in front every visiting relative, that’s a different story. But I didn’t care. Turn the volume up and I’d be dancing before they asked me to. 🕺
Music that way, was always played in the household. One didn’t miss an episode of Zee’s Antakshari or Sa Re Ga Ma Pa! When music was not playing I’d hear my mum humming while she cooked away in the kitchen. I know some songs exist because I remember her humming them, like “Sayonara Sayonara”. 🍳
All this started rubbing off on me. Like, when Kal Ho Naa Ho’s music was released I went to a music shop and bought a cassette the very next day. The guy at the counter sold me a copy of Chiranjeevi’s Indra, so I bought that too. Never actively listened to Telugu music but I bought it anyway. I played Kal Ho Naa Ho until the cassette’s tape gave up on me, learnt my first ever English lyrics in “Pretty Woman” and flexed it like I was the next MJ!
I missed out on plenty of music during my formative years at Sainik School but there was a fair share of music that came in, thanks to enthusiastic seniors making mixtapes. And when they’d play it during dinners, the nasty sabzi became a tiny bit easy to ingest. I should say on the flip side, I came out quite unscathed from the Himesh Reshammiya era! 😉
Outside the gates of my boarding school, the world of music just opened up to me. Listening to Ryan Seacrest on Bangalore’s Radio Indigo, finding music on songs.pk, the onset of YouTube that didn’t buffer, mixtapes on 8tracks and on and on! By this time, I had become an obsessive tracker of new music with a defined set of rules — download music, have a running playlist of songs and track the number of plays so that I don’t listen to the same song too many times. The only exception to the rule was Rahman’s “Hosanna”.
Downloads soon gave way to streaming. I began with Saavn and Spotify before switching to Spotify completely, discovering plenty of new music and artists along the way. Over the years with the changing modes of music consumption, my tastes have evolved as well. What that has meant, is I now have wider choice of music to choose from everyday. And thanks to all that data I have given to Spotify, the recommendations keep getting better every day!
Over the years I have realized I need music to keep me running. People have different ways to fill silence, some even have the balls to let silence be. I fill mine with music. I use it to amplify moods or to switch moods completely. And for the most part it works.
There’s a famous mean tweet about Mumford & Sons that goes,
I love how music takes you away to another place. Like Mumford & Sons is playing at this restaurant so now I’m going to another restaurant.
I will modify this to say, music can take you away to another place. So in a year where I was stuck between four walls I found plenty of music that took me places. 🚀
As I finish this article, Geet mein dhalte lafzon plays on the speaker. Geet mein dhalte lafzon mein, taal pe chalti nabzon mein, naya kuchh naya to zaroor hai. Which loosely means, in the words fitting into song, in pulse running to the music, there is surely something new. If that isn’t a reason to keep listening then what is!
You can follow me here and see all the weird shit I listen🎵 to, https://open.spotify.com/user/notsocoolda?si=7d9041a579a04a2e.
