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My five - Nandita Sridhar

Sting

The song ensnares you with its texture and arrangement. The pace is languid and Cheb Mami’s voice, with its curvaceous Arabic flow, finds the right space in the music. Mami and Sting’s combined effort is a brilliant climax to the build up; but it’s Sting’s voice — slightly coarse with a drawl giving it a feel of endlessness — that carries it through, making it the perfect song for a long and aimless drive.

First Minimalist musician Michael Nyman’s composition for the Academy Award winning film ‘The Piano’ is powerfully evocative. Aesthetically, the appeal lies in its passion that spontaneously emerges. The piece moves steadily, intensely purposeful with every note, while drawing strength from the previous one, before tapering off in the end. Through its entire course, the composition forms an emotional connection in a manner only the piano can.

It’s the voice that does it. Madonna’s vocal range in her comeback 1998 album adds dimension to the addictive measured undertones. The Eastern and Middle-Eastern sounds willingly give themselves up for the symbiosis, to create a mesmerising effect. Back when it was released, the tremendous potential the song had set off a spate of remixes in different musical genres. Chris Cunningham’s video, with its awkward and sometimes exaggerated metaphors, totters on the edge of a self-parody, but sufficiently works by being dark and delightfully black.

One of the finest advertisements for funk has a quality to it that’s instantly appealing. Virtual Insanity (fascinating in itself) seems headed for a rapid realisation, which Jay Kay conveys with refined sound and great lyrics. The most talked about feature, the video, is brilliantly conceived and shot with teasing camera angles, colours and choreography. The voice lacks just the right amount of overbearing depth to carry the music on its desired course.

The video has studiously given itself up for stalker parodies, but ‘Hello’ works due to its transparency, unpretentious soppiness and Richie’s balladic rendition. There is an unabashed earnestness that’s hard to ignore and the contrived climax when his love is symbolically requited is done with so much seriousness, that it ends up appealing. The song’s impact was widespread in the 1980s, after men began using it in the background when popping the question.

Those that almost made it

Mariah Carey: Hero

Abba: Waterloo

(Nandita Sridhar is a Senior Reporter in the Sports

Department of The Hindu.)

[Readers may contribute to MyFive at

myfivecolumn@gmail.com. Submissions must have a full address and telephone number. Publication is at the

discretion of Weekend Metroplus.]

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