Metal, hard rock, EDM, blues, gaana ... Tamil music has taken myriad forms in Chennai, and the city has seen a spurt in indie talent like never before. They’re exploring existentialism, expressing their politics, celebrating life, and doing it all in their own language.
Over the past five-odd years, the number of independent musicians in the city seems to have grown exponentially, but it’s just the latest chapter in a story that began much earlier.
“In the past 15 years, the scene has changed at least three-four times,” says music producer Tenma, the man behind Madras Medai, The Casteless Collective and Kurangan, the game-changing band that’s now dissolved. Tenma traces the rise of indie music as it stands today, from “the days when open mics first started in the city, in 2004. We were still listening to songs in cassette tapes back then, and different parts of the city had their own scenes: North Madras, with its working class and Anglo-Indian communities, had both jazz and gaana , while the Adyar side had a whole other gang.”
Cut to today, when a slew of Tamil EDM bands are in the fray, and little bands are playing to fresh audiences, coming up at open mics and jamming with unfamiliar talent in cafés and spaces across the city, from Backyard in Adyar to Urban Desi House in Thoraipakkam. And of course, there are the regular venues like Unwind Centre and Bay 146, which have been encouraging fresh talent for decades.
While the number of such spaces is still a far cry from the thriving scene in Mumbai and Bengaluru, it is a marked improvement from the few offerings the city had a few years ago. “Initially, bands could only play in college cultural shows, if they were well-known enough. Otherwise, they could play in bars or pubs, but that happened quite rarely,” says Enderson Prithviraj, director, Unwind Centre. Prithviraj began the centre in 1999, “but our Live 101 programme started in 2001. The idea was to give opportunities to artists to come and jam, and be open for young musicians to play on our stage as well,” he says.
My land, my voice
It’s a small wonder that a number of bands across the city credit Unwind Centre for encouraging them and putting them on the map. Prithviraj had a strong motivation to open such a space, where artists could sing in their own voice. “Back in the day, bands would have to do covers to get popular. Now, expressing in our own language is getting easier.”
A voice of one’s own is — naturally — something all artistes feel strongly about, including Karthik Manickavasakam, the lead singer of Pithukuli. “When I write and sing in my own language, it obviously comes out more sincere than if I were trying to write in English. But even today, most of Chennai’s pubs and bars don’t want regional music,” says Manickavasakam, fresh from his trip to France where he and a fellow artist were collaborating with French musicians to create fresh soundtracks. He can’t help but compare the audiences in both places. “In France, people look for concerts and don’t mind driving for one-and-a-half hours to hear it, even if its a new artist. Here, if a performance is in a slightly far neighbourhood, or if tickets cost ₹200, people turn away.”
Considering the tens of thousands it costs for independent artists to put their music out there — right from sound recording, mastering and rendering for online platforms to the economics of setting up for a gig, or as Tenma puts it, “production, distribution, exhibition” — this seems a tad unfair, but the musicians are aware that the grind is something they must all go through. And while Tamil music might not have much choice in terms of venues, it certainly has an audience.
Amrit Rao, composer and lead of the band Amrit Rao & The Madrascals, says, “The film industry has been more welcoming to independent musicians of late. This shift in mainstream sound is probably what triggered this shift. The likes of Pradeep Kumar and Sean Roldan were among the first to have dominated this scene, but now, a lot of bands keep coming up. And they’re playing jazz, blues... genre and language are no longer a barrier.”
So it’s quite safe to say that the younger, up-and-coming bands have plenty to look up to. Fledgeling band Aatma, for instance, is capable of getting a courtyard full of people swaying to their tracks, and lists off a number of bands as their “we want to be” goals. But if Prithviraj and Tenma are to be believed, any new band’s strength is in its original voice. As the latter says, “Young bands still have to put up a fight. So even if you’re singing about something like sunshine, just be real, man.”
