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It’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday night. The city sleeps to the clamour of ringing bells, courtesy the city’s tea vigilantes and their bicycles. The roads are dimly-lit, headlights shining the wrong way. In a matchbox-shaped apartment complex riddled with twenty-somethings, a question arises: “is 2 a.m. too early to call it a night?” And then “How is Aandavan Padachaan from Sivaji’s 1961 Nichaya Thaamboolam playing on the speakers?” to the response, “No, don’t change the song; it’s chill .”
Hundred years from now when historians and anthropologists look back and wonder how to label our generation, the millennials’, I’d like for us to be known as The Playlist Generation. And not just for the music; there’s also the conversation that comes with it — the sombre, sometimes macabre, often pointless discussions bordering on existential crises that soon culminate in “should we order something?”
I belong to a generation that has learned to compartmentalise and prioritise the little things that were often overlooked by the previous generations. Our idea of what constitutes happiness and success, tearing down ideas of materialism, embracing uncertainty, all before we make our way to jobs that we know we’re quitting, and eventually making a playlist because what’s life without some music?
Since the advent of music streaming, since Spotify, Apple Music, Wynk, Saavn, etc., came into being, the way we consume our music has drastically changed. From bookmarking artists and albums we are now after playlists — our approach to music has become more mood-led than artist-led (with a few exceptions, of course). Humans that put music together to algorithms that try and determine the kind of music you like based on what you already listen to have replaced the person at the cassette shop who illegally mixed songs from different albums together to make a mixtape. It’s eerie how efficient and right the algorithm is about giving us music we like.
There’s a playlist for every occasion — the party before the party, the actual party, and the cooldown party after the party where you’d listen to wonderful Croatian instrumentals before you agree to get some shut-eye. The more playlists I discover, the more I realise that my passive dependence on music has increased exponentially since I got myself hooked onto a music-streaming app. You have a playlist for travel, one for your shower, one for your road trips, one for when you hit the gym (this is generally the one that comes under “Least Played”) and even one to help you sleep. Every occasion.
But the one playlist that constantly eludes is the ‘Chill’ playlist. Anybody with an access to a device that can store and categorise music has a playlist that goes by the name ‘Chill’; it goes by different names. It’s the one playlist that supposedly defines your idea of chill. Now this could be as eclectic and ineffable — it could be a mix of your most favorite mainstream Tamil Film Music beats or a Leonard Cohen classic. Our parental generations didn’t seem to care too much if their work schedule ever got in the way of their ‘Chill’ but we do; a playlist whose entire purpose is to color your ‘Chill’ time defines the playlist generation in a way.
The sheer joy of discovering a new song, one that resonates with your newly formed idea of “you” is incomparable, especially when the song you discovered was the result of you taking the leap of faith on a music-streaming application, and thereby agreeing to listen to a curated playlist that you haven’t heard previously. I am aware and I acknowledge that this level of exposure and accessibility to music comes with privilege, but given how the country is becoming one of the fastest-growing smartphone and Internet markets in the world, it’s only a matter of time before a big conglomerate (cough, cough; rhymes with Rio) introduces a music-streaming app that’s cheaper than a cup of tea after midnight.
I belong to a generation that’s still debating if the art and the artist are two separate entities and if laughing out loud while watching Louis CK might be morally wrong. Ironically, however, when it comes to our taste in music, what we can enjoy in the privacy of the space between our own ears, we don’t much care about the artist, so long as it resonates with our mood.
Not that we’d ever pay complete attention to the music, but being in control of your very own background score is almost Wes Anderson-ish in its auteurism. Now, who wouldn’t want their very own score and have their life directed by good ‘ol Wes.
