Myself

Edge of a cliff

I have a problem. I have a problem with Cool Things That Would Look Great At Home Even Though They Cost An Arm and Leg. My usual excuse when I buy something like that is – “It’s fine. If I want to, I can sell them and get my money back”. Because let’s face it, we are legion. There are lots of us willing to throw money at shiny things that are available only on the secondary market.

But there are rules. There has to be rules, otherwise there would be chaos and what can only kindly be called the Smaug Syndrome.

The first rule is: no 3-dimensional figures. Like ever. No toys, action figures, no cold-cast polyvinyl resin statues or statuettes, no life model decoys and 1:8 or 1:12 or 1:2 or even (shudder) 1:1 scale models. No. Nopity nope nope. Books, yes. Art, yes. Prints, a reluctant yes, but only under extreme duress.

But sometimes, just sometimes, the first rule comes perilously close to being broken. [ref]The one corollary to the First Rule is if I get something insanely cool for insanely cheap. Like a Hawkgirl figurine for 2$ at a sale, or a Darwyn Cooke Wonder Woman figure for a buck. Why wouldn’t I? Despite all my flaws, I am still human. [/ref] [ref]The second corollary is if it glows in the dark and is hilarious beyond belief. That’s why I got myself the Chew Chog figures, hyuk.[/ref]

Seeing preorders for Q Hayashida’s Kaiman figure, from her un-freaking-believable manga Dorohedoro makes me want to forget all about restraint and self-control and all that jazz.

caiman_main_g1

To be fair, there has been others this year. The Iron Giant figure that Mondo brought out. It helped that I had absolutely zero padding on my budget that month and the next thanks to a couple of cross-continental trips.

I suspect the next one will be Bryan O’Malley’s Ramona Flowers figure, also from Mondo.

Picture by user slinch on vinylcollective

The capitalists are winning. This is not a good thing.

 

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Mixtapes, Music

The Return of the Monthly Playlist: August 2015

Yeah, I seem to have been remiss in updating the monthly playlists, so here’s a double-dose of music for the last two months. I did create the playlists, but somehow did not get around to creating a post.

Commentary below:

Chvrches is one of those bands that I like the sound of, but kind of feel that their first album got lost in the wave of similar-sounding synthpop albums that came out around the same time, with female vocalists. Or maybe it’s because there are way too many such bands in my ambit. This is the first single from their new album, due to release end of September, and to say I am obsessed by the song and the video is understating it. The sound and themes are linked to Purity Ring’s ‘Another Eternity’, an album that has captured my heart since it released early this year. It is the three-note sawtooth riff that got my attention, but the pulsating chorus is what really drew me in. And holy shit, Lauren Mayberry (singer, song-writer, drummer girl and journalist? Talk about over-achieving!) is so SHINY in that video, in the Whedonian sense of the term.

I stumbled on ‘Hanging On’, and it took me a few anguished days of confusion to figure out why it sounded so maddeningly familiar – Ellie Goulding had covered it. The original version runs circles around the cover, Pat Grossi’s voice and arrangements are just heartbreakingly beautiful. It always struck me as a water song, for some reason, and it’s gratifying to see the video.

I have no idea how Hot Chip manages to make every single one of their albums sound so fresh and intriguing. This track is from their newest album Why Make Sense?, and it’s dancey as fuck.

I heard Trifonic’s Emergence around the same time as BT’s This Binary Universe, mostly because the latter got me searching for albums with a similar sound. I was listening to BT’s pseudo-follow-up to TBU, called If the Stars Are Eternal So Are You and I, and obviously revisited Emergence. Much like the revisiting old haunts, this took me down a different head-space. ‘Good Enough’ is the last song in the album, and the acoustic guitar strum is what gets me every time. (1:52, wait for it)

Kyla LaGrange is an English singer with South African/Zimbabwean roots and the kind of voice that feels like a delicious scoop of ice-cream on a warm summer day. The steel drum loop gives it a bouncy calypso vibe. Love it.

Pretty fucking genius to use GTAV (that’s the iconic game from Rockstar Studios, for those who came in late) game-play and cut-scenes to make the video for this song. Reminds me of Com Truise. I would try and describe their sound but the official description works just fine – “a neon soaked, late night, sonic getaway drive, dripping with analog synthesizers, cinematic vocals and cyberpunk values, all exploding from the front cover of a dusty plastic VHS case which has lain forgotten since 1984”. Like a Nicholas Wending Refn wet dream.

Israeli band Garden City Movement’s ‘Move On’ is the kind of track you want to get high and make out to. ‘Nuff said. Oh, and kinda NSFW video. So’s M83’s ‘Wait’, that comes along a few tracks later and Alpine’s ‘Gasoline’.

Jazz and electronic music come together in BadBadNotGood’s works, and ‘Can’t Leave The Night’ definitely goes places. I love how the drum and bassline takes over around 1:00, after the dreampop beginning. Breakestra’s ‘Come On Over’ is more funk than jazz, and I love the ever-loving shit out of it.

Trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf pays haunting tribute to the place of his birth in a trippy 11 minute track. The lead instrument, at times, sounds like it’s talking to you; at times a whisper, at times raucously laughing along to a joke it knows and wants you to hear, and sometimes, it just wants you to give in. I gave in.

Sir Sly’s ‘You Haunt Me’ sounds way better in the AMTRAC remix. Seriously, try listening to the original after you have heard this, no comparison at all. Wonderful when a song’s texture and feel changes completely in a different mix.

Kate Boy makes the dirtiest, illest riffs ever. Such a distinctive sound this song has, with just the right kind of thematic connection to their earlier ‘Northern Lights’, which blew my mind a few years ago. A song like this needs to be followed by something as dreamy as ‘Technicolor Beat’, just so your heart calms down. An aural relaxant, let’s say.

Don’t you love the name ‘Whilk and Misky’? The flamenco guitars and claps, the voice, and especially the moment when the bass drums jump in – this feels like the perfect summer song.

Laura Welsh’s moment of fame came this year with the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack, but it is this song that made me fall for her. Reminds me of the likes of Modern Talking and Laura Brannigan.

Sometimes, you just want a song like ‘Cheerleader’ playing in your life. No pretension, no deep lyrics, just something you can bop your head – and body – to.

The saddest thing about listening to Burial’s ‘Archangel’ for the first time is wondering why I hadn’t it heard it so far, and the crippling thought that there is so much great music that I haven’t heard yet. This song (and album) came out in 2007, can you believe it?

Did you like this? Which track did you like/hate the most? Do you know music that you think I may like? Did you think my commentary is annoying? Does my taste suck? Talk to me at beatzo@gmail.com, or leave a comment.

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Myself

Of Beginnings

I was born in a small town in Assam called Dhubri. Assam, for those who came in late, is a state that lies to the east of India. While it is flanked by other states on nearly every side, it does border Bangladesh in one corner. That makes Assam a very culturally diverse state. Most Indians that I have met and known have no clear identification with that part of the country – they think it is green and beautiful (which it is) and that people there don’t resemble mainland Indians at all; others are confused about whether civilization exists at all east of Bengal, and if all of us living there are hunter-gatherers foraging in dense jungles. I wish I was exaggerating, but I am not.

I do not remember much of Dhubri, of course. Years later, when I was in school – I believe I was twelve – my mother decided that I should go back and see the place of my birth. We took a bus to the town (a Night Super, as they are called in my part of the world) and stayed there for a few days. The first thing that came to my attention when we got down from the bus was a damp, festering, woody odor. “Matchsticks”, my mother said. “I remember this, it used to be the same so many years ago.” Dhubri is home to the North-East’s only matchstick factory – or was, because ITC closed down their WIMCO factory in 1997, a year or two after I visited it. I crinkled my nose all the way as we boarded a rickshaw. “How do people live with this smell?”, I wondered. By the time it was afternoon, it hardly bothered me anymore. The smell was a part of the town, just like the Sylheti-tinged Axomiya and Bangla in the streets, the bustle of the hand-cart pullers and the ramshackle buses, the tinkling of bicycle and rickshaw bells.

We stayed in the home where my parents lived when I was born, which was very interesting. The landlord still recognized my mother, and there was a lot of laughter, some teary eyes. Old stories came tumbling out later, in the evenings — how my mother would ration money from my father’s meager sub-inspector salary, and how those savings paid off when he had to go visit his family one fine day. How my mother nearly died of tetanus a year before I was born. How some other house in the neighborhood that my parents nearly rented turned out to be haunted, and the newlyweds were rescued from their predicament by this kindly man who took them in, even though he was suspicious of policemen. We met the current tenants of the small, one-bedroom-attached-kitchen place that my parents lived in, the house that had welcomed me from the hospital. I tried to think if I had any memories of the place, an unconscious recognition among the shadowy corners; a chord struck by some angle of the sunlight streaming through the bright windows. I tried to imagine a couple beginning their life together in a place away from their support systems. I now wonder if it was harder for them to move from one end of a state to another than it was for my sister and I to move continents. We have Skype and Whatsapp, they did not have a telephone back then.

We traveled a lot when I was young. It was mostly because my father’s work caused him to be transferred every few years to a remote village, or if we were lucky, a small town. A flood of names of places – Runikhata and Kathaltoli; Hailakandi and Patharkandi; Kokrajhar and Karimganj. They were all based around the lower part of Assam, referred to as the Barak valley. We edged closer to the heartland of Assam when we moved to Tezpur in 1986, and finally, to Guwahati. Most of my mother’s side of the family had moved there by then, including my maternal grandparents. This was when my parents decided that enough was enough, and never mind future transfers, we would stay put in the city, for the sake of everyone’s sanity – most notably our school-work. That was 1988 – I had been rootless for the first 9 years of my life.

You have to understand that rootlessness means different things to different people. Maybe “rootless” is too strong a word to use. For me, at that early stage in my life, it meant that the faces around me, the neighbors, the didis and uncles and kakus, the kids in the neighborhood would all change, all of them would be replaced by an entirely fresh set every few months, and that we all have to be ready to say our good-byes any time, with a fair chance that we would never see them again. I knew that the houses we lived in were not ours; and that how a place was and how friendly it felt was a function of luck and governmental caprice. Some of the names and faces blur into each other now, others have distinct after-images that remain in my brain.

One of the after-effects of growing up in the Barak valley was that my cousins, whom I met every year during summer or winter vacations, were befuddled by the two of us, my sister and I. The Nepali side of the family, who were still in Digboi found it strange that we did not speak their tongue, while the Axomiya cousins in Guwahati found our Bangla-tinged accents hilarious. My sister’s primary language, for the longest time, was Bangla – that was what the little girls who were part-time nannies spoke, as did the neighbors. It took me a while, later in life, to understand and unlearn the Bengali-influenced intonation in my spoken Axomiya.

My earliest tangible memories, though,  are of Hailakandi. I remember that the house we lived in, a government quarter, was quite big. I cannot remember any of the rooms, or what was in the house, or what it looked like. The clearest mental picture I have is that of my father leading me gently, holding my tricycle with one hand and my hand with the other, across a narrow piece of wood that connected the backyard of the house to the main road. I have vague recollections of riding said tricycle – and feeling very happy with myself. My mother tells me that there used to be a neighbor’s son who would come visit me every now and then, cause considerable mayhem among my toys because he was a few months older, and then leave me crying. I do not recollect any of those (no doubt) traumatic episodes.

My most enduring Hailakandi memory remains that of being woken up by my father one morning. I remember that I had a hurried breakfast, and that I was happy, giddily so, because I was going to see my mother after a long time. Did we take a rickshaw that morning? I have no idea. If I did, then I am sure we weren’t alone – the street urchins would run after rickshaws and jump on them from behind, taking joyrides on them. They would put their feet on the rear axle and hold on to the sides, laughing and hollering until they got bored, or the rickshaw puller or the passenger yelled at them, or something bad happened. This is what I saw one day – one of these adventurers caught his foot on the gear-and-chain of the rickshaw, and it bled terribly. There was a lot of howling (the kid) and yelling (everybody else). Obviously, that did not deter future joyride enthusiasts, but did make me want to never attempt this in the future.

But this is the lasting memory from that day – my father pointing at a sleeping baby through glass. “That is your little sister”, he said. Maybe I turned my head to the side to look at her more carefully, thinking she looked just like a doll. “Where did you get her from?”, I asked. “God left her for us under a kosupaat“, my father replied.  For the longest time, I believed that to be true, and every time I saw a kosu patch near the side of the road, I would wonder if there was a baby left under the greenery, waiting to be found.

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Mixtapes, Music

A Very Delayed June Playlist

Here’s another month’s worth of recurring, female-heavy music arranged in a playlist with no discernible order.

Three of them are Indian tracks – the first is the ethereal ‘Sway With Me’ from Dhruv Ghanekar’s 2015 album Voyage, an album I am enjoying quite a bit. It includes an Axomiya track called ‘Baare Baare’, and a collaboration with Ila Arun called ‘Dhima’, both highly recommended. The other two Indian tracks are a trippy number called ‘Manali Trance’ sung by Neha Kakkar, with music by Yo Yo Honey Singh, and a song I can only call slacker-pop, by this duo Tanishk-Vayu, who went on to compose a song for Tanu Weds Manu 2.

Two of my favorite dirt-pop ladies – Inna and Alexandra Stan – collaborate on ‘We Wanna’, and goddamn if this does not make my Romanian friends throw hissy fits, when I proclaim my love for them.

Rhye’s ‘Open’ and Braid’s ‘Miniskirt’ are both songs of beauty and power that give me goosebumps when sitting at work. Kaleo’s ‘All the Pretty Girls’ work on that level, almost, but is more calming.

I have been obsessing about Brigitte’s album ‘Et vous, tu m’aimes’ the past few weeks, and it was quite a struggle to pick one song from that album for this playlist. The album begins with the sassy ‘Battez Vous’, goes into the ‘Coeur de Chewing Gum’, all sensual and naughty and makes my knees go weak at ‘English Song’. This one’s the right kind of everything, I think.

Mansions on the Moon is an LA band that popped up in my life a few weeks ago and last week, I saw them at a free show. This city is great that way.

Hudson Mohawke is a producer who has collaborated with Kanye West and is part of the trap-music band TNGHT. His second full-length album came out last month.

Sia’s new song is amazing, like all her other songs. Tove Lo gives me a boner every time I listen to her. Because if I love her right, we fuck for life, on and on and on.

Blood Orange’s Chamakay makes me wish I hadn’t listened to them in the middle of my Brigitte obsession – it is so hard to switch allegiances. But I will cope, I promise.

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Music

The Ultimate 90s Indian Music Playlist

Listen, the 90s were great for Indian music. A far cry from the end of the previous decade, when the average Hindi song would suck 8-9 minutes of your life, and if you had the  fortitude to stick with it to the end, your brain had either internalized this prolonged sonic assault, or found itself completely repulsed. Film music was kind of just there, playing on weekdays on National TV and All India Radio, heard in hotels and barbershops. Most film soundtracks followed a template [ref]One-minute instrumental introduction. First verse. Chorus. First instrumental interlude. Second verse. Chorus. Second instrumental interlude that sounded exactly like the first. Third verse, exactly like the second. Chorus. First verse again. Chorus again, a little speeded up. Fade-out or abrupt end.[/ref] that had been unchanged for decades, sung, written and composed by folks who had either been around for decades or were too entrenched in the system to go beyond the commercial bottom-line. Yes, there were the annual musical blockbusters that shattered records and launched careers. But in general, the consensus was that the industry was broken, that the age of giants had gone with the passing of Messrs Rafi and Kumar. All that remained were pale echoes of their vocal legacy, zombie nightingales, and the crazy disco hedonism brought about by Bappi Lahiri and Kalyanji/Anandji, in the First Age of synthesizers.

In many ways, this decade embodied a period of dramatic change, a time when both the form and the market surrounding it somehow managed to brush off the grime and creakiness of the previous years. By the end of those ten years, those 8-9 minutes had shrunk to a more manageable 4-6 minutes, and the film song, instead of being an excuse for a restroom break in the middle of the proceedings, became one of the reasons you would go watch a movie in the theater. If there was a common theme to all that transpired in the industry in that timespan, it was that Indian film music wanted to – and did – break out of its provincial roots and limited audience. The music scene brashly tried on everything, unsure of what worked on its awkward frame, embarrassing itself in the bargain.  Yes, some of those experiments fail, but when they work, you’ll notice an unmistakable swagger and strut. That made those ten years the gangling teenage years of Indian music—awkward, experimental, hormonal, and mercurial. The best of times, the worst of times; when grand orchestras, all shriek and bombast, yielded to a more refined use of electric guitar solos, piano and synth flourishes; when the gentle, pabulum rhythm of dholkis and bongos gave way to sequenced drum machines and crunchy 4/4 bass thumps; when the rigid distinction between sur and besur began to blur. Significantly, musical instruments no longer remained unobtrusive little minions cowering in the background as mere “accompaniments;” they gamboled around the song’s vocals on equal terms. By 1999, a song was not just voice and lyrics and tune; it grew to become a complete soundscape.

It was a decade when a fresh generation of musicians and composers, armed with a new generation of recording technologies and techniques, began to extricate the industry out of the talent vacuum that had plagued it for years. Singers like Udit Narayan and Kumar Sanu began the decade with a well-established resume of their own while Anuradha Paudwal, Kavita K, and Alka Yagnik chipped away at the Mangeshkar sisters’ hegemony. By the middle of the decade, there were quite a few brash new kids on the block. The likes of Shaan and Sagarika and Sonu Nigam began their careers from behind the shadows of stalwarts, slyly moving out into the sun when their voices gained popularity; others – like  Sunidhi Chauhan, Ila Arun, Hariharan and Shankar Mahadevan – had voices with distinct personalities unfettered by past expectations, and found non-judgmental, appreciative audiences.[ref]I cheered for Sunidhi that Tuesday night she took the crown on Meri Aawaz Suno, as Lata Mangeshkar and Annu Kapoor looked on. None of us had any idea what was coming, obviously. I remember being so happy about how this young girl my little sister’s age sounded.[/ref]Semi-retired singers written off as irrelevant and over-the-hill found themselves a new generation of fans; classical and folk musicians, long marginalized by the mainstream machine and who had in turn turned their noses up at their bland offerings were embraced back into the fold. This also meant that the kind of vocal range that had thus far passed for mainstream slowly began to accommodate other permutations. Convention demanded a booming male baritone and a trilling female singer on the upper soprano range; by the end of the decade, an earthy contralto female voice taking the lower registers while the male voice soared to the heavens not only found critical acceptance, but also burnt up the charts.

Tunes of the past came back repackaged , sung by voices both familiar and unheard. On an aside, even song-titles of the past insinuated themselves once more into the industry – by becoming names of new, hip movies. Along with our baggy Levis and the wonders of Cable TV came Indi-pop, at first a hesitant, self-aware blend of global sounds and visuals which then metamorphosed into something in its own right. With multiple TV channels also came awareness – it became apparent how Southall bhangragga beats and the lush soundscapes of Vangelis and Peter Gabriel or – closer still – the devotional Sufi qawwalis of Pakistan were adapted, mangled and blended into sounds palatable to Indian ears. You faced bitter disappointment when you realized that your favorite tune on TV from last week was actually a Top 40 Hit on another continent six months ago, or that five different movies had versions of the same chart-busting song, each by a different composer. Indian film music was still part-jugaad in this tumultuous decade, until it wasn’t. [ref]As Jaaved Jaffrey put it succinctly in a memorable song, “chor-us”.[/ref]

The words, good Lord. We hummed the many names of love, in Urdu and Hindi and brajbhasha and khari boli and English, and giggled at inventive acronyms for mundane words[ref]ILU. 1-4-3. LML Baba[/ref]. The biggest name in the business thought nothing of lip-synching about kisses promised on a Friday, and neither did we. Lyricists, egged on by changing times and a generation that both watched and became Bold and Beautiful, unleashed a torrent of rudeness from their pens. It became okay to speak of creaking beds on wintry nights, of opening up the windows of love hidden behind blouses with brutal, raunchy directness – even the word “sexy” was no longer off-limits, shock and awe! More fodder for raging hormones when everyday words became sexual metaphors – cricket, chilli peppers, the cooing of pigeons, chicken fry .What was known in past decades as the cabaret song, a word that hints at seduction with a hint of elegance, became the brusque, mass-market term ‘item number’. And again, the cross-pollination of North and South, where the surreal imagery of a jazz music party in Jurassic Park[ref]’Muqabla’, Humse Hai Muqabla, PK Mishra[/ref] got just as much airplay as onomatopoeia for the sound of ocean waves. [ref]’Chhai Chhappa Chhai’, Hu Tu Tu, Gulzar[/ref]; where eyes were compared to strawberries around the same time as the seven shades of classical love was eulogized in words that we struggled to understand and appreciate. Also proliferating in this decade was the lyrical hook that became both meme and ear-worm. Rukmini and Urvasi, Humma and Ui Amma, Ruk Ruk and Hai Hukku, Chappa Chappa and Rama Rama – two-word phrases that dropped every other week and became unique identifiers for a generation.

It became acceptable for an actor to occasionally step in to sing his own lines, an act deemed sacrilegious until this decade.[ref]Few stars could get away with it. Amitabh sang his own songs in Laawaris and Mr Natwarlal, but then, his voice could put naysayers in their place. [/ref] And why not? Onscreen, dance masters of yesteryear had morphed into choreographers; in turn, actors who had previously shied away from shaking a leg or two on-screen (either out of incompetence or self-imposed gravitas) now found themselves dragged into exotic locales and bustling cities, into nightclubs and on UNESCO world heritage sites. They did not dance alone, because the perfect way to distract audiences from the shortcomings of a not-so-nimble protagonist is to ensure spectacle – through legions of synchronous dancers. [ref]A principle also employed by Michael Bay and his ilk to disguise their clarity of visual cohesion.[/ref] I am not saying that this began in the 90s, bear with me; it is just that suddenly the background dancer rose into greater prominence even as there were no longer the clear demarcation between dance heroes and fighting heroes and the serious thespians. What changed also, consequently, was the role of the chorus in the Indian song. Once a clunky construction of warbly voices, part of the vocal accompaniment, the choral section gained more personality, bolstering songs with a wall of sound and complex harmonics.[ref]A major chunk of credit should go to vocal arrangers who found their way into the industry, Clinton Cerejo and Hitesh Sonik being the names that come to mind.[/ref]

But above all it was a decade where, for the first time ever, the musical differences between North and South dissipated. The 90s was truly the decade of the pan-Indian sound, the overture of which began in 1992, when a Certain Southern Composer began to quietly change the fabric of reality as we knew it; patiently inventing the future, laying the groundwork for a brave new world. It took a while – a whole generation actually – before his work ethic made sense to the industry at large, the idea that originality, attention to detail and a distinct style paid far more dividends than slapdash or second-hand tunes pasted together in haste. Keep up, the market said, or be sidelined.[ref]Even Nadeem-Shravan, the last bastion of the 80s sound caught up, with Pardes, in 1997 – I suspect to this day that it was more Ghai’s tinkering with Rahman during the making of the announced-but-never-made Shikhar that led to such a unique sound in that movie, but I may be wrong.[/ref] Bear in mind that this was a two-way flow – Carnatic rhythms came to Bombay even as bhangra was heard on the streets of Trivandrum.[ref]Daler Mehndi’s Bolo Tara Rara sold an insane number of copies in Kerala the year it was released. [/ref]

It is easy to lay all credit entirely to AR Rahman, but that is a disservice to the rest of the industry, as charting the careers of Anu Malik, Nadeem-Shravan, Anand-Milind, Jatin-Lalit, Viju Shah, Rajesh Roshan and even the less-remembered Sens, Dilip and Sameer –  show the clear graph of this wind of change blowing through Indian film music. Their musical catalog went places, both pedestrian and sublime. Styles evolved, bandwagons were pursued and jumped on with a lack of restraint or cohesion; and before we knew it, it was 2000 zamaana,[ref]Mela. Terrible movie that owes a debt to Sholay. Sorry, couldn’t resist.[/ref] when we would go on to Broadway Musicals, Academy Award nominations, and non-ironic references in Hollywood soundtracks[ref]’Chamma Chamma’ was the prom queen, used gleefully in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. See what happens when you are original, Mr Malik? [/ref].

This post is accompanied by a playlist I created on Spotify, a way of providing hard data backing my claims. It is pretty damn comprehensive, though there are gaping holes in its catalog. Most of the T-Series catalog does not exist on the platform. There is no Aashiqui (which to me is the first great album of the decade), [ref]The Last Great Album? Logic says Taal and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, but I am tempted to claim that Pyaar Mein Kabhi Kabhi set up the next decade, and so did one song from Shool. [/ref]Dil, Beta, Dil to Pagal Hai or Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. I am specially miffed by the absence of Ziddi, Major Saab, Shool (how can you have the 90s without talk of looting UP and Bihar?), Rakshak and Shastra (whither Paro?). No Papa Kehte Hai, Sardari Begum or Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin, which are admittedly obscure but are undeniable stars of the decade’s musical firmament. It is best listened to on shuffle mode. Please, please do not try to work when you are listening to these – they deserve your attention, they demand it, and chances are high that, if you are a child of the 90s, the opening bars of a song will make you laugh in delight or shake your head bemusedly at the follies of youth. [ref]I also recommend a game of identify-the-song based on the first few bars. [/ref] Nostalgia looms large. That said, it is perfectly okay to be annoyed within a few seconds and skip to the next song; there is no way every song will appeal to any single person. I mean, this is a list that contains Altaf Raja; it has Anu Malik singing for Baba Sehgal and cat-calling at Alisha Chinoy; it has Poornima at her shrillest and Aditya Narayan at an age where his voice could make your privates shrivel. Seriously, what were we all thinking?

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