Space For Rent
Thursday, May 5, 2016, Baishakh 22, 1423 BS, Rajab 27, 1437 Hijri


Some thoughts on our young musicians
Nazmus Saquib
Published :Thursday, 5 May, 2016,  Time : 12:00 AM  View Count : 109
Our music industry is in disarray. Piracy has already crippled the industry and online based paid content subscriptions are yet to gain popularity. Therefore the singers and composers are nowadays depending much on stage and tv show performance in order to survive in the changing landscape. There was a time when audiences could connect well with the singers due to their melodious voice and thoughtful lyrics. Those have been mostly replaced these days by auto-tuners and other voice enhancement tolls. The lyrics have mostly been inspired by the contemporary songs of our neighboring country. The allegations are rife that even tune and music are also copied. Some singers say they get inspired, but many believe those are mostly copied in the name of inspiration. Recently a young and popular singer (Initials of his name is IM) released a music video on youtube. Later it was found out that most of the scenes in the music video were frame to frame copied from a Russian music video. The singer later argued it was an inspiration and he even went on to say that the video was an inspiration, but the song was an original creation. However later it was found out that even the song was heavily inspired by a Pakistani pop song.
Saif Sohan, a keyboardist while talking with this writer said, "Such so called young singers are far away from originality. They are easily getting media coverage which they do not deserve. If I ask them to perform in front of live audience without the help of technology, they will fumble. They can't even play a complete tune in a live setting. They have their recording studio, they do thousands of re-takes, they copy idea from others and still they become so called 'artist', thanks to our journalists who are making their career through wrongful coverage."
It is also alleged that some young singers are running paid promotions on facebook in order to get more likes on the popular social media platform. There is nothing wrong about that because in Europe and America, such trend exists. However in our country, those who have real singing talent but lack financial support, lag behind due to this unfair practice by some.
Amid such a disappointing scenario, the lack of respect for the seniors by some young singers is rampant. When a singer is accused of breaking the age old Bengali concept of marriage, when someone is accused of fighting on board a flight, et al, what kind of message do they transmit? Recently yours truly was heavily criticized by a young musician, named Ayon Chaklader on social media platform. This writer's only fault was pointing out the copied music by one of his colleagues. In retaliation, Chaklader even questioned about the journalistic skills of this writer. However he totally forgot the fact that I was the writer who first published his interview at a national English daily about five years ago when hardly anybody knew about him.
Yours truly was blessed by many renowned singers of Bangladesh and the Indian sub continent. To name a few: Azam Khan, Ferdous Wahid, Kumar Biswajit, Asha Bhosle, Bappi Lahiri, Atif Aslam, Sonu Nigaam were kind enough to give extensive interview to me. Whenever I encountered such renowned personalities, who have mesmerized millions through their magical crooning, I came back enlightened myself and it was always a pleasure to witness humanity and perseverance shown by them despite their busy schedule. Whereas, in our country, these days some young singers have reached nowhere to success, yet they are full of arrogance and self propaganda using social media platforms. I'm not saying that I am hopeless about the singing talent of our young generation on the whole. There are still many young and talented singers in this country who are extremely gifted and at the same time full of humanity and originality. I just wish all other young guns imitate from them and be like them. Because tomorrow is waiting for them.
Nazmus Saquib is a freelance journalist. He is the author of the celebrity based first English language interview book 'Selected Interviews.' He lives in Florida, USA









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