#scurf105 on superficially gorgeous songs

on the emptiness of Gehraaiyaaaaaaan and the Kuhad brigade of nonballads, the beauty of cold/mess and emraan hashmi love poems

With Gehraiyaan releasing in a few days, the promotions are reaching a crescendo. The build up is meaty, steamy and mama-mia is it spicey (all eyes on you Siddhant)! We all know how the unraveling will unfold, he an evasive scoundrel, she an overinvested emotional careergal, but our eyes are peeled for the *how* of it. Adding more drama to this is the background score and title track of the movie. In the trailer the song comes across as a floaty, roomy, spacey version of so many others we have now sort of grown used to. The female voice is untethered and not in a boom-ey way, never exerting its presence, but in a manner that’s its exact opposite, merely existing on the fringes.

This one time in Goa, after hours of a daytime nap, my then boyfriend and I were out on the road biking our way from one bar to another. Drunk, high, and feeling gypsy light, as our biked knifed through an extremely crowded, noisy cul-de-sac, I remember how my bladder was swell. Wanting to pee, we stopped by along a dark stretch of the backroad, that surprisingly no one seemed to be using. That road side pee was one of the most pleasurable pees in my very long list of roadside pees. That rush was sublime, soothing in its exertion. The urine gushing, felt pure, golden even, and smelled of the hard beer I’d drank that morning after breakfast. It felt like a needed release. Nothing special, nothing extraordinary, in fact imbued with an infra-ordinary everydayness to it.

That long night — and a few other fistfuls of time like it, all of them moments of chance existential intimacy (on the roadside, kerb-side, behind a car, in a boyfriend’s mom’s bathroom at 3am) with the self — fills the back of my mind as proof of something I can’t put a finger to/on. And I think about it as I close my eyes and listen to the Gehraiyaaan track laid the trailer. It reminds me of nothing meaningful, deep or of lasting consequence, just a little something that might have otherwise slipped off my memory tracks completely. The feeling of urine rush out of a full, bursting bladder.

The song joins the long line other such Internet-y song, sung by the likes of Prateek Kuhad and Jasleen Royal. These are mostly rarely more than just a really hummable tune, and a couple of catchy words here and there. They are untied from the earthy, rustic feelings of what love, friendship or any relationship will ever be like. Unmoored. More miasma than meat. Gaseous in their substance, these are detached songs for a detached batch of us who seem to be swaying to them. All vibe, and mood, no content. Almost as if they are all playing with a forgotten tongue that used to be the language of love. And it drives me absolutely batty.

Delving into the pithy, cerebral, and sometimes limiting mind-ness of feelings, these songs come across as glib, incomplete, unsure. They pay little or no respect to the heart, and go on scratching at the surface of whatever feeling they want the listeners to feel. Scratching, scratching and scratching, then quitting just before the surface gives in and breaks open, leaving the song a mere shell of itself. They stay away from anything ugly, deeply felt, in that refusing to stir any emotions. Gas of consciousness, may be. And with the passage of time, they are becoming more flotsam, slushpile.

In 2020 I thought that Kuhad quarantine nonballad Kasoor was the extreme end of these non-feeling, but extremely wordy bulbous songs. But I was wrong. These songs, wilfully packaged as songs of consciousness continued to deplete in quality. Mere teases they became more unclear, uncertain and anxious with each passing locked in week. More mood than moment.

Take, for instance, the Gehraaiyaan song. The characters wear T-shirts and worn denim, shorts, razor backs, the works. They give off a day-three-of-a-camping-trip vibe, looking chic, cool, distant, playing folkish indie rock band members. The song, thanks to the visual plays at being the kind of a sound that’s something you’d chance upon while you had no cell service. The plaintive, nervy female voice echoes in the background as the word “gehraaiyaan” repeats itself thrice. The song proposes to unspool a messier, more chaotic version of love, feelings and friendship. But the lyrics expose it and it turns out to be a mere parable of how we talk, laugh and interact with another in the present time. At a remove, disconnected, never fully in a moment, forever distracted, jumbling between three devices and four internal voices at the same time, rambling at any cost, always incoherent, hardly making sense.

The songs seems to be anchored in the warm, wiry texture of the four-ple (what’s throuple but for four?). The intertwining guitars and vocal cords sound like a summer memory, like a played down version of an intense and haphazard time that has now come to be characteristic. At the surface level, the song is beautiful, trust me, I’ve spent mornings working out to Kuhad’s tiny croonings, evenings playing Jasleen Royal’s plaintive, mousey numbers while drinking beer. It’s what they propose to tackle and almost get away with is where I find the trouble.

The last song, that went headlong and dived deep into the soul and pierced some red, real, raw emotions was cold/mess by Kuhad. The video was almost as perfect as the song. It had the feel of a wall where others could see their own emotions scribbled on top of older ones, for over decades. People are imperfect, relationships are messy. Lemon tarts are beautiful. Choreographing chaos. The song had it all. The coldness of Jim Sarbh’s lisp, and the rustic fullness of Zoya Hussain’s charms. Add to that Kuhad’s very detached, removed, not fully invested, casual, self-deprecatory poetry to love’s messiness. His lyrics hyper-specific and biographical, dense with pain and conflict. It was sublime. But that was the pinnacle. The zenith. That way Kuhad’s music reminded me of certain specific memories, shared with someone I once held close, in which maybe nothing happened but that nonetheless feel like proof of life. If you were alone and going through something, there was always a good chance that cold/mess would make you cry. When it came on ted lasso on that very pregnant, opportune moment, we all certainly did break down. The sun set with that song, just like the sun of Netflix anthologies set with Lust Stories.

Then, we turned a corner.

Suddenly everyone was making music, singing songs that were about nothing, but pretended to reach the depth of the Arabian Sea. The earlier songs had a peculiar way of emptying out for the listener, these were loopey tunes, singsong, fastracked, reverb versions. The earlier ones functioned as fluctuating, vacant frames for human emotions, these were vacant in their form and content. The before songs had a brilliance of their own, that came not from obvious pyrotechnics or any grand statements. cold/mess for example, contained within a resolute sense of the everyday, moments that feel both definitive and commonplace, and so vanishing that I’d never think to speak of them out loud. But with the likes of Gehraaiyaan we lost it all.

This coincided with the fact that we all were all the time online. Never really bothering with learning any lyrics, by-hearting the crests and troughs of rhythms. Suddenly it didn’t matter what the songs were about. They could be empty, vacuous, not even full of themselves, not take us anywhere, just make us jive, shimmy and rub our drunk bodies against the ones of perfect strangers in our perfect little humid houseparties. Then came the pandemic and lo and behold we are here, in the unending era of *vibesss*!

You could say, now more than ever before, we need those kind of songs. The perfect notion of love is overrated. The empty nothings that make you feel somber, even if only for 1.5 minutes. There is nothing "perfect" in relationships, friendships anyway. In reality all relationships are hard to handle and these songs are a way to get out of our own heads.

To that I will raise you — this Gehraaiyaan!!!

A song that is all gas, pardon my French. All vibe and no feelings, even lacking the basic absurdities of expression and continuance. The lyrics of these songs are a tease, only gesturing and gesticulating at being about emotions being stripped to their extreme vulnerabilities. They are claypots, pretending to be earthen ones. They are vain, lack rustic qualities and behave in a totally uprooted fashion of their own making. And so they create a sense of claustrophobia. A sense of forced choreography between different various aspects of the art that songwriting is. They pretend to capture a thirsty, authentic, vital drama of your life, but end up only as the wettest version of our collective quarantine dreams. All aesthetic and no content.

I wish in the best way that we cheered for and waited with bated breaths for songs that were easily more hot and bothered. I wish we had more deeply felt story ballads about the real, pesky, little dramas unfolding all around us all the time, even during the third year of a pandemic. Instead we get these mumbly, jumbled songs that float in and out of our consciousness. They seem to be all poised for a breakout, but do they ever overstay their welcome and slip from our minds to the cervices our hearts?

The misty mosaics of prose that were once the territory of Emraan Hashmi love songs had so much more ethos, feelings punctuated into the superficial smooches. Now we have the original, raw make out sesh, the lower lip biting, tongue puling long smooch, but the emotions are vapid. The visuals are treated ever so delicately, with great care, allowing for lots of small, quiet moments where our actors can flaunt that extra set of abs (sorry too 90s) or that perfectly chiseled torso (yuck, I know!), but there’s hardly any sense of maturity, evolution, arc, character development through the song. People change, mature, break up, have sex, and make up over these songs and their piddly videos, but where is the reality of emotions and what are we exactly hiding behind?

The imperfectness of cold/mess and some other songs like it, the youthful mistakes it aimed to show so poetically, is part of what made those songs so real and endearing. If you scroll down the video, over to the comments you will see entire short novellas spilling out. People are full of emotions, love, care and you give them one brief six minute video that captures even the slightest bit of that, and they will grab at it with both their arms.

Tomorrow the Gehraaiyaan full track is to drop. It would have felt only fitting, even soothing, in this gelid Delhi to have had a soundtrack slice you from within, awaken old emotions, soothe existing burns and leave your passions rekindled like glowing embers against a charcoal grey dawn sky. I hope somebody reads this in the passenger seat of a hot car and remembers how to write real songs till then we will gyrate to these nonballads, and sheepishly masturbate inside our musky quilts.