To Soothe A Savage Beast

Elvis, Dolly Parton, Sixpence None The Richer. What three things do they have in common? They’re American, I know them from MTV and they all have gospel albums.

Unthinkable, the second and third bits, in the Mizoram music scene. There are Gospel Songs and Love Songs. Gospel Singers and Worldly Singers. Never the twain shall meet.

Used to be, I’d hoped. I’d begun hearing talks of genres and music tastes, no longer a simple division between lyrical content. But I hear people who are Born Again are now changing their tune once more. ‘I will only sing gospel now because I am made new’. Ah well. The times. The more they change, the more things remain exactly the same.

I am no musical maestro. What little I know of music is only enough to tell the difference between rap and country. Mostly. But in the past year, I have been on the road a lot. I have listened to collections of Mizo Music on Spotify in these trips and have made some observations I’d like to share. Do feel free to comment. But also be kind. Yours Truly does not take criticisms well, constructive or not.

What I noticed was that in the 00s when I was growing up, every Mizo music was either Gospel or Love. And the love song singers were considered worldly. No self-respecting Born Again Christian would sing love songs on TV or on stage. Genre did not matter. Lyrical content was it. Somehow it felt like a very peculiar but unnamed and specific sort of sin to listen to Mizo love songs. Like you were feeling things you should not be feeling.

So I started listening to English songs. MTV introduced me to all sorts of music. Henceforth there were gospel songs, love songs, English songs and Hindi songs. MTV also introduced me to the idea of genres. Which was how I discovered that I liked country music very much but was also a big fan of pop music. At the time, I recognized rock, R&B and rap but was not as big a fan. This was my realization that things were not just black and white. Growth!

It is strange but I think it’s the foreign-ness of it all but we could sing Spice Girls’ Two Become One and all the coital references in ballads. In English. Meanwhile in Mizo, even singing about missing a person felt like an anathema that would take you on a one-way path to hell. Perhaps it is the same reason why it is so easy to curse in English with all the worst words and genitalia yet in Mizo, the worst most people dare call anyone is a monkey-face; anyone who says the actual words for genitalia in Mizo is way too vulgar for polite society. Too intimate, you know.

At any rate, it remains that the Spotify collection was diverse and I adored it. It introduced me to all sorts of Mizo music. I realized that if you took out the lyrical content of it all, Mizo music came in all sorts of genre too. I might be wildly mistaken but I think we can categorise 90s Mizo “love songs” as mostly classic rock and country driven. Think of the era of Daduhi, Rebecca Saimawii, Albatross, and Dreamhunter… rock, right? I think there was a very strong western country and rock influences in both gospel and love songs in that era. Something about Shillong too there, I am sure.

I have to admit, the 90s had a really bad phase of experimenting with 90s American pop music. It made for really cringe novelty songs but I think it defined an era too, so I won’t name names but you know what I mean. Very definitely you know what I mean. We are all defined by the wider global entertainment world that envelops the current cultural era we grow up in. It is no wonder that 80s folks will always think less of today’s music. The love affair between Mizo language and classic rock was – mmhm – chef’s kiss!

However, the recent pop music scene in Mizo music with say, the twang of Gorkhali influence in H.O.M., or the Burmese influence in say Saiwannah, Mary Dawngi, Benjamin Sum etc. are extremely fascinating and I believe they have made Mizo music that much richer. The strange ways Triau Trackx has redefined Mizo lyrics has been interesting because in Mizo, prose and poetry have their own grammar. Triau Trackx has somehow defied those rules and reshaped Mizo lyrics forever. All the younger folks have come to bend Mizo prose into poetry and somehow found a way to make even rhyming schemes work. I am always delighted to listen to people like Youngfella, Mista Blow, Guru Gee, Kimkima, K Hminga etc. and listen to how they (in Avatar terms) word-bend.

What was simply “love songs” in the 80s, 90s and 00s have today become the art of singers, songwriters, rappers, crooners, cover artists, indie music… each with their own lovely places in the sun. Cool, isn’t it?

I don’t know music much so I appreciate the ones that create these various art pieces that speaks for the heart when us random folk can’t often express our own feelings and emotions. In the Japanese Studio Ghibli film Whispers of the Heart, they said that sometimes when an artist pours so much of their soul into their art, the resulting art itself gains some form of soul and sentience. I think that’s gorgeous. It’s also a bit like how Taylor Swift said of her music in her The Eras Tour that these songs are songs she’d written on some things she’d felt at certain moments of her life, but now they were out and no longer hers, that they belonged now to the people who claimed them because they felt what she’d written. Just lovely what can become when artists are allowed to grow. They tend to make the world a better place. Music has charms to soothe a savage beast, as they say.

I still do wish people would stop singing random gospel tracks in government functions. When in Rome... all that jazz. Another topic for another day.