Opinion Groovy kind of tune

For an audience long fed with Bollywood staples,it is a welcome variation. The innovative beats are driving music lovers wild and sending energy levels soaring on the dance floor. It is a happy,vigorous and big sound,said homemaker Sneha Rao who uses the genre to pep up her gym routine.

The craze permeated into the mainstream in a major way after “Kolaveri Di”,the lazy number crooned by Tamil movie star Dhanush,invented in Chennai that went on to became a viral hit worldwide. That whipped up a frenzy like no other and boosted requests for a host of other numbers.

Chartbusters like “Jinke Marina” and “Pyarge Aagbittaite” in Kannada,“Nakku Mukka” and “Appadi Podu” in Tamil and “Ringa Ringa” and “Aa Ante Amalapuram” in Telugu are the top choices.

The songs are trendy and exhilarating said Sneha Devaraj,a communications consultant and a party organiser in Bangalore. The music is innovative and gets people grooving on the dance floor,she said.

Hardly anybody understands all the lyrics of these songs but that ceases to matter once the music gets going,said her colleague Sandhya Nair. It is a refreshing change from the routine Bollywood music,she said.

Meanwhile Bollywood,which has imported heroines and recently movie plots from southern movies,is spinning off of this trend too. Bollywood music directors are cottoning on to the genre,as hits like “Ringa Ringa’s take-off “Dhinka Chika” adapted into the Salman Khan film Ready,and playing with similar beats,show.

In the movie The Dirty Picture,Vidya Balan gyrates to the heady score of the Tamil song “Nakku Mukka”. In the Sonu Sood-Naseeruddin Shah starrer Maximum,the Telugu number “Aa Ante Amalapuram” shows up in a Hindi avatar. Rowdy Rathore’s “Chin Ta Ta Chitta Chitta” is a Telugu lift and another crossover hit.

For those in the know,the exuberant dance floor moves are distinctly south Indian and veer towards a gritty,folk-ish style,very unlike the moves characteristic of Bollywood. In southern films,dancers in glittery costumes perform high-spirited gyrations and shimmies in exaggerated song sets or in the rough-and-tumble of village settings.

Some of the songs borrow heavily from a folk genre called koothu that has its origins in the Tamil Nadu countryside. The genre heavily emphasises percussion and,unlike classic Carnatic music,is informal and without a definite structure. The beats are repetitive and heady,and traditional koothu music is played at funeral processions,temple celebrations and weddings.

DJ Naveen of Chennai,who specialises in the newly popular category,says he has played high-volume koothu music at parties not just in Bangalore,but at Indian shindigs in Beijing and Bangkok as well. The songs are as much a hit with those in their 20s as older folk,he said.

Dancer-choreographer Lourd Vijay,who runs a chain of dance studios in Bangalore,has witnessed the popularity of the music genre in clubs in Paris and London. He forecast that the style would soon hit the dance class circuit. The basic style is very accessible but the Western-influenced south Indian dancing style could take a bit of learning,he said.

“First people went crazy over Bollywood,then bhangra and now it is south Indian film music,” he said. With DJs mixing south Indian movie tunes innovatively,it will not be long before the genre becomes a mass trend across the country,said Vijay.