“Music is a pretty common source of entertainment for people. However, the extent to which it influences us, hampering our abilities of self-thought and the way we look at the world, largely depends on our decisions and the aptitude of one’s own self-control.” Says Mr.X, an emerging new face of the Haryanvi Film Industry. Undoubtedly, there are no two ways about the popularity of music amongst Indians; from the oldest member to the youngest toddler, whether rural or urban, music has left not even a single heart untouched. From being a ceremonial art of the older days to being the most popular means of enjoyment for today’s people, music has its own unique meaning in every individual's life. So what is served to us as music requires a great deal of attention.
According to a news article published in the Indian Express on the Fifth of February 2020, famous Punjabi singer Afsana Khan landed into another controversy, after Shubhdeep Singh Sidhu, commonly known as Sidhu Moose Wala, and Mankirt Aulakh were booked by the Punjab police on charges of promoting violence and gun culture in a song that the duo had uploaded. Afsana, an alumnus of the government senior secondary school at Badal village of Muktsar district, had visited her alma mater on Saturday and interacted with the students of the school. She had uploaded a video clip of her singing her song “Jat Dhaka Karda” in the school premises. Alleging the lyrics of the song to be unfit for a school campus, a Chandigarh resident Pandit Dhanesar Rao filed a complaint with Muktsar police demanding action against the singer and the school authorities. Similar kinds of reports have been filed against several other singers of the industry of not just Punjab but also states like Haryana, provoking widespread public protests and criticism.
When asked regarding the same, Mr. X very openly threw light on the glamorous ugly face of the Indian music industry. How stars we delineate as our ‘role models’ have a completely different side, which is often obscured. “Controversies are rather pre-planned initiatives by the so-called “famous classes” to prevent new people from rising above them. More than a matter of entertainment or to be more precise, more than the fact of what is right and not right for the audience, it is rather an affair of the ostentatiousness of the people.” Explains the interviewee.
“It is very difficult for people belonging to some specific sections of the society, or for people who do not have an industrial background, to actually withstand and maintain their place in the industry today. If we look at Amit Saini, the Haryanvi personage, or those mentioned above, one thing that all of them have in common is their ‘inessential’ caste background. It is a vicious cycle of unending stereotypes and the power-ridden mindset of people. How it is important for some people to pull down the others, in order to be successful or attain their peace of mind.” He added.
But this still did not answer the real question. Why is such music that promotes aggression, violence, and hooliganism being produced at all? And what impact does it have on its listeners? “An artist only creates what he or she is asked to. Similarly, even we serve the public with what is in demand and with what is appreciated by the listeners. It is not the very first time that gun culture or belligerence is being portrayed in music or movies. It has been going on for years. The most important reason for any artist to survive in any field is public support. And the public has been rather responsive towards such work. Providing the public with what it does not want to see, is like cutting off the nose to spite the face.”
He further explained. “The real crux of the matter is public opinion. Or to be more direct, the real problem lies in our tastes and preferences. We are only shown what we choose to see. Hence, changing our own perspectives is the need of the hour. “
The fact that music with heavy content is being produced for years now is worth noting here. As then sudden repression against it, and that too, targeting certain people, reveals another cruel side of the music industry. More importantly, we must remember that what we see as events are the aftermaths of prolonged processes that are kept concealed.
A 2003 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, April 2003, Vol. 84, No. 5, pages. 960-971, on violent lyrics, gives us conclusions based on five experiments, each conducted on students from a large Midwestern university. Each study was conducted on a number of students ranging from 60 to 160 constituting approximately an equal number of males and females.
In each experiment, young people listened to the lyrics of a song, then completed a scale aimed at measuring whether they were feeling hostile or having aggressive thoughts. Some songs had violent lyrics and some did not; some songs were humorous and others were not.
Hostile feelings and antagonistic thoughts were measured in several ways, such as the students’ greater tendency to turn incomplete words into hostile or violent words (changing “h_t” to hit rather than hat), and the authors’ State Hostility Scale, which consists of 35 sentences describing current feelings, either hostile or friendly.
Students who listened to the violent songs expressed more hostility immediately afterwards. However, in some cases, if they had another task between the time they listened to the songs and filled out the questionnaires, they did not seem more hostile in their responses although they continued to have aggressive thoughts. Also, The students who listened to a violent humorous song were not as influenced as those who listened to a violent song that was not humorous. From this, we can conclude that humour partially canceled out the effect of violence on state hostility, but did not completely cancel out violence for aggressive cognitions.
Using a meta-analysis on the five experiments, researchers infer that violent lyrics increased the students’ feelings of hostility and likelihood of interpreting ambiguous cues as hostile, and this was true (although less influential) even if the violent lyrics were in a humorous song.
The strength of the studies is that they used songs with similar styles and the same artists so that the only difference was whether lyrics were violent or not.
Overall, the findings from the five experiments were consistent with each other, suggesting that listening to even one violent song can have a short-term impact on a college student. But the fact that students did not show increased hostility when they were given another task between listening to the song and participating in the hostility survey or word tasks indicates that the impact of these songs on hostile feelings may be short-lived. However, their impact on aggressive thoughts may be long-lasting.
Since other youths were not studied, it is impossible to know if younger or older students, or less educated youth, would be affected in the same way. Also, this study does not assess the impact of repeated exposure to the same violent lyrics. Although it seems logical that if the song had an impact after listening just once, the impact would be much more considerable if the student heard it repeatedly.
Indeed finding flaws is easy but what is difficult is to rectify them. No doubt that the repercussions of unhealthy music cannot be ignored, but what must also be kept in mind is the web that has been formed. Nothing can exist in this world, until and unless we allow it to exist, until and unless we promote it. And nor can any artist work against the will of the people. Even if people try to, they are naturally suppressed. A prominent example of this is the Diler Kharakia controversy with one of the TikTok users. Recently, an Indian TikTok user had alleged Diler for ruining old Haryanvi folk music in his remakes. To which the star responded with brutal repression. Although he had to publicly apologize for his actions, the man was later seen being maltreated. This indicates the role that money and power plays in all our lives in today’s day and age. But this does not at all mean that it has come to an end. Only if we don’t choose the path of passive resistance.
Image courtesy:
- Arre
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