All creativity is a remix, all art is a cover song

When originality becomes an obsession, we miss out on good art. And worse, we get stuck in our own creative life.

One afternoon in 2016, I was crunching numbers on an excel sheet. Tamil songs gave me company in the background. Slyly, YouTube auto-played the cover of Rasaali, my then-favourite A. R. Rahman song. I enjoyed it even more. My excel sheet filled up fast. I was in a flow state.

I switched tabs. How lovely were these cover artists! They seemed like genuine Rahman fans and devoted practitioners of music. I could not believe it. How can I love a cover more than the original? Is that even allowed?

Rasaali Cover Song

I reminded myself that I had loved covers of Rahman songs before, for example, Jiya Jale - by Berklee Indian Music Ensemble. The ensemble celebrates Rahman like he’s a festival. They pour all their playful creativity into their love for this artist.

But some covers backfire. The song Pasoori, a global sensation, was successfully ruined by one Hindi movie. There was an angry consensus in the comments section: LEAVE THE ORIGINAL ALONE.

Hindi movies aren’t listening. Their Jhumkas don’t stop falling. Commerce over art. Guaranteed success over risk. They are good at this. Annoy, appropriate and add clutter to good old songs.

I didn’t always care about originality. If you were a teen when I was a teen, you would remember the ‘Remix’ era. Old Hindi songs were amped up into their vibrating, peppy, scandalous versions. The television was ablaze with the thongs in Kaanta Laga and the girls who danced on the bar to Mere naseeb mein tu hai ke nahin.

Oh man, how upset the elders got! Their favourite songs were being ruined by DJ Aqueel and Bombay Vikings. The more furious the adults were, the more we enjoyed it. We didn’t love the songs for too long. But it introduced me to legendary songs like Chadhti jawani and Keh du tumhein that were otherwise too old for me to discover.

Mashup of Mohammad Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar’s Chadhti Jawani and Asereje by Las Ketchup

This is what covers and remixes do best.

They give you a bridge to songs of a different time and space. Remind you that incredible music already exists in the world. Tweaking the arrangement or harkats ever so slightly, they tickle and refresh your ears. I have become numb to certain old Hindi songs, having heard them only in antaksharis. But covers alert me to their beauty in a fresh way. If songs are houses, good covers open the back door for you when the front door is closed.

We love covers created with good intentions. Grateful, not greedy. Awestruck, not opportunistic.

Berklee Indian Ensemble affectionately playing with an A.R. Rahman song

You will always find purists who will criticise cover songs. They think it is lazy to like them. They think you will listen to Ali Sethi, not Mehdi Hassan; Arooj Aftaab, not Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Meesha Shafi instead of Iqbal Bano. “You should listen to the original!” - I have been instructed.

OF COURSE THE ORIGINAL IS BETTER. But does that mean only the original can exist?

Originality is what we yearn for. An original voice, a fresh perspective, a groundbreaking, trailblazing, innovation or insight is what we aspire to. But it can become an obsession. It can lead to false hierarchies and creative blocks. Originality needs creativity, but creativity doesn’t need you to be original all the time. All it wants is for you to be honest and playful.

Writers and poets are especially obsessed with originality¹. Singers, dancers, and visual artists know that they learn best from imitation. That originality is not a pre-condition but takes time to evolve, with consistent practice and experimentation.

Writers are so afraid of sounding like someone else, we would rather stay muted. The classic anxiety of influence.² It doesn’t allow us to grow. When we are anyway absorbing subconsciously, why not be consciously guided by the best literary voices?

Aren’t we always trying to remix what has been created before, or make versions of what occurs in nature? Sometimes we cover one thing, by painting the moon and sometimes we cover two things, by writing - The moon is a coin my mother gave me to buy roasted corn.

If you look closely, all creativity is a remix, all art is a cover song.

We endlessly borrow words and phrases from the artists who came before us, their andaaz and tareeka, their colours and brushstrokes. We stand on the shoulders of giants. We must dance while we are up there.

1. “You would learn very little in this world if you were not allowed to imitate…But in the world of writing it is originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of sins. Too bad. I think if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned partially and haphazardly.” — Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook

2. “The theory of anxiety of influence is based primarily on Harold Bloom's belief that there is no such thing as an original poem, that every new composition is simply a misreading or misinterpretation of an earlier poem and that influence is unavoidable and inescapable; all writers inevitably, to some degree, adopt, manipulate or alter and assimilate certain aspects of the content or subject matter, literary style or form from their predecessors.”

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A raw version of this essay emerged as a response to a prompt given by

Parool

in the writing group named Bavaal. 💖

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