Two American YouTubers reacting to a song from a 1995 Tamil sci-fi film named Asuran, which is unknown even among die-hard Tamil cinema fans, couldn’t have happened without director Lokesh Kanagaraj. The song Chakku Chakku Vathic Kuchi, composed by Adithyan, was conspicuously played as the background score in Kamal Haasan’s comeback movie Vikram (2022). The song currently has clocked in more than 9.4 million streams on YouTube. With every new film, Lokesh Kanagaraj revives a forgotten Tamil song. In Leo, it was Karu Karupaayi from Eazhaiyin Sirippil, composed by Deva, and in Kaithi, it was AR Rahman’s Jumbalakka.
YouTube currently has many versions of Lokesh Kanagaraj’s playlist. While many are just compilations of all such songs from his filmography, a few fans have taken the liberty to add more tracks that have the same vibe. Now, almost all the songs used by Lokesh share some traits that make them an instant hit among the new audience.
Firstly, these songs aren’t widely known among the current generation but are popular amid a dedicated fanbase. Except for Jumbalakka, almost all the other tracks are by composers other than the two Tamil music icons, AR Rahman and Ilaiyaraaja. It could be a conscious decision from Lokesh to choose beyond the works of the two, who dominate the music space because you even find KV Mahadevan’s Kalviya Selvama Veerama in Vikram, and MS Viswanathan’s Naan Polladhavan in Leo, but Ilaiyaraaja is visibly missing from LCU. So, Lokesh’s choices thus fall into the category of songs that one might have listened to but can’t pinpoint the details. ‘I have heard this somewhere,’ is the feeling that you get when Lokesh adds an old song in his film. This vague familiarity makes the song click instantly.
And of course, these songs are popular among the 90s kids as they are mostly from the mid-90s to early 2000s. It is the era of new sounds in Tamil cinema. With the entry of AR Rahman, synthetic sounds and the usage of instruments like the Octapad became commonplace. The audience got exposed to a new brand of music in Tamil space, which till then was monopolized by Ilaiyaraaja. Electronic instruments became a rage in the period, and that’s the common characteristic of the ‘Lokesh Kanagaraj playlist’. These songs belong to a sweet spot of not being too old and not being too new because of the relatively new sounds. It is from an era when the mainstream was getting introduced to American pop, which invariably influenced the songs made here.
And that’s exactly reflective of Lokesh Kanagaraj’s brand of cinema itself. He is highly influenced by Hollywood, especially by Quentin Tarantino. The very art of placing a song incongruous to the situation was popularised by the Kill Bill filmmaker. And Lokesh, who is vocally a fan of his works, is aping the same in Tamil cinema. He lifts such American tropes and Indianises them with sophistication. Take Kaithi, for example, the climax sequence of Karthi as a lorry driver in lungi blasting the machine gun is the perfect marriage of American and Indian sensibility. That’s the exact feeling you get listening to Chakku Chakku Vathikuchi, Thamara Poovukum, and all such Loki’s favourites. They have the foreign beat to hyperlocal lyrics.
Or we are reading too much into all of this? It could just be that Lokesh just happens to like the songs without putting much thought into it, but it still exudes his personality. It’s exciting to think what Rajinikanth is going to dance to in Thalaivar 171.
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