“I have been told about development in these cities, I wasn’t told about the slums and all the misery. I tell you, you tell me, same old stories on repeat.”
That Bombay’s indie music scene is catching wildfire is no secret. We’ve all heard people belting Prateek Kuhaad’s cold/mess or raving about the deep emotionality of Kavya Trehan’s Underscore. The Indian indie music industry is bursting at the seams with ballads about love, life, and experiences beyond and in between.
But, we don’t often hear of government propaganda being challenged in music. In political films, sitcom jokes, and in commercials, sure. But, music? Raghav Meattle, a young Indian singer-songwriter, is making the leap into the political with his new track, “One Sided Stories”.
Meattle moved to bombay about 2 years ago after he quit his job in Bangalore. He has since been pursuing a full-time music career that started with solo gigs in bars and a feature on a music reality show, The Stage. In February, last year, he decided to crowdfund his album, Songs From A Matchbox. But, the shining star of this album is “One Sided Stories” that delves into the spread of fake news and emergence of government propaganda. Talking about “WhatsApp University,” Meattle says, “Messages are sent to each other without thinking about it. We see this on WhatsApp groups with friends, family, classmates, almost everyone. That’s why I started thinking about this.”
Concerned about the growing intolerance in the country, he says, “We can still have those conversations in a responsible way with accurate information.” This prompted the birth of “One Sided Stories”, a melodious effort at highlighting the spread of false information through social media. Other than the fresh, bold lyrics of this song, the music video is, in a word, stunning.
Director by Mehek Malhotra, an artist who started her own studio, Giggling Monkey, the music video has bright, vibrant artwork that has been brought to life by animation.
“I wanted to use matchbox art because I wanted to put grave and important messages on things people rarely notice,” says Mehek who wanted to add layers of nuance and irony to the music video and make hard hitting lyrics more consumer friendly. She also has a personal series on matchbox art on her Instagram page.
The entire video took almost three months to animate, says Mehek, who hand drew the 4,000 frames that we see in the video. “I want to be able to put across my message with a function that’s so easy that people can just see what it’s saying,” says Mehek. And she does just that as her pop art uses Indian motifs usually seen on ordinary matchboxes to highlight the lyrics Raghav is singing.
Produced by Zain Calcuttawala and shot by Omkar Potdar, Raghav Meattle’s “One Sided Stories” is a video you are unlikely to forget.
Feature image credit: One Sided Stories
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