Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Why this viral di???


 ‘Why This Kolaveri Di (Why This Murderous Rage, Girl?) is an Indian song from the soundtrack of the upcoming Tamil film 3, which is due to be released in 2012… The song was officially released on 16 November 2011, and it instantly became viral on social networking sites for its quirky “Tanglish” (portmanteau word of Tamil and English) lyrics. Soon, the song became the most searched YouTube video in India. Within a few weeks, YouTube honored the track with a Gold Award for getting the most number of hits.’

 – This is an official Wiki Entry for the Kolaveri Song and pretty much sums up the introduction for a song for all those (if at all) unaware of the phenomenon. If there are actually people like that I guess we can successfully declare them Web-Illiterate.

When I first saw the song pretty much before most of us started sharing it, for me it was a catchy song sung by a southie star for promoting his new movie through social media. What followed was a mass sharing on facebook with endless likes and status messages about the song, crores of tweets and millions of hits on youtube. Many of them shared it just because others were sharing it.  It took me completely by surprise that my north Indian friends started humming the song and they thought Dhanush was a south Indian singer until I corrected them. Last heard the song has crossed borders and even Pakistanis are going gaga over it. And then we were thrown in some interesting and some really ridiculous versions of the song, all trying to cash in the fame. This included a female version (yaawwn!), Metal version (murderous rage to the core), Rnb version (wannabe), Sharad Pawar Slap Song (okayish) and even a jr sonu nigam version (cute, good way to make a son popular)

Many of us have wondered why this song has become so viral, I have tried to pen down some of which I have heard or read:

1.     The Musical Theory: First of all let’s not take the credit from the creators of the song. The young Music director, Anirudh Ravichander and the Actor cum Singer cum Lyricist, Dhanush is told to have composed and made the song in 25 minutes flat. The song has simple urban lyrics, very simple to be understood and one that you can relate to easily. This makes the song very hummable even by a non-tamilian. It has a very addictive rhythm that makes you listen repeatedly.

2.     The ripple effect: You might have seen the video just to know why people are sharing it and many others have done it too. This has in turn made it even more popular.

3.     A highly critical but interesting theory:  Reasoning why the soup song has become so popular is also the reason why it is so popular. We can conclude two things from the fact that it has become so popular - First, it is establishing that we live anxious lives, always in the quest of answers for the Five Ws, the one H and their cousins. It is probably out of this curiosity and never ending journey to know the unknown that we are listening to it again and again. Second, by going viral we are also trying to heal our anxious selves. There is often so much things of meaning around, meaning being created out of nothing, meanings to explain the unexplained, meanings to define, to regularise, to legalise – that at times we feel it is good to transport ourselves to modes of zero-meaning; where there is no meaning of anything whatsoever. Kolaveri di is one such zero-meaning mode. Let us not unravel the meaning of why this kolaveri di, it supposed to have no meaning and let it be that way. It is just a moment of zero gravity for our mind.

4.    The Mathew effect: The Matthew Effect dates from the 1960s. It is the theory, first expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. Put simply: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as it is expressed in the Gospel of St Matthew, from which the effect takes its name - “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Thanks to the Matthew Effect, the already famous get more famous, the often quoted get more and more quoted…It is easy to see how this transfers into social media – the more something is spread the more it will be spread even further by word of mouth. So next time you see 15 friends from your list sharing a same link, there is high probability that you would be in that list too on your friend's walls.

5.     Rajnikant –  .
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Can't believe you are actually searching for an explanation here!