ABSTRACT
In 2012, the Tamil film song “Why this kolaveri di” achieved unprecedented popularity as a “youth anthem” whose appeal crossed linguistic and ethnic divides.1 From Chennai to Houston, from Madrid to Kuala Lumpur, the halting voice of Dhanush, with its down-tempo feel and “drunken” effect, could be heard as flash mobs gathered to sing and dance to the song in public spaces. In the same year, another song, with an entirely different kind of sound and aesthetic, also achieved great popularity: “Kalasala,” a fast-paced, heavily engineered item number which featured the aging voice of L.R. Eswari, a playback singer who had made her mark singing vampy songs for Tamil films in the 1960s. Produced within a year of each other, these songs both circulated far beyond their parent films and soundtracks; each was the song that lifted their respective movie, and its soundtrack, out of relative oblivion. Both songs were released and hyped long before the films in which they appeared through “making of” videos on YouTube, and both songs entered into global circulation as they were sampled and sung in musical productions outside of Kollywood, as the Chennai-based Tamil-language film industry is known.2
