Music Appreciation
Related: About this forumHow a Long-Lost Indian Disco Record Won Over Crate Diggers and Cracked the YouTube Algorithm
In 2014, Debayan Sen found a mysterious album inside of a trunk in his mothers attic, in Kolkata, India. The red-orange record sleeve featured a picture of his mom as a young woman along with her nameRupain big, bold lettering. That was the day Debayan learned about his mothers past life as a singer.
Suddenly reminded of this discovery last year, Debayan decided to Google the record. The results surprised his family: Rupas first and only album, 1982s Disco Jazz, was selling for hundreds of dollars via sites like Discogs. The day I found the record my mom said, Throw it away. It is just pointless, Debayan remembers. I said, What the hell, you made this, why would you throw this away?
Since then, Disco Jazz has been reissued by Numero Group, the well-established archival label. Aaj Shanibar, one of its four tracks, has also started to spread through the strange rabbithole that is YouTubes recommendation algorithm. The most popular upload of the song now boasts more than 1.5 million views, likely thanks to factors including its eight-minute runtime and its high-energy, ever-shifting instrumentals. Its another example of what happens when, with the benefit of time and technology, lost songs reach a new generation of listeners halfway around the world.
MrScorpio
(73,630 posts)How exactly did this overlooked album surface, nearly 40 years after its original Indian pressing? It helps that the songs could turn up in Balearic disco sets, Indian weddings, or even vibey studying playlists. But tracing Disco Jazzs path to re-emergence shows how roundabout and happenstance the modern rediscovery process for old music can be.
The journey started the old-fashioned way, with a bit of crate-digging. In 2005, Florian Pittner, a Hamburg-based record-seller who runs the Discogs page Hindustani Vinyl, was traveling in Kolkata when he came across Disco Jazz. Pittner recognized the name of the albums producer and co-arranger, Aashish Khan, and decided to buy several copies. He sold a few on eBay and, in 2010, listed another copy on Discogs. In May 2012, Swedish DJ Albion Venables was searching for disco music when he came across Pittners Discogs listing. He took a chance on it, largely based on the album artwork and Hindustani Vinyls reputation. When I heard how Rupa sang, in a really heartfelt way and with this divine voice, I knew the universe would relate to it, he says.
Venables started playing Aaj Shanibar in his sets, one of which was posted in a Facebook group for listeners trying to identify obscure songs based on snippets of audio. That was where Fran Korzatkowski, a music fan based in Albany, New York, first heard Aaj Shanibar and became obsessed. After much digging, Korzatkowski identified the track based on its use in Miss Lovely, a 2012 Indian art-house movie. Disco Jazz was selling for about $400 on eBay at the time, so he took the recording from Venables mix, adjusted the bass levels a little, and became the first person to upload Aaj Shanibar to YouTube, in April 2016.
Months later, Dan Snaithbest known for his roving house project Caribouwas stuck in a YouTube wormhole, skipping through hundreds of songs, when Aaj Shanibar stopped him in his tracks. He immediately integrated the song into his live DJ sets and radio broadcasts on NTS and Gilles Petersons Worldwide FM. Juxtaposed against contemporary club music, its like a breath of fresh air at the right point in a club night, Snaith says. Aaj Shanibar has the propulsiveness of a great disco track but also an otherworldly, spacey feelingit floats along allowing people to get lost in the arrangement, the melody and Rupas voice. Its one of those records that gets asked about every time you play it.
In mid-2017 and then again in early 2018, Korzatkowski started to see a spike in the songs YouTube views and comments. By the end of 2017, German label Ovular had released a bootleg pressing of Disco Jazz, and people were posting about Aaj Shanibar on multiple Reddit forums. The word-of-mouth chatter and DJ sets (not just by Snaith and Venables) almost certainly helped the song spread on YouTube, but there are other factors that likely boosted its chances from there. Longer videos can be favored by YouTube because they offer extra space for ads; at the same time, Aaj Shanibar is immediately punchy, encouraging audience retention. But Massimo Airoldi, a professor and digital researcher at Emlyon Business School, suspects something else is at play as well: YouTube has been found to suggest music based on situational qualities, like whether a song would fit on playlists of study music or shower music (whatever that means). The atmosphere of the song resonates well with these sort of relaxed forms of listening to music, he says.
marble falls
(57,060 posts)eppur_se_muova
(36,256 posts)Needs less guitar, more sitar, to be "world music".
AllaN01Bear
(18,101 posts)alfredo
(60,071 posts)marble falls
(57,060 posts)thank-you for turning us on to "Disco Jazz".
colorado_ufo
(5,731 posts)Ms. Rupa, be proud of what you did!
ornotna
(10,797 posts)A little more on Rupa.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/21/from-bengal-to-boogie-rupa-biswas-indias-rediscovered-disco-diva