Songs over the Ages

Listening to songs may be the favorite pass time of many and especially people of my age. With the growing size of the hard disk space one can really put all the space constraint out of the window and even with all the high end utilities, a FIFA 10 game or high end graphics games, one can stack more than 1000 songs easily. Easily that is the case with me. But then i started analyzing the pattern among my songs= the year(as in old, semi-old, semi-new, new), the lyrics, the genre, the quality of rendering and noticed a real shift in some areas but yet certain things are constant.

As a disclaimer i propose that i am a bit biased towards lyrics and rendering because i am a vocalist and like songs to encourage me to sync-sing with the song and i try to mimic some of the bits of rendering which are top-class. To ease my burden i like to stick mostly to tamil music industry. Thus my mini-research of the song database of mine starts. To make it more refreshing i will try to go the other way around to what is usually done in these articles.
The newer generation for one have lost out a bit on the cultural aspect which is disheartening and influence of western music and culture on the song is easily visible. One can accept the facts that we are moving and aiming to bridge the east and west have had for a long time. This is a positive sign as far as the world order goes but one of the strongest thing we had was the original score of our composers and a style which depicted our culture. All i get to hear mostly, excluding the one and only rahman(for lyrical), are some bits and pieces of some copied music and lyrics which absolutely do not make sense and totally neither inspiring nor social-conscious. Ofcourse i again exclude some of the best works during this generation. Though they may be good to hear the actual meaning of songs is lost. It has been grossly also been influenced the kind of films we get in this era. This stop gap arrangement for songs is not good for die hard music fans.
The semi-new era was dominated by melody genre of music. Truly great pieces of music flourished in this short period of time. Singers thrived in the era and a healthy competition brewed up some great notes and lyrics from the instrumentalists and lyricists. Strongly influenced by the number of songs of this period in the most played playist, i would take this period as my favourite period without any doubt. Still there was an evident shift in the music quality from the previous era due to the whole "Digital" phenomenon. As i recall that nice song from mugavari which thinks futuristic, we are beginning to appreciate that much of what it focused on is happening. So what did this generation drop?
Come the semi-old era and the tamil industry for one had its truly inspirational composer Maestro Ilayaraja under whom the songs reached new levels of adore. Rather than producing songs for stop-gap arrangement, songs with that a little extra edge to reach the common people with that extra folkish nature was clearly visible in his songs. It is no surprise that my parents like this era. More than the songs he produced, the people he used to produce them will remain his great contribution to music. Their rendering will forever stay etched in my mind. Rendering flourished at its best here.
The old era by no means the last in music, will be best remembered as the lyricist era and rendering was done with such easy ridicule that it still inspires the many talented singers. Songs were made socially conscious and taught values to the young and old. In tamil music industry influence of carnatic music was well noted in the songs but there were other gems by the one and only NSK whose songs were thought provoking with a humour element. Under the influence of MSV and other great composer and singers like TMS, P.Susheela and PBS the music indutry achieved great heights down south. It did take me 18 yrs or so to realize that music is multi-faceted and there is enough life in our music history that future musicians not look west and make the west stand up and take notice of our work. Rahman's waves have to echoed by the larger proportion of other musicians and produce stellar music yet not divert too much from the impact that a song can have.