To Sing or Not to Sing

To stop performing is akin to death for most artistes who have enjoyed the thrill of public attention. There is no retirement age for them like other employed persons. Unmindful of their advancing age they trudge along churning out bad performances, testing the patience of the public. Instead of leaving the people cherished memories of their beautiful performances, these artistes become objects of pity for their lacklustre attempts to stretch their popularity.

This is truer in the case of actors and singers. We see older actors enacting a role that dosen’t suit them, so confident of their ability that they can pull it off. But this invites derision instead of appreciation from the discerning public. Sometimes it gets to a point that even their diehard fans find it difficult to tolerate them.

I would like to focus on some film playback singers who have had their career extended by insistent music directors despite age clearly telling on their voice. Lucky are the singers who died at the peak of their career. One can add great singers like Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh, Saigal etc to this list. Both Rafi and Kishore died in their late fifties at a time when their singing ability was waning.

Once a singer is past 60, it is tough to maintain a young voice even if he or she follows a disciplined life. Unlike film singers, classical music singers mellow with age. But they too are not free from the travails of old age.

When talking about singers, let me take the example of the legendary Lata Mangeshkar first. Music critics say her best songs came in the 1950s and 1960s. No argument there. But many of her songs from 1970s to early 80s are pleasurably listenable. But as 80s advanced, her protégés Lakshmikant Pyarelal made her sing for most of their films. Ok she was tolerable during that phase. Personally, I feel she should have stopped singing for young heroines once she crossed 60 years in 1989. To me her last good song perhaps would be in Rudaali in 1992.

In the 90s, her already thin voice got more delicate. She sounded jarring to me whether it was the films DDLJ, HAHK or several A R Rahman compositions. Thankfully she cut short her singing assignments in films with age catching up with her voice. It is reported that she refused to sing for Salil Chaudhary in the 90s knowing well that at her age she wouldn’t be able to do full justice to his songs. A right decision indeed. We still can feast on and enjoy the memorable melodies that she sang for Salilda earlier

What happened to Lataji is happening to K J Yesudas. By late1990s, his voice began to sound tired and strained. Yet his voice had the magic to keep the listeners in thrall. Mind you, this singer had looked after his voice well avoiding anything that would affect his singing ability. But apart from age, his busy schedule began to take a toll on his voice. After 2000, the strain in his voice has got more prominent. Now the quaver in his voice is more noticeable.

But this did not matter to the music composer Raveendran, who gave several splendid songs to Yesudas during nineties. He kept squeezing the even the last drop of Yesudas’s voice by making him sing some tough numbers. He tested the aging Yesudas’s voice to its limit. Music composers still have faith in him to carry a song though he is clearly past his best. He still wins awards justifying the confidence of music directors in him. He is helped by the fact that many emerging singers try to blindly imitate him without bothering to establish their identity. Few like M G Sreekumar, Venugopal, who have attempted to carve a niche of their own, have succeeded.

Another case of extended career of a singer is S Janaki. She was, along with P Susheela, much sought after singer in the south Indian film industry in the 1960s and 1970s. I feel the texture of her voice changed from the mid 1980s. Malayalam film industry did not have to suffer much from her older voice because of the emergence of a fresh talented singer K S Chithra. After delivering some classic songs for music directors Ravindran and Johnson in the eighties she gradually faded away.

But Ilayaraja continued to use her voice for his Tamil songs. Lot of what she sang towards late 1980s in Tamil are eminently forgettable. The songs of Janaki for Ilayaraja that linger in your mind are still the Annakili and 16 Vayathinile songs which were composed in 1970s. In Malayalam if you are asked to select her ten best songs, at least half of it will be the ones she sang for Baburaj in 1960s, when her voice was so fresh.