At times, his friends, and there are many, will just call him up and take him places. Occasionally, I’ve called him up at 9 AM and then at 2 PM and then at 7 PM, only to have him apologize in his groggy voice and reasons galore on why the meeting has to be put off. [break]
Strangely, he’s so honest that I’m not even annoyed at him canceling the meeting yet again.
“I was up all night drinking yesterday at a cousin’s wedding and have a severe hangover. Can we reschedule?” he asks for the umpteenth time.
His honesty blows me.
The economy sucks. Fuel prices are skyrocketing and it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that everything will be more expensive. But perhaps because it’s so rough out there, we’re living in an age of oblivion.
I ask Yogeshwar what he thinks of the politicians and what they’re doing to our country. “They suck,” he says. I like him already.
It takes only a couple of minutes from the moment we enter the bar at Tangal for someone to recognize him.
While I notice a few diners whispering into each other’s ears, some are pointing frantically. One of them does a double take, walks up to him and shakes his hand.
Seven minutes inside a bar is all it takes for me to realize Yogeshwar is famous.
If you want to understand how bad things are in the Nepali music industry right now, how muggy and cautious the atmosphere is, how little financial assistance or encouragement a new singer or a band receives, and how devoid of ambition the prospect currently appears, it helps to start with a success story.
It was 15 years ago that Yogeshwar first became a household name.
Ever since then, observers have anxiously tried to gauge whether his fame was on the wax or on the wane.
They foretold his fall; they searched diligently for someone new to take his place. At last, they have given up. Yogeshwar’s fame is beyond question.
It has nothing to do with whether he’s rude or polite, married or unmarried, 25 or 45; whether he appears on the Top 10 Countdown on the FM stations, or not.
He is well above any position even a 1974 AD might jostle for. Yogeshwar is nothing if not introspective and self-aware. If you listen to “Aja-samma,” you’ll notice that he explores the human condition in his songs, and knows from his own heartbreak and anger that he’s not immune to it.
Since 1994, when he decided to sing for the first time, Yogeshwar has been one of the most ubiquitous figures in the Nepali music scene, releasing rare albums and performing countless songs. However, if you ask him, he’ll tell you he doesn’t know how many copies his albums have sold.
Many of his songs are catchy and fit enough to become pop hits; yet he always does rhymes that are richly detailed and witty enough to maintain his bona fides within the music industry.
His rhyming is backed by self-confidence so great it’s infectious to the listener, an often laid-back flow that sounds at times almost as if he were talking and an ability to paint clear pictures with a careful choice of words.
For example, he croons for Manisha Koirala-like lips in “Pachas Tharika Holan,” a song about a lass, and reasons why he adores her.
More in character is how compulsively he defines himself by omission. Though he usually stops short of belittling his contemporaries by name, Yogeshwar’s low opinion of stardom for its own sake isn’t exactly a secret.
He’s the kind of singer who’s almost as famous for what he refuses to do as for what he does, and ever since he’s evaded teen-idol status despite the glittering studs he sports in his ears, his allergy to courting the regular fans’ approval has rivaled a Muslim’s reaction to a pork diet.
If a great singer is what Nima Rumba is, Yogeshwar must be something else – the anti-Nima Rumba, if only by implication. Even in inconsequential songs like “Kya Bore Bhayo,” Yogeshwar never sounds petty or ordinary, and there’s a reason for that.
Nabin Bhattarai may qualify as a fairly perplexing human being, but his screen persona’s main virtue is limited to a hired pretty model running around a tree.
Yogeshwar’s voice, on the other hand, can charge any song with subtle meaning – even one blatantly meaningless as ‘Wakka Dikka.” Watching him perform these songs live is like watching a firefly play chess.
To recap: We’re at Hitz Bar, Tangal, on a Wednesday evening which is nice, and we’re both wearing shorts, which is awesome. Yogeshwar is wonderfully dressed in Crocodile shorts, a Giovanni shirt and a pair of his favorite Nike sneakers. Possibly no other musician has ever looked cooler. If Prabal Gurung had walked in, he would’ve nodded.
While I’m concentrating on emptying my coffee quickly so that I can begin drinking some whiskey, Yogeshwar fiddles with the menu.
“I’ll start with a whiskey,” he says with a smile.
His smile, very much like his music, is contagious. A couple of whiskeys makes me realize how much I’ve missed the man, and the music that might’ve been when my generation lost much of its youthfulness, along with one of its greatest icons, when Yogeshwar got bored of making music and decided to stop writing songs altogether.
In fact, we could’ve used more of Yogeshwar’s songs these days for his lyrics incorporate a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences.
They defy the existing pop music conventions, and appeal hugely to the common people. In an era of political polarity where viewers hear one version of reality on one channel and an absolutely opposed take on another, I feel Yogeshwar would’ve again sung out on behalf of many of us.
If you’ve ever watched Yogeshwar perform, you’ve probably noticed his self-indulgence. Apparently, his live performances are remembered for the antics on the
stage almost as much as the music.
However, there’s nothing wrong with self-indulgence. As a prelude to songwriting, self-indulgence is right up there with love, hate and probably better than the remaining deadly sins. Plural.
There’s nothing wrong with striving for musical grandeur, using every bit of skill and studio illusion to create a sound large enough to get lost in.
Male sensitivity, a quality that’s currently under siege in the Nepali pop culture, full of unrepentant music videos of people desperately running after each other around trees at random locations, shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, no matter how risible it can be in practice.
Greatness in music is achieved when an artist tries and successfully builds a sound on the lessons of past bands. Put them all together, and they add up to Yogeshwar, the most insufferable singer of the decade.
Clearly, Yogeshwar is beloved: By moony high schoolboys and girls and their solace-seeking parents, by producers who sample his music’s rich instrumental sounds and by emo rockers who admire his heart-on-sleeve lyrics.
The songs stem from good intentions, beginning with Yogeshwar’s political statements to lyrics insisting on its own benevolence.
It’s anybody’s guess how much he cares, since he’s often indifferent to an album’s mediocrity so long as he can experiment with new ways of hiding and finding himself in his songs.
What’s irksome is that his singing instincts are as marvelous as his commitment to mastering the performance in each of the songs he chooses to sing is intense, as his judgment of the material is chancy.
Yogeshwar has no formal training, but he’s got a remarkable and most often than not, trust in his own instincts. Not many singers get so much subtext out of using hands to choreograph broken hearts and losses during performances.
His real originality, however, is that his ideal performance seems to imagine what his characters in his songs are like. This is often fascinating.
“Whether I’m someone’s favorite singer or not, whether I’m thought of as one of the best, one of the most half-assed, whatever it is, I’m one of the most personal,” he explains. “That’s why people relate to me, because I show so much of myself. That’s why random taxi drivers call me “Yogeshwar Dai.” And the reason I put so much of myself out there in the first place is because I had no idea I was going to be so famous. I had no idea! If I had to do it again, I don’t know if I would. I’m glad, though, that my music has brought people together.”
Charming indeed. With a contagious smile, he’ll make you feel there’s nowhere he’d rather be than right here, right now.
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