Before we get into it, a short content warning. This one deals with the topic of war and naturally it’s a bit sad. Not much, but a bit. If that’s not something you feel like reading right now, totally understandable.
The last two weeks have been quite weird for me. I was confused about what to feel.
There was a war brewing. As usual, traditional news channels pushed their propoganda, independent journalists tried to correct them, WhatsApp was filled with misinformation and forwards of sloppy AI edits. Among all this noise, something caught my attention. Instagram stories. More specifically, the songs that were trending on those days in Instagram.
In mid-2016, Instagram launched this “new” feature called stories. Then CEO of Instagram Kevin Systrom, openly admitted that the feature was copied from Snapchat, based on the success of Snapchat stories.
I always wondered what the process was when they came up with these disappearing stories as a feature. It’s like they took the phrase ‘felt cute, might delete later’ and turned it into a problem statement to solve.
In late 2018 Instagram partnered with Spotify and with that users were able to easily add a background song to their posts. I think this was the next most pivotal point in the history of Instagram right after its acquisition by Facebook. Because there was someone already storming in from China, TikTok. TikTok with its Smile and ByteDance legacy was always rooted in music and Instagram again had to play catchupNowadays, it’s difficult to imagine a post on Instagram without background music or some sort of sound. Songs started trending on the platform and using a trending song became the thumb rule to get your content to more people.
Think of that funny Instagram post you saw in the last week. Now imagine the same without a background song. It doesn’t hit the same, right?
Coming back to the war at hand. Songs have always been a crucial part of war. Hitting on things started as a primordial war cry. A sound that resonates with the rhythms of their heart. Songs have then became crucial to the whole military complex. When the world was at war, there were songs to inject patriotism and improve the moral of the people dying in uniform and people dying on the streets. At the same time songs have also pushed back and criticised war like no other media. Be it the country songs, psychedelic rock, punk or even later pop albums.
I grew up on everything. My heart swelled when Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that’s gonna fall or when Roger Waters asked his mother if they were going to drop the bomb. I also felt weirdly motivated to shoot down rogue enemy fighter jets when I listened to the Top Gun movie’s theme song — a movie that literally increased the number of people enlisting in the US Navy. Or when I heard the songs from the movie Lakshya and had a surprising feeling of pride. I even allowed Shankar Mahadevan to gaslight me into believing that joining the army is my dream through the title track of the movie ‘Lakshya’. I am not a Bollywood aficionado, so I have not seen any of the recent propaganda, sorry I mean Patriotic movies. So I don’t know what’s happening there anymore but I saw the songs trending on Instagram.
last week, when the India Pakistan tensions were high, Instagram’s trending audios were extremely peculiar. There I was checking out the trending songs on Instagram without any intention on posting anything. Why you might ask. I was just being curious.
The top twenty trending songs were extremely interesting. It was a perfect mix of fear, pride and hate.
The top most trending song on Instagram during that time was that of the artist Prestigigator. It was a song called ‘Nuclear Siren’. It was the most aptly named form of music I have ever seen. A horrifying sound that could easily be the theme song for apocalypse itself.
Prestigigator is a Polish artist with more than a million subscribers on YouTube. Their most popular song with more than 16 million views on YouTube and more than 100 thousand plays on Spotify is the song ‘Nuclear Siren’ made 13 years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine. All most all other videos or songs of this artist are just the same nuclear siren song but with themes of Christmas, Halloween, Tsunami and some other events of the recent past that haunts us. That was fear.
There were also songs from bollywood movies, old and new, to make me feel…proud I gues. The only problem was I didn’t know any of these songs. Then there were these weird semi religious songs from independent youtube creators about burning the enemy. There was also a song called ‘Happy Diwali’. Quite a tasteless joke on bombs and explosion that were going off in parts of the country.
What does this all say about the time we are living in? Maybe social media platforms get to group us on the basis of fear or hatred and incentivise us to make content amplifying it? Maybe it is to make more war cries masqueraded as hymns to burn places? Or make air raid sirens the theme song of the 21st century?
sigh…
Maybe I should catch up on these new Bollywood songs. They might make it easier for me to swallow these hard pills. If anything history has taught us, it’s that the music that comes out against war comes from a real place. Maybe I will wait for that, to make an Instagram story.
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