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Bathiya & Santhush Bathiya & Santhush were some of the first to do Rap in Sri Lanka, and for years you have been among the most popular artists in the country. What direction are you heading with your music at this time? In 1988 we were the first group to have hip hop based songs. We were the first act who commercially started to introduce rap music in Sri Lanka. Around 2001-2002 there were more up and coming hip hop groups, and they were the actual thing. Then we started to expand hip hop in Sri Lanka, we started to do it in a huge sort of way. By 2002-2003 we were the largest, the most established hip hop act in the country. Hip Hop was huge all over the world, but it was just a niche kind of thing in Sri Lanka at that time. I’m talking about 2002, not that long ago. And then we started to do pop, but a certain part of us was hip hop as well, because that was always part of us. Then by 2007 we started to move away from hip hop. Why was that? One reason for that was, whatever said and done, hip hop is a very African American thing. It comes from the African people’s experience living in America. Hip hop is good, we are big fans of hip hop, but what appeals more to people here is a hip hop/pop sort of mix. The straight rap doesn’t appeal to us because we haven’t grown out of that. African American people, through their issues and struggles, obviously have grown out of that, which is what authentic hip hop is. You feel that hip Hop is not authentic to you, you being a Sri Lankan. Yeah, it is not exactly authentic when we do it. When you go to India, Japan, the Middle East, or Sri Lanka, it is not authentic hip hop you hear. The authentic hip-hop is a thing which the African people in America do, which the real ghetto people do. I don’t think that we should even dream that we could ever be as authentic as them. When we do hip hop it’s not in our blood. We can adopt the Sri Lankan traditional styles that we grew up with and blend it with hip hop as well and achieve a balance. But then you can’t call it hip hop as such, it’s a hip hop and a pop mix. We do a hip hop and a pop sort of a mix at the moment Your album called “Tharunyaye” was my favorite Bathiya & Santhush album. That was the first album I heard of yours and I thought you would go more in that direction. You were using a lot of Sri Lankan folk beats and tribal drumbeats, but you were taking it to a modern level. Then the next album you did was more Indian influenced. When you take authentic Sri Lankan folk we have only a limited space we can work in. We have a handful of authentic Sri Lankan folk styles. We were exploring that, we went in search of that, but it comes to place where you get stuck. Then when you exhaust that authentic Sri Lankan thing, everything that goes after that has an Indian influence in it. So we actually experimented with the Sri Lankan folk sound, but you can experiment only up to a certain limit. From about 2002 – 2004 we were caught in a frame, only in one framework we could work in. Then we decided to go into a more Indian sort of sound, because there you have more experimentation that you can do. We still have our Sri Lankan folk music in our songs. When you get our upcoming album you will hear more of the authentic Sri Lankan stuff, it will be out real soon. We have also slightly gone towards the Arabic sound as well, in order to expand to this whole region. Since 2006 we have been reaching a bigger region, like the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia. When I first heard Bathiya & Santhush it was very exciting because you were taking Sri Lankan original drumbeats and folk music and mixing it with rap beats. I thought we could never do authentic rap because, as you say, it was never in our blood. But the Sri Lankan tribal beats are in our blood. I thought that you could guide the Sri Lankan young people more in the traditional direction, going more into our tribal roots, because you have so much influence. True, but there has to be some sort of a commercial aspect to the stuff we do, otherwise there won’t be a growth in anything. For something to grow we need new equipment, we need new sounds, new studios etc. So talking about the commercial aspect in the last two years, we have been totally on this commercial exploitation of our songs. But now, because we have during the past two years achieved it, we can go and experiment again. Because a new experiment is an expense for you, experimentation is always an expense. Plus you throw cash into it, so it’s a expense to our company. Up to 2002 we were experimenting a lot. Then we saw we needed to grow. In order to experiment more we have to grow and we need to have cash on hand, so then we had to go into a more commercial stream and really establish ourselves. Now we have the office and the staff, our own company, our own studios. About two months ago we established an mp3 player which is coming under our company, we’ll be putting it out on to the market. Now Bathiya & Santhush are established and have cash in hand to do it. If you don’t have cash to do it you will fail always. I hope you will make an album with really tribal drumbeats and Sri Lankan folk music. That would be like a landmark, really a landmark for music in Sri Lanka. Bathiya & Santhush have experience. You have taken a lot of risks; you can do it again. We will be experimenting on our new album, as we are more established now. Until 2002 we were taking a lot of risks, but there was no growth in our operation. We needed a brand. We were a folk success with the people, but we weren’t a commercial success. People knew us, there was a lot of aspiration towards the band, but we weren’t a commercially successful output until like in 2002. We thought, OK we’ll keep doing this for a while. And commercially we were extremely successful. We’ve had our greatest growth within the last three years. Commercially successful to the point of having our own studios, equipment etc, and now we have our own video production facility and our own engineers who are exclusive to us. In order to establish all this, we had to take that move. You probably made a good move. Otherwise you might have disappeared. Now we can go back and start experimenting again, with Sri Lankan folk songs, the authentic tribal beats. In a year or two we will certainly do a total folk album with a lot of traditional drumbeats. With your style, with those beautiful melodies you sing, you could get big all over the world. When I saw Amaradeva and Nanda Malini perform in the States, there were a lot of American people, but it was mainly a Sri Lanka crowd. Sri Lankan artists can also sell to the American market. When a Sri Lankan artist performs in America, the turnout is mostly Sri Lankans. But when African bands or Dancehall artists from Jamaica come and perform in the States, there are thousands of people, a huge crowd. We need to cross over and I know Bathiya & Santhush can do it. I know what you mean. We need to sell our product in the American market, not just to Sri Lankan people. If Bathiya & Santhush were doing typical American hip hop, I wouldn’t be very excited. But you do a different kind of hip hop, that’s why you stand out. That’s what makes you marketable. Who writes all your songs? Basically Santhush and I are two composers. We come up with the melodies, the drumbeats, the effects, the whole thing. We don’t write the lyrics. We have about five lyric writers that we work with. Do you write lyrics at all? We don’t. We have done it in the past, but we feel like it isn’t our expertise area. At the start you can do it because you’ve got lots of free time in your hand. Now what we do is like, the whole concept of the song is ours. We go to them and tell them, “This is the story, this is a man who has a lot of poverty and hunger, this is what’s happening. So can you put these into words? We need these kinds of things happening in these lines.” I play it and show it to them, so then the writer writes the lyrics. You guide them to do what you want? Yeah, and the other issue we have is, unlike when you do a song in English, we have almost like two languages when you write lyrics in Sinhalese. We have the Sinhalese literacy grammar and the normal speaking language. Normal spoken language is not used in a song. Why don’t you break the rules and use normal spoken language in your songs? You can break it, but you can’t just break it. It’s a thing, it isn’t specific to only Sri Lanka, it’s like that in the whole region. I think India has that. If you take the composers in India, the lyrics of the songs aren’t written by them. They’re done by different people. That is the way it’s done in the entire region. And it’s the same in the Arabic as well. There are two different languages, spoken and written. No one is singing in the same language that they speak in. Why do you think that is? When you take parts of the world like China and India, we have had an artistic exposure for a long time. We are a poetic sort of people. Indians, Sri Lankans, Chinese were even more of a poetic people. When you come to this part of the world you get the “om’s and the “shanthis”. That is our way. Sri Lankan song lyrics are so beautiful. Very mysterious and poetic. We are born with this way. Changing it I feel would not be authentic to us, because we are a people who talk about the moon like: the moon feels like these things, the moon as a person. We use a lot of metaphors and we have to go with that, because we are born with it. It’s been like that for 2500 or 3000 years or more. If we start doing our lyrics in that other way, singing in the spoken language, then we will not have that authenticity about us anymore. We will lose something. When you write songs and when Santhush writes songs, is there a big difference of style? Yes, I’m more of a groove-oriented person, in our partnership and Santhush is more slow flowing, heart easing with his music. His songs are more melodic? Not melodic. It’s like this: it’s a inner thing, like groove in what I do. Like even if it’s a slow song, there is more heart in his song and more groove in my song. It’s difficult to explain it in words. How do you compose your music, in the keyboard or guitar? I compose on the keyboards. I’m a classical pianist. We sang opera and jazz for almost about 14 years Do you have a jazz influence as well? Not exactly jazz, it’s more of a opera influence. Opera was our base then into jazz, and as an extension of that, came into pop. It was the same for Santhush. Did both of you meet in school? Yeah, in school, when we were in school we use to have all these classes, where we use to go for, like swimming meets, sports, that kind of thing. And we two knew each other. But he was a acquaintance of mine. Just an acquaintance of mine. Where did both of you grow up? We were from Colombo, but our parents are not from Colombo, my father is from Kaygall and his parents are from Haligama. So they come to Colombo and we grew up here. Does anyone else in you family play music? No, the we’re the only two who are into this. Also I have a degree in management. And Santhush has a degree in economics and marketing. Why did you spend the much time to getting a degree when music is your passion? I was working in the corporate industry for a long time, so was he, while playing music. Until we establish ourselves we had to have something to fall back on. When things started happening, we said no more jobs, we will do this full time. You have to do something until you get big. Like when we started, we use to earn like rupees 3000 a day. After that when things started growing we didn’t have to work any more. How do you see the Sri Lankan music changing? Sri Lankan music in the last four years has changed a lot. We had this same growth in the 1970 like with Clarence, with the Golden Chimes and we had a major change. I think that was the time SLBC started to play all these songs from the Beatles and all. In the 1960’s and 1970’s people were exposed to that atmosphere, there was a major change. People started playing guitars and the drums and there was a big change. Again it slowed down, somewhere around the 1980’s. Even in Sri Lanka? Even here it was stale, because the exposure was not there. But there were some major bands. Rukantha was one artist who made a big change, and the Gypsy’s were another. Other than that there was nothing big happening. They did the experimentations, but as a whole there was no big uprising. But since 1997-1999 after we came and all that there has been a big uprising also. In every country you have the established entertainment industry where you can grade things. Like in America movie stars and pop stars and athletes are like the grade A entertainment category. Then when you come to India, movie stars and cricketers are the grade A category. Then the bands and the artists are like grade B and the hockey and all after that. In Sri Lanka the cricketers and the musicians are the grade A category. Then you got the actors afterwards. It’s when you take it as a whole. Yes, you get actors who are at the very top, but overall. Now in Sri Lanka it has come to a point where cricketers and people who sing are grade A. Now everybody you talk to wants to sing or play cricket. It’s a big uprising now. Entertainment has gone in to another level. I think our music as an industry has surpassed all other industries. It has surpassed all and gone very far so the others now have to come here. In America you get a lot of Cuban music, Brazilian music, African music. There a lot of interest in international music. I feel like Sri Lankan music could be very popular there. I agree with you, but at the same time I have to disagree with you as well. One thing is when you talk about Cuban music, what they talk is Spanish, and Spanish is spoken across the globe. Argentina talks Spanish, Mexico talks Spanish, so it is not the Cuban music actually. If you say Spanish songs across the States has gone across, yeah it has. Our problem is that our language is only spoken by a very small amount of people in the world. That is why we have to go up to a platform, which is a larger platform to see the actual thing. I was talking with some people at Sony, and they said the five major languages in the industry is: first comes Chinese, it’s the largest selling music. Chinese artists sell more than all the American artists. First is the people who do Chinese music. Second is Hindi, third is Arabic, forth is English and number five is Spanish. As for African American music, it sells because it’s done in English. So these five, if you do songs in these five main languages, basically you will get some sort of mainstream platforms. That’s why songs done in our very own Sinhala or Tamil languages cannot be taken across, because of this factor. That we have to accept. Can it be huge commercially? No, it can’t be huge commercially. It cannot be commercially viable, because people don’t understand it. Like when you talk about a Cuban band or a Argentinean band or a Mexican band you can’t take that as an Argentinian or Mexican act. It is a Spanish act. Whether they are from Cuba or Puerto Rico or Argentina or Spain, Spanish is widely spoken so then it can be a hit. That is why it is hard to sell authentic Sri Lankan music to an international audience. You have to take the authentic thing into another platform and expose it to people. What type of music are you interested in right now? Right now I’m more inserted in orchestra and score type of stuff. Like film type music because I have done about four movie scores for 2008 and we had two movie scores which we did, they were a tremendous hit. So I’m interested in that, because I have to do that kind of work, other than that I’m very interested in Dancehall music, what is going on in Jamaica |
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