LOOK CLOSER, INTO, THROUGH;

I encountered Tamil-Swiss singer and songwriter Priya Ragu’s single “Good Love 2.0” on YouTube in late 2020. Considering the content that is usually recommended to me by the algorithm, I decided to go ahead and watch the video. After watching the video once, I replayed it and started scrolling through the comments posted. One comment stood out to me— someone who had watched her newer music video titled “Chicken Lemon Rice” remarked how happy they were to see an Indian woman singing R&B and pop. In response to this, another user commented

“She’s srilankan (smiley face emoji)”

and went on to be corrected by someone else who responded,

“she is tamil (blessed face emoji)”.

This discourse mediated through YouTube changed my reception of the song. As I paid closer attention, I became aware of certain musical elements that were particular to Tamil mainstream music, including the lyrics as well as the beat of the song.

“Good Love 2.0” reveals Ragu as a rising South Asian R&B artist, the beats making evident the influence of R&B and hip-hop music as well as Kollywood (Tamil-language) music on her larger artistic oeuvre. The visual aesthetics of the music video affectively convey Ragu’s identity as a diasporic subject who stages herself as one of the two protagonists in the video. “Good Love 2.0” went on to become the FIFA 21 official soundtrack, putting Ragu on the map for her R&B, Tamil-folk inspired fusion music. The lyrics are co-written by Ragu and her brother who produces music under the moniker Japhna Gold. They began their artistic collaboration in 2017 making music that blends Ragu’s singing and rapping with experimental R&B, synths, shuffling tabla beats, and Tamil folk music. It is this aesthetic practice of genre-bending that she calls ‘Ragu-wavy’. Ragu-wavy reflects the brother-sister duo’s shared musical upbringing and is defined by the artist as “a boundless approach to music that is a mixture of everything”. By using Tamil words and musical elements in their songs, this eclectic brother-sister duo performs diasporic subjecthood through the sonic realm.

Ragu’s debut mixtape released the following year— titled damnshestamil, this album is made up of ten unique tracks. Through this album, I came across “Chicken Lemon Rice” and watched the music video soon after listening to the track. Like “Good Love 2.0”, this song combines R&B with Kollywood music beats, and we hear Ragu singing and rapping in English, Tamil, and French. The music video features the artist as one of the protagonists while also starring several other performers. Both these music videos complement her fusion sound and build visual and sonic worlds that shape the diasporic performance practice of Priya Ragu.

In this essay, I undertake an aesthetic and sonic analysis of “Good Love 2.0” and “Chicken Lemon Rice”. By considering these two videos alongside one another, I am interested in the visual archives that Ragu draws from to challenge dominant narratives of forced migration and exile that shaped her upbringing in Switzerland. As the daughter of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka who fled the country during the twenty-five year long civil war, Ragu implicates her familial and cultural inheritances as part of her practice. Expanding on the name of the mixtape in an interview, she notes, “I’m here, I know who I am, I know where I’ve come from and I know what my purpose in life is. I also wanna put Tamil on the map!” The album allows Ragu to be here and occupy the temporal registers of the past, present, and the future. The act of putting Tamil on the map brings up a consideration of language in relation to home, belonging, and nation-state. Instead of engaging in a comparative reading of the two videos, this essay looks closer, into, and through various scenes to read for Ragu’s embodiment of desire and pleasure as a practice of diasporic refusal to normative representations. I argue that the visual aesthetics of these videos evoke a form of disbelonging to construct an alternative archive of the Tamil diaspora.

Performance scholar Bimbola Akinbola introduces the term ‘disbelonging’ in her writing about the reality of diasporic belonging and unruly return. Instead of being “an authentic process of going back and seamlessly ‘fetching’ what has been left behind”, diasporic belonging is mostly an act of disruptive making and becoming (Akinbola 154). Through the genre of Ragu-wavy, the artist embodies a form of sonic disbelonging that is grounded in a reimagination of the sounds that she grew up with while simultaneously rejecting the notion of returning to a home/ land. I have separated these two terms to honor anthropologist Mythri Jegathesan’s reparative reading of the Plantantionocene concept through the lens of Black feminist scholarship. In her research, Jegathesan attends to the lived realities of caste-oppressed Tamil workers who labored on Sri Lanka’s tea plantation plots for generations while continuing to remain landless. While this presentation does not focus much on return, I continue to think about how diasporic subjects grapple with returning to a home/land and the articulation of return within scholarship in disciplines such as Black Studies and Indigenous Studies.

This essay asks, how does Ragu sense differently as a diasporic subject through the medium of the music video? In what ways does she embody and extend the interdiscursive and transnational possibilities of her music by troubling the categories of language, gender, nation-state, and cultural inheritances? And finally, what might her music videos illuminate about sonic disbelonging, thereby redefining what the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora sounds like?

Filmed in the coastal city of Goa in India, “Good Love 2.0” begins with an individual looking out into the open sea. Their figure is miniscule in relation to the large body of water in front of them. In the next scene, we see a close up of one of the video’s protagonists looking outside a window. This scene is followed by the introduction of the singer Priya Ragu’s body in space. She looks up as if to search for her co-performer. The two performers are united in separate grids on screen and we see both their experiences as occurring in the same place but temporally disjointed (see image below).

“Good Love 2.0” demands that we enact a viewing practice where we are always looking closer, into, and through visual representations of diasporic subjects. The sensational connection that I experienced while watching the video did not result in an overidentification with either performer. Instead, I recognized a “collective viewing position” that Bakirathi Mani references in her theorization of ‘diasporic mimesis’. We are invited to bear witness to the multiple, overlapping encounters between the two performers. By staging her body at the center of the video, Ragu makes herself visible as a racialized subject who desires differently. Her co-performer embodies two distinct roles here— they are both a desiring subject as well as a physical representation of the colonial gaze that follows Ragu wherever she goes. However, she is not always the subject who is being watched. Throughout the video, there are several scenes where Ragu returns the colonial gaze that is projected onto her (see image below).

I will now pivot towards a clip from the music video for “Chicken Lemon Rice”. The title celebrates Ragu’s cultural heritage and reflects the fusion of different sounds, words, and spices in the song. Like “Good Love 2.0”, this music video was shot in India and begins with a visual introduction to Ragu and her co-performers who are dancers. The presence of these dancers re-establishes a collective viewing position between the viewer, the artist, and the performers in the video. “Chicken Lemon Rice” choreographs moments of stillness with joyful gestures and finally erupts into a dance party featuring an entourage of dancers.

Leaning into experimental R&B and pop, this song is rhythmically quite different from “Good Love 2.0”. The richness in rhythm is furthered through the visual landscapes of the video. In one of the early shots featuring Ragu and several of the dancers, there are colorful garlands draped over various objects in the background (see image to the right).

Out of the six dancers, four are standing while two of them are seated. Ragu can be seen wearing a long white shirt with white pants. She also has white and black biker gloves and dark shades on. Other than Ragu, everyone else in this image is donning yellow balaclavas. Ragu’s dark shades and the yellow color of the balaclavas is reminiscent of the aesthetics in the previous image from “Good Love 2.0”. The repetition of aesthetic elements brings up an image that we have seen elsewhere, and through this repetition, a relation of identification gets established between the viewer, the artwork, and the artist.

Through the yellow balaclavas and the black shades, Ragu mobilizes the practice of diasporic mimesis that is forged through a repeated affective encounter with the same visual object. [1]

Ragu’s use of the Tamil word “matchi” (which refers to a close friend or buddy) in this song furthers a relational space for the viewer to celebrate alongside the dancers on screen. As the video progresses, we get glimpses of the faces behind the yellow balaclavas (see figure below). This is one of the most striking images in the video for me.

In this image, Ragu is seated in a golden chair in the center. There are five dancers surrounding her. One of them is standing, three others are seated, and the last dancer appears to be lying down. This scene is dimly lit and it is hard to identify the dancers at first. Upon looking closer, we see the presence of at least three out of the six dancers from the previous image. The dancer on the bottom left corner wears a dark green cropped suit in both scenes. The dancer who is lying down wears a mustard yellow top in both images. And the dancer who is pictured at the bottom right corner can be identified by their hair and neck jewelry which remains consistent across both images.

The images repeat in a discursive loop— the camera zooms in to reveal each of the dancers in the foreground while also staging them in the background as aesthetic accompaniments to the visual landscape. As experienced in “Good Love 2.0”, the encounter with the subjects staged in the video is fleeting and develops as the video progresses. Ragu employs the visual-aesthetic strategy of repetition to create an alternative archive of racialized subjects who joyfully occupy the public sphere. They determine how and when they are visible. The colorful streetwear in this video creates a rich visual palette that further emphasizes the layered soundscape of “Chicken Lemon Rice”. Joy and excess are central to the experience of the dancers. Both collectively and individually, the dancers vibe to the music and dance through the night, generating an affective response in the viewer. It is hard to stay still while watching the video and I found myself accepting Ragu’s invitation to dance and celebrate along with her cast. “Chicken Lemon Rice” presents us with a visual representation of minoritarian, diasporic subjects celebrating, sizzling, and being their authentic selves.

My reading privileged the act of looking closer, into, and through the visual images that make up Priya Ragu’s music videos. As I examined the notion of disbelonging and how Ragu’s artistic practice addresses home, nation-state, and cultural heritage, the question of inheritances came up for me. For Ragu, her inheritance as a Tamil-Swiss artist is deeply rooted in the musical traditions that were passed down to her. This is why I find her performance practice provocative as an artist-researcher— these traditions framed my cultural upbringing as well. Transcending regional and national boundaries, Ragu layers her musical inheritance with images of diasporic subjects celebrating in the presence of one another. Through her sound, she embodies the present moment while also building bridges to the past and the future, thereby envisioning new ways of listening to, as, and with diaspora.

Bibliography

Akinbola, Bimbola. “Disbelonging and Unruly Return in the Performance Art of Wura-Natasha Ogunji.” Text and Performance Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2020): 152–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2020.1721554.

Fechik, Mariel. “Damn She's Tamil: Priya Ragu on Debut Mixtape, Spirituality, & Culture.” Atwood Magazine, October 5, 2021. https://atwoodmagazine.com/prdst-priya-ragu-damnshestamil-music-interview-2021/. 

Hess, Liam. “Priya Ragu’s Layered Sonic Universe Is a Window Into the Future of Pop.” Vogue.com, Vogue, October 25, 2021. https://www.vogue.com/article/priya-ragu-sonic-universe-future-of-pop

Jegathesan, Mythri. “Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology’s ‘Regional Closets.’” Feminist Anthropology 2, no. 1 (March 12, 2021): 78–93. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12037. 

Kheraj, Alim. “Priya Ragu: ‘Tamil is the language I speak. Why not put it in my songs?’” TheGuardian.com, The Guardian, August 17, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/17/priya-ragu-interview-music-lemon-chicken-rice-damnshestamil-good-love

Mani, Bakirathi. Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Murray, Robin. “Priya Ragu Shares Addictive New Single 'Good Love 2.0'.” Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews, October 2, 2020. https://www.clashmusic.com/news/priya-ragu-shares-addictive-new-single-good-love-2-0/. 

Ragu, Priya. “Priya Ragu - Chicken Lemon Rice (Official Video),” YouTube video, 2:33. February 5, 2021. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdFqv3JBA4Q&ab_channel=PriyaRagu.

Ragu, Priya. “Priya Ragu - Good Love 2.0 (Official Video),” YouTube video, 4:07. October 2, 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHZ2nuvIGdA&ab_channel=PriyaRagu.

S., Arun. “Priya Ragu Opens up About her Music and Identity.” Browngirlmagazine.com, Brown Girl Magazine, April 12, 2022. https://browngirlmagazine.com/priya-ragu-opens-up-about-her-music-and-identity/

Tagat, Anurag. “Tamil-Swiss Artist Priya Ragu Signs to Warner Music U.K., Drops ‘Good Love 2.0’ Video.” RollingStoneIndia.com, Rolling Stone India, October 19, 2020. https://rollingstoneindia.com/priya-ragu-tamil-swiss-warner-good-love-video/