Sanuka Wickramasinghe is something of an enigma. Even now. His voice conveys a kind of contemporary excitement that makes it his signature, and ours. It’s not the sort of excitement which turns him into a romantic or a spurned lover or an idealist, all three of whom you see every day, everywhere, on TV and over the radio. In fact it would be a mistake to label someone like him as a romantic or a radical. His is a voice that’s chic but reverential, that’s out-there but in-here, that’s daring but guarded. His two most recent songs – both released on YouTube, both massive hits there and everywhere else – convey this strange blend of conflicting aesthetic elements, and it’s to be seen even in his lyrics. Sanuka is the New Voice, but it’s not really New. To be New there must be an Old and a rejection of the Old. Sanuka doesn’t reject it; he is downright indifferent to it. He is, and performs with, his own standards.
The male pop voice in here evolved with Neville Fernando, moved into Clarence Wijewardena, and found its way through Jothipala in the seventies, Rookantha Gunathilake in the eighties, and a horde of names in the nineties (culminating with Athma Liyanage and Sangeeth Wijesuriya on the one hand and Athula Adikari, among a great many others, on the other) before meeting the new century, the new millennium, with Bathiya and Santhush, who in turn gave way to Iraj Weerarathne and a set of pretenders who never transcend their imitativeness and hence paled away. Sanuka is the New Voice because he surpasses all these; he is no longer trying to imitate, to pay homage. He’s done that, but now he’s through with it. His “Saragaye” was, I think, the ultimate culmination, though he hasn’t stopped. It’s the most breathtaking local love song I have listened to since Kashyapa Dissanayake’s and Nelu Adikari’s “Ahasata Sonduruda”. It’s sincere, sentimental, but not sappy.
As good and popular as they were, neither Bathiya and Santhush nor Iraj had the luxury of the Web to help them reach a wider audience, because that wider audience didn’t surf online. They had their collaborators – Nilar Cassim and Wasantha Dukgannarala were their most frequently opted for lyricists – and they had their production houses. But they had to fight, and fight hard for every inch to win us over. (Tissa Abeysekera was one of the few commentators, during their time, who recognised Bathiya and Santhush for the pop revolutionaries they were, and would go out of his way to defend them.) What they fought for, they won, even if in later years they deteriorated. Sanuka comes from this line, this tradition, so to speak. He is a New Voice because he no longer makes it necessary to defy that line to gain new territory.
What’s so obvious and yet enigmatic about Sanuka is that no one understands him, or more specifically why they like him. They’re tantalisingly short of not even GETTING him. And for the record, some people don’t. They like his conception of the medium he’s in – the melodies, the vocal range, the lyrics – and he himself has pointed out in several interviews that the sleek amalgamation of all these elements is what makes him so popular, and varied, but that’s a despicably easy cop-out. Of course it’s the melody, the vocal range, and the lyrics that make up any vocalist, popular or not. What else could there be? I think the more appropriate answer is that he can paddle several genres: pop, rap, baila, even devotional. Here a brief perusal of his work, and the reactions they have gleaned, might help us get it, and get him.
If there’s an almost eternal sense of youth in Sanuka’s work it’s because he started young and is still very much young. His first real song, a tribute to his mother titled (what else?) “Amma”, debuted on YouTube in April 2011, and as of today counts in almost 60,000 views; it was followed eight months later by a cover version of “Hallelujah” and a further year and eight months later by another cover, this time of Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors”. These two were, to be sure, largely derivative, but they did open up his range, before he moved into the Great Theme of encountered love with “Mal Wiyan”, on February 2015 (it presently counts in more than 515,000 views).
An attempt at a rap single (“Oluwa Wikarayai”) was deliberately absurd but also stunning; it invited comments as positive as “I don’t know the language, but I love your style” and “You rap better than most” which compelled a return after his next effort, “Sihinaye” (shot like a commercial, and manifestly a lesser work). “His Tin” (April 2016) was also breathtakingly refreshing, if not a minor, rap single, but it’ll probably be remembered as the song that came before his first big hit, “Saragaye” (August 2016), which as of today courts more than 1,060,000 views. His next single came a year later, an unusually lengthy interval for him but one which yielded another hit: “Perawadanak”, which schoolboys and even schoolgirls I know are still swooning over. Paraphrasing those two YouTube comments, it showed that he was better than most even to those who didn’t even know his language; an achievement in itself since, after all, rap doesn’t thrive on a language (it’s formally self-referential) while pop singles do.
“Saragaye” and “Perawadanak” and even “Mal Wiyan” represent Sanuka at his best, his most appealing. They are all about encounters – short, temporary, never properly fulfilled – and they end abruptly, sometimes happily, often unhappily. “Perawadanak” isn’t even a love song: it’s a carefully crafted, promising love story that is tragically stalled midway. People like it because they’re tired of listening to the same ditties on romance again and again. They are tired of coming across lovers crooning over insurmountable, impenetrable walls (literal and metaphorical) and they are fatigued by the onslaught of cheap, unappealing music videos. They don’t want the vocalist to be his own star. Sanuka isn’t. That’s where his package is.
And that’s where his sense of mystery comes from. In an interview with one of those banal but disconcertingly popular gossip websites he has openly refused to disclose his age. He’s a teenage heartthrob, a contemporary Brian Hyland and Paul Anka: puppy love is what he’s got, and we like him all the more for it. We don’t care for how old or how young he is because we’re so enflamed by what he represents: the deepest, most potent dreams of romance we never dare to have, simply because we’ve never encountered it beyond a few glimpses. Hyland sang of a girl named Ginny he met “a couple of days ago”. That’s the kind of crisp, terse love stories Sanuka tells us. Because of that, he appeals not to youth, but to adolescence. Quite obviously, the fact that “Saragaye” spurred schoolboy bands in several schools, especially his own indicates, that we’re into something new. And someone new. Here. Now.
Photo of Sanuka by Flexus Labs
Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, October 15 2017
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