A soup song? Ring a bell? Remember Dhanush taking the world by storm with his mega hit Kolaveri Di? He speaks of a soup song, a song for “soup boys”.  This genre of bar song or soup song probably existed in Tamil cinema before, but since Kolaveri Di, a soup song has come to mean a song that a dejected, rebuffed male will sing to the object of his affection; a girl who ruthlessly crushed his romantic hopes. There has emerged something of a tradition of soup songs in recent times and one such recent composition has landed its makers into some…well, hot soup if you’ll pardon the pun.

The soup song is the litany of the spurned admirer

(Image Source)

(Image Source)

Presumably a boy decides to pin his hopes on a girl who is (probably) way out of his league and then feels affronted when she turns him down like a blanket on a hot Chennai summer afternoon and refuses to give him the proverbial “ghaas”. So the boy feels compelled to sing his soup boy song blaming the poor girl from pretty much everything that is wrong in his life.

Note how in Kolaveri di, the rejected boy claims that the girl has white skin but a “black heart” and proceeds to blame her for his “dark future”.  Note his plight, having to drown his sorrows in a glass of scotch that is also full of tears! Now of course his life is empty, and his life is in reverse gear; all because of the girl’s rejection. He is dying and she is happy… How! He laments that he and the other soup boys have no choice!

The soup song in trouble?

Recently the “Beep Song” by Simbu and Anirudh has had a police complaint registered against the makers for indecent representation of women. By all accounts this song sinks to a new low. For his part Anirudh said that he has nothing to do with the song and Simbu said that the song was never meant to go public.

It would see that soup boys are in trouble! Though soup boy sympathizers may protest that this is a curb on the freedom of speech, many feel that boys and go can go nurse their wounded egos in private; why make a song and dance about it all!

 

Author: Reena Daruwalla