Let’s skit to the good part

Artistes dissect album skits, a musical tool that has recently made a comeback thanks to stars like Adele

If we are to understand what a ‘skit’ in a musical album means, we only have to look at 30, Adele’s last record. In it, the British superstar sings about her divorce, pouring her heart out like a waterfall in a lonely valley that’s waiting to be heard. The third track is called My little love, where the music stops abruptly around the two-minute mark only to be interjected with the recording of a real-life conversation she has with Angelo, her six-year-old son. The mother tells the child about her turmoil. “I feel like I really don’t know what I’m doing,” Adele says. “Oh, at all?” her son asks. “At all,” she replies at the end of the non-lyrical interlude that takes the album’s narrative arch forward, which is what a skit embodies in the musical sense. Here, Adele uses that recording to explain the story of her divorce better, and the heartbreak that two parents in love go through when they decide to part ways. 
    
Such skits seem to be making a comeback in the music industry with a slew of global biggies — Lana Del Ray, The Weeknd and Frank Ocean among others — employing the ingredient to flavour their songs with a sprinkling of drama. The Indian indie circuit hasn’t missed the bus either. Mocaine is a Delhi-based collective that released The Birth of Billy Munro late last year. It’s the first installment in an ongoing concept project that’s divided into three parts — an album, short film and novella. The completed album is 43 minutes long, and in it, each track starts with an author-cum-narrator taking the tale of the troubled titular character forward, before the actual song starts. They begin with a skit, in other words.

Rajesh Radhakrishnan aka Dope Daddy (right) performs live with Dopeadelicz crew mate Tony Sebastian

Adding layers

Amrit Mohan from Mocaine tells us that there are three reasons for that. The first is that the album itself acts as a stitch between the story and the novella, and the skits tie the two together. “Musically, it was to make an uninterrupted and seamless 43-minute album — you won’t be able to make out when one song segues into the other because the skits [help blur that line],” he says, before adding, “And the third and least obvious purpose is that there are a few red herrings that will make sense only when the [concept project’s] next installment comes out.”  

The entire musical exercise helps add a much more cohesive layer to the story-telling aspect of the larger creative product, Mohan says, but of course, skits in albums don’t always have to be accompanied with films or literature. The trend is widely believed to have galvanised in the 1980s when seminal hip-hop acts like Grandmaster Flash and De La Soul introduced it in their songs. They, and later stars like Eminem, would switch from rapping to tell the audience a story that is sometimes gritty and sometimes humorous. That’s exactly what Mumbai crew Dopeadelicz also did with their breakthrough track, Aai shapath. It takes a light-hearted dig at city cops, with crew members Tony Sebastian and Rajesh Radhakrishnan essaying the roles of a pot-smoker trying to convince an officer that he’s clean. When they perform this song live, it adds an element of mirth to the music. “The audience enjoys the whole thing because it’s a complete package. It’s like a play being enacted by the youth and the cop,” explains Rajesh Radhakrishnan aka Dope Daddy, who plays the policeman.

Amrit Mohan

Long live the album

Skits thus serve multiple purposes within the spectrum of music, but the question is, what does their evident return in the global industry tell us? Well, if anything, it tells us this — the concept of an album, with or without a skit, is not done and dusted yet. The fate of this musical medium has been debated long and hard in a digital age when shorter EPs have sidelined them and playlists rule the roost. But albums still hold their own place and people recognise that. Just consider this — 30 was streamed 55.7 million times within its very first week in November 2021, with 67 per cent of the album sales being physical ones. How about that?   

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