Red Roadu | Pleasure of Silly lyrics in Tamil Cinema

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There are songs where you sit with the lyrics, look for metaphors, connect them to literature and slowly uncover what the writer was trying to say.

And then there is Red Road-u from Jil Jung Juk. Jingaru Jangu Jingaru Jangu Jingajam..

Three dudes get drunk/high, somebody starts blabbering, somebody else joins in, and somehow we end up with a lorry crashing into the White House, a man losing his veshti to a fire, patta patti underwear, another lorry, a bottle singing a song, a rapping rooster and finally... a philosophical duck. Eppadi da yoosikureenga? I need whatever the lyricist cum director Dheeraj was on!

I love this song so much. For the longest time I thought the lyrics were just a bunch of random words chosen because they sounded funny together. Which, to be fair, they absolutely are. But they're also not entirely random. There are actually two tiny stories buried inside all this nonsense. And once I realised that, the song became even more fun everytime I listen to.

Sarukku per-u Last Day:

It starts with the appropriate warning:

Indha sarakku per-u "Last Day"
Adhavadhu kadaisi naal
Naale round-u, non-stop sound-u...

Basically: this drink is called Last Day.

The final day.

Four rounds. Non-stop sound.

From this point onwards, expecting normal human thought would be our mistake.

Red Roadu Lorry!

First, we are given a very serious traffic incident.

Red road-u.. Rendu lorry
Onnu right odichu.. Nera poi
Vetta veliyila nikkura.. White House gate..
Ulla naduvula modhidichu

So there are two lorries on the road.

One turns right and goes straight into the gate of the White House.

Why is there a White House sitting in the middle of this drunk Tamil lorry universe?

No idea. Don't ask unnecessary questions.

Seri... accident aairuchu. Adhukku enna?

Naturally, somebody arrives to watch.

Hey motta veyilila.. patta pagalil idha
Vedikka paakka vandhaan.. Namma vella kodi vendhan

And then:

Pattinathu boodham.. Thee pudippadha.. patthi erivadha..
Ayyayyoo

Patthi erivadha.. Pothi dhooram ninnu paapadha vittu puttaan
Andha parakka.. vetti payyan
Pakkam ninnu.. kaiyya katti
Vaetti thee pattu.. karugi kazhati uttu odinaan

Our man could have simply stood at a safe distance and watched the drama.

But no.

He goes closer.

Too close.

His veshti catches fire.

And he has no choice but to remove it and run.

This is already a perfectly complete quircky scene. You can almost imagine it visually - huge accident, people gathered around, smoke everywhere, and somewhere in the corner one fellow is suddenly sprinting away because his veshti is burning like Vadivelu.

But Dheeraj Vaidy is not done with him.

The obvious question now is:

What happened to this poor man?

Ye… pattaa patti.. mattum mattinu
Sittaa parandhaan da.. avan right hand kaatti
Left lorry yeri.. history aanaan da

He is now running around wearing nothing but his patta patti underwear.

He sticks out his right hand.

Stops another lorry.

Gets in.

And...

history aanaan da.

He becomes history.

That's it.

Character introduced. Veshti burned. Escaped in underwear. Took a lorry. Vanished from the screenplay forever.

Where did he go? Different district? Different state?

Did he start a new life somewhere because returning home after this incident was impossible? (if it were me, I would have done that lol!)

Did the lorry driver ever ask why a half-naked man was hitchhiking from the White House?

The song provides no answers.

And I don't want any.

But listen to how the words move

This is the part I love more than the actual story.

Summa spell panni paarunga:

Pattaa patti... mattum mattinu...
Sittaa parandhaan... right hand kaatti...
Left lorry yeri... history aanaan...

There is this chain reaction happening between the words.

Pattaa - patti - mattum - mattinu - sittaa

Then:

parandhaan - right hand - kaatti

Then:

lorry - yeri - history

Some of these aren't even conventional rhymes. They're connected by syllables, accents, English words, Tamil words, whatever happens to sound good after the previous thing.

The lyric doesn't seem to move according to meaning.

Sound itself is pulling the song forward.

One word gives birth to another word.

Which is probably also a fairly accurate representation of how drunk people tell stories.

You start talking about a red lorry and fifteen seconds later you're explaining how some guy escaped wearing patta patti.

And then... whatever this is

The story temporarily disappears.

Ba ba ba
Bottle la thaan
Paattonnu
Paduthorangudhu

There's apparently a song sleeping inside the bottle.

Of course there is.

Thatti thadavi
Thuruvi nee
Kottum aruvi

Thatti. Thadavi. Thuruvi.

It sounds sooooo good.

It feels nice just moving those sounds around in your mouth.

And then:

Ra ra ra
Rum-ula thaan
Raakozhi rap paadudhu
Kokkarakkoo koovu nee
Kottum kolavi.. ye ye ye

A raakozhi is rapping inside rum. Kafkaesque imagery right there lol. Kollywood Metamorphosis right there.

At this point the song has completely earned the right to do whatever it wants.

Again, look at the sounds:

Ra ra ra — rum — raakozhi — rap

And:

Kokkarakkoo koovu nee... kottum kolavi

It is almost childish.

Not childish as in poorly written - childish in the best possible way. Like somebody discovering that words are funny objects and you can throw them at one another purely because of how they sound.

Meaning becomes secondary.

Rhythm becomes the joke.

Okay. Enough Song. Next Word: Duck.

And just when you think we are going back to something resembling a normal song:

Ada paattu urangattum..
Adha thalli vittu.. Light-ah oram kattuvom
Route-ah maatthumaa..
Ada next word.. Vaathu maa

This might be my favourite transition.

Let the song sleep. Move it aside. Let's change the route. What's the next word?

Duck.

Vaathu maa.

It's almost like watching three drunk friends playing a word game.

Nobody knows where the conversation is going anymore, so somebody simply announces the next topic.

Vaathu.

And suddenly namma director cum lyricist becomes modern kannadasan.

Vaathennum
Vaarthaikku thaan
Neththonnu yosichen
Ahaan
Kaikippo mike-ettinaa
Haikoo kavidhai..

Apparently he was thinking about the word vaathu yesterday.

Give him the mic.

He has prepared a haiku.

The seriousness of this announcement compared to what follows kills me.

Here comes the poem:

Ye vella vaathu
Theppa kolathula
Thoppul kuliyalumaa

A white duck is taking a... belly-button bath in the pond.

Again, an image no one in human history necessarily needed.

But now I cannot unsee it.

And watching all this is a crow.

Andam kaakkaa
Kandu kavundhuchu
Underwater maa

The crow sees the duck doing its thing, tries the same stunt...

...and goes underwater maa.

Kavundhuchu.

Finished.

There is actually a tiny philosophy hiding inside this ridiculous image.

The duck can float because being in water is simply part of what a duck is.

The crow looks at it and goes, "Naanum pannuvaen."

Bad decision.

In other words: someone else's natural way of living may not be yours.

What works beautifully for one creature can drown another.

You can interpret it as imitation, comparison, jealousy, blindly copying somebody else's path - whatever you want.

But what makes it funny is that the song absolutely refuses to behave like it has delivered wisdom.

Just:

Underwater maa.

And we move on. He could have elaborated but no. Just open ended. Take it as a funny story, take it as philosophy, take it as kudigaaran ularal.. it's upto you!

Controlled nonsense

That's what I eventually realised I love about Red Road-u.

It sounds like nonsense.

But it's actually very carefully constructed nonsense.

There is a difference.

Random words wouldn't be this satisfying to listen to.

The lyrics constantly find little sonic connections:

road-u / lorry / right / White House

pattaa / patti / mattum / mattinu / sittaa

right hand / kaatti

lorry / yeri / history

rum / raakozhi / rap

kokkarakkoo / koovu / kottum

Tamil casually crashes into English. English words are bent until they behave like Tamil words. A rhyme appears, disappears and gets replaced by another internal rhyme. The sentence follows the sound instead of forcing the sound to follow the sentence.

And because the entire setting is three intoxicated men improvising, even the things that would normally feel like bad songwriting become part of the character of the song.

Why did the lorry hit the White House?

Because White House sounded good there.

Why patta patti?

Because listen to it.

Why does the duck have a thoppul?

Please stop asking questions.

That freedom is the whole point.

And the music is equally unhinged

Then there is Vishal Chandrasekar's production.

This was one of his early films, and the whole Jil Jung Juk album has this slightly mad experimental energy to it. But Red Road-u especially feels like everybody in the studio was allowed to keep adding one more stupid idea.

And thankfully nobody stopped them.

Santhosh Narayanan, Sean Roldan (he does the weird gibberish noises fyi) and Vishal Chandrasekar together already give the vocals this wonderful gang-of-friends feel. It never sounds like a singer standing inside a booth delivering a polished playback performance.

It sounds like people participating in the joke.

The chorus responses...

The little "Ahaan!" during the vaathu portion...

The strange vocal noises...

The sudden drops...

Tiny sounds entering and leaving...

Things appearing on one side of the stereo field and moving elsewhere...

Random little details buried behind the vocals...

Even that ending, where everyone seems to progressively lose whatever remained of their sanity.

Listen with a decent pair of earphones and there is stuff happening everywhere.

I'm not an audio engineer, so I'm not going to pretend I know exactly what they did technically. But I know the feeling I get from it:

someone actually cared.

A lot.

A throwaway comedy song didn't need this much attention.

That's exactly why I enjoy it.

There are songs where every detail exists to make the song grander.

Here every detail exists to make the song more fun.

And that's an art too.

One last thing

Comedy songs are easy to dismiss.

You laugh at them when the movie releases, quote a few lines with friends, and eventually forget about them.

But making something genuinely silly without making it lazy is probably harder than it looks.

Red Road-u is silly.

Extremely silly.

But listen to how much craft is hiding underneath that silliness - the phonetics, the Tamil-English collisions, the mini stories, the performances, the arrangement, the sound effects, the completely unnecessary duck philosophy.

Three-and-a-half minutes.

A lorry.

A burning veshti.

Patta patti.

A disappearing man.

A song sleeping inside a bottle.

A rapping rooster.

One duck.

One unfortunate crow.

Every time I revisit this song, some tiny thing makes me smile again.

If you haven't heard Red Road-u in a while, don't just play it in the background.

Put on your earphones.

Listen to the words.

Follow the lorry.

And most importantly...

don't copy the duck. haha

isai yin mohzi is sometimes fun! (unnecessary plug to the website ikr)

Follow the full line by line english translation, trivia etc., here:-

Nandri Vanakkam