Chanuka Moragoda, Yaka Crew, and “Adawwa”
By: Uditha Devapriya
Tags: Music, Dance, Sri Lanka, Culture, Drums

Chanuka Moragoda, Yaka Crew, and “Adawwa”

“We pander to not just teenagers, but also their parents.” (Chanuka Moragoda)

The tastes and preferences of the Sinhala youth are changing, and the young Sinhala artist is making those changes happen fast. Some of the most exciting changes to impact the arts have been due to the efforts of young adolescents working with feverish intensity. They start out relatively penniless, and although most of them hail from the suburban middle class they are, it must be noted, certainly not rich enough to indulge in the sort of luxuriant wastefulness that the English speaking class does.

Plebeian and democratic in their outlook, they pander to the majority without insulting their intelligence, and they resort to what little they have at their disposal: YouTube, the patronage of friends and relatives, and the media. To a considerable extent, this explains the rise of Yaka Crew and the person behind it, Chanuka Moragoda. If the image of young, suburban, middle class Sinhala artists is real, Chanuka and his crew bear out much of the stereotypes associated with those artists.

I haven’t been to many shows, but two Saturdays ago I attended one where they performed: Adawwa. If it wasn’t quite the mega show that TV and radio outlets organise to draw massive crowds and boost their ratings, it was definitely the kind I was clamouring for. You know it’s a Yaka Crew event the moment you see the yak beraya onstage and it is used for every other item. The band didn’t actually pioneer the use of that beraya in their performances, but — and to me this is what distinguishes them — they were the first to incorporate it in their skits along with songs and dances. It brings out the traditional element of what they are doing, the reverence of the past that has become an integral part of their oeuvre. To understand why and how, it’s instructive to revisit Chanuka’s story.

It’s not only the social milieu, musical preferences, and cultural grasp that bring the members together; it’s also their schools. Chanuka and most Crew members were schooled at Ananda College, while two others were educated at D. S. Senanayake College. Chanuka himself had been a prodigy, if not at music then certainly at dancing: he underwent a ves mangalya at the age of 14. In 2015, he was tasked with reviving probably the most important dancing event organised at school level in Colombo, Ananda Pratibha. Until then “the show was revived in intervals of two or three years, only to vanish completely from the scene in 2012.” It was a challenge he couldn’t have met overnight, though he did; by reinventing the whole show, he resurrected it so well it became an annual event. The concept he marketed to resurrect it was as novel as it was simple: just dance with the devil. “Yakku balanna warew!” took everyone by storm.

By then Chanuka had established himself. A student of Ravibandu Vidyapathy — who, as my friend Dimitra Abeysekera constantly laments, has not been given the kind of official acclaim he deserves — Chanuka had studied drumming for three months, after which he had shifted to poetry and singing. Having started at his daham pasala at the Susilaramaya in his hometown Malabe, Chanuka had soon been entranced by jana gee. Inevitably he would join the Ranwala Balakaya, and after being selected to a competition he wound up winning one contest after another, becoming first in 2011 — he was in Grade Nine at the time — in the pahatha rata solo category at an island-wide competition called Sarala Kavi Thala. For his O Levels and A Levels, he had selected dancing: his first love.

In 2016, he made and released his first music video, “Anapu Tokka”, and in 2017, around the time I met him for the first time, he’d released his third single, his most popular until then judging by the YouTube views, “Mayamkari.” Both these delve into the consciousness of the suburban Sinhala Buddhist middle class youth: “Anapu Tokka” is about a bunch of middle class Sinhala schoolboys who are lovingly reprimanded by their teacher, and “Mayamkari” is about an affair between a boy and a girl that ends with the girl cheating on the boy: “based on a real incident”, it was shot on a shoestring budget, though the YouTube views — more than 10,000 and that in just three four days — far surpassed the limits imposed on the production, turning him into a viral phenomenon.

Chanuka Moragoda

Things began to unravel soon after 2015. “We decided to set up a percussion band. The name was already there: Yaka Crew.” Their debut event didn’t take long to come: “a company the big shots of which had seen us perform at school hired us for a conference at the BMICH. We had precious little to do: a few dancing items, plus two Hindi songs.”

The boys do not recall what the conference was about, but they do recall what it led to: Interflash, organised in late 2015. “At that point, we realised that the resources in our hands were inadequate to meet the demand we were inadvertently creating. We not only needed drums and dances — groups like NAADRO had pioneered that area already — we also needed guitars and, more importantly, songs. We wanted to take it beyond the conventional troupe. That’s why we incorporated a bass guitar. The moment we let go of it, people began giving us negative reviews. In 2016, except for Transcendence, organised by the Interact Club of Ananda, we didn’t get breathing space to experiment. That came in 2017 when we performed at Illuminate, where, for the first time, we included a keyboard.”

Call if cultural fusion, call it cultural crossover, there’s really no better word for what Yaka Crew is doing. And yet, to limit their work to these terms would be to limit their work altogether, a point Chanuka brings up: “In our first few shows we tried to be different. True, we brought the bass guitar with the yak beraya, but this does not mean we were aiming at the sort of fusion other artists had engaged in.” Besides, others weren’t grappling with traditional music and dance the way these teenagers were.

“None of those pop stars of today include the beraya or the natuma in their performances,” Chanuka tells me, not a little frustrated, and I ask him why. “For the life of me, I don’t know. Are they prejudiced against it, are they so obsessed with electronic music they are blind to the potential of traditional music?” Chanuka tells me that “audiences respond very differently to our work. With other artists in a show, they’d quickly dance along. With us, they’d take their phones and video us.” It was certainly not what they wanted — “We wanted to be accepted on the same level as others, to be a part of the athal” — but fortunately, audiences have matured enough to treat them as the pop cultural fusionists they are.

What of shoots and music videos? In 2017 they released “Api Enawo”, a novel reworking of Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” that brought together all they could muster at that point. One year later they, were putting their socks on for their second single, “Yakkuth Pitiyata Awa”, which collected in one day the number of YouTube views it took them one month to collect for their debut. “See, most local bands prefer doing covers because people know what the songs being covered are. There’s nothing new in them, except for the instrumentation. We want to go beyond that mentality.” With that in mind, they plunged into another single, and music video, in 2019: “Karawala Hodda”, yet another YouTube hit.

So what’s the message these boys want to put out? Though he looms over them, and though he’s very much the “band leader”, Chanuka emphasises that Yaka Crew isn’t only about him. “This is a collective enterprise. I make sure we aren’t cheated — yes, we have been cheated a number of times before — and that we get paid for what we’re worth. On the other hand, this being Sri Lanka, where people aren’t too fluent in the language of access, English, we have to compromise on earning massive profits, at least in the short term, because first and foremost we need to get our message across a wide audience.” As for reaching foreign audiences, “we realise we need to go overseas, but with people conversant in neither Sinhala nor Tamil this is going to be more difficult that you would think.”

Acknowledging that by creating a precedent of sorts in the industry “we have created a whole new segment for ourselves, inadvertently siphoning off fans from other segments and giving them a new experience”, Chanuka admits that they are resolute in what they’re aiming at. “Two years ago, we set a trend. That does not mean we finished our journey. We are on our way up. But we’re ready to sweat it out till we are there. At that point, you will understand what exactly we’re doing.”

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com