Wilbur Sargunaraj is a YouTube sensation and his new film, Simple Superstar just released in late 2012. Thomas Crowley reviews the film, and also adds to his earlier criticism of the man and his art …
Has Wilbur Sargunaraj changed, or have I? This was the question I kept asking myself as I watched the film Simple Superstar a few days back.
I first encountered Sargunaraj’s work in 2012, and I wrote about him in these pages, during my early days as a Kindle columnist. Billing himself as a simple man of humble status from rural Tamil Nadu, Sargunaraj promotes his music and his videos on many media platforms, both old and new. As he constantly reminds his audience, Times of India dubbed him “India’s First YouTube Sensation” back in 2009. He is probably most well-known for his low-fi techno hits like “Love Marriage” and “Chicken 65,” though his instructional videos (“How to Use Eastern Latrine”; “How to Tie the Lungi”) have also been popular. Sargunaraj avers that his mission in life is to make the common extraordinary. And he shares his own life story as an example of this mission, presenting himself as a naïve, enthusiastic country bumpkin, speaking English with a thick South Indian accent and celebrating rural life.
There’s only one problem: this self-presentation is almost certainly a fiction. As I detailed in some length in my last column, all the available evidence suggests that Sargunaraj is the alter-ego of a drummer and performer named Paul Benjamin, who was born in Canada but raised in India (largely in Tamil Nadu). I admire the audacity and wholeheartedness with which Benjamin has created his double, but I still feel uneasy about the fundamental mismatch between the form and the style of his work. If I may be allowed to quote myself: “Wilbur/Benjamin’s genuine enthusiasm for cultural exchange, though, clashes with his camp [so-bad-it’s-good] aesthetic… His songs and videos are low-fi to the point of ridiculousness, and his retro logos (bright pink colours, old cassette tapes) point to a hipster sensibility…. While his mode of presentation triggers the audience to expect ironic detachment and postmodern distancing, instead we find sincerity and cheer.
But I still find myself humming his tunes, and I still find his enthusiasm infectious, which is why I was excited to learn that Sarganaraj had recently uploaded his full-length movie, Simple Superstar, onto YouTube. Originally released in 2013 (it played at the Calgary International Film Festival), Simple Superstar got its YouTube release only in late 2014.
The film was a bit of a letdown, but then, that wasn’t a huge surprise. It’s difficult to go from manic three-minute music videos to 90+ minutes of plot development, character growth and thematic depth. The main plot of the film involves Sargunaraj, as a hotel clerk, playing the role of cultural ambassador and guide for an overwhelmed NRI, Naveen, who is coming to India for the first time to meet Reena, a girl he has fallen in love with on the Internet. Sargunaraj takes Naveen and Reena to his native village, and slowly shows Naveen how to love Tamil Nadu and its rural traditions. The acting could charitably be called uneven, and the plot points are predictable, aimed more at NRI or foreign audiences than Indian ones. But there are moments of genuine humour that peek through, including a running joke about an acquaintance of Wilbur’s dying a series of gruesome deaths.
The highlight of the movie is the music; although several songs were recycled from earlier hits, there were new touches, more deliriously low-fi editing, and some new catchy beats and rhythms. And Sargunaraj deserves praise for his sly critiques of India’s troubling obsession with fair skin and the continuing oppression of the caste system.
And yet my discomfort with Sargunaraj only increased after viewing the film. In my last column about Sargunaraj, I ended by explaining that, even if I didn’t quite understand his artistic choices, I appreciated his efforts to use music and humor to address social issues and facilitate cross-cultural understanding. Perhaps I have grown more cynical since then; perhaps I just did not delve deeply enough into the nature of Sargunaraj’s charitable activities. But I can definitely say that now, for me, even his social activism has started to raise uneasy questions.
I got my first sense of this in the closing minutes of Simple Superstar. After the main movie has ended, Sargunaraj shows footage of a concert he gave for workers in Dubai. The workers are mostly from India and Pakistan, no doubt working in precarious, exploitative conditions. Sargunaraj is in full self-promotion mode, and he clearly wants to the viewer to see what a good person he is for mingling with the common people and performing a show for them. There is an extended footage of a man from Pakistan thanking Sargunaraj and praising him for taking the time to be with the workers. No doubt Sargunaraj’s intentions are noble, but there is something both disingenuous and paternalistic about the way he portrays himself as a man of the people, especially when one considers Sargunaraj’s real identity, as a Canadian-born, internationally-educated musician with a background in video marketing and social media branding.
I had to know more about this perplexing character, so I turned to his natural environment: YouTube. This turned up a series of short videos he made for “Why Poverty?” a multimedia project whose stated goal is to get people to think more seriously about the root causes of poverty. However, with funders like the Ford Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, it seems unlikely that “Why Poverty?” will go very far in questioning the entrenched economic order that has enriched the Fords and the Gates (and the Tatas and the Ambanis, it must be added) while impoverishing much of humanity.
For the project, Sargunaraj made three videos called “Wilbur Goes Poor,” in which he visits slums and impoverished villages, and prides himself on making the (hopefully entirely self-evident) point that poor people are people too, and should be treated as such. To tackle poverty, his proposed solution is to “enter into the world of the poverty and the poor people.” This kind of exposure and basic empathy is surely important, but it is hopelessly naïve to think that this alone will even begin to challenge the economic and political structures and processes that ensure an ever-widening gap between rich and poor.
Sargunaraj even sings “The Poverty Song,” full of platitudes like, “Learn to be simple, so we all can simply live. Don’t turn away from others and make sure you always give.” Dear reader, I was about to abandon all hope in Sargunaraj. But then this set of lyrics cropped up in the middle of the song: “Do you know what neoliberal policies can do? Supporting corporations but not me and you. Why not join our hands and our voices today? Make the world so happy, there is another way.”
Sargunaraj, ever the enigma. Wilbur, if the problem is economic policies and corporate power in the age of neoliberalism, and the solution is to join hands and voices (a pretty clear endorsement of collective action, as far as I can tell), why does so much of your song dwell on the importance of individual acts of charity, which do nothing to unite people in challenging the larger structures of oppression that breed poverty?
As a song writer and as a character, Wilbur Sargunaraj is charming. His short YouTube music videos remain campy, light-hearted gems. But the deeper one gets into his back-story and his political engagement, the more one wishes that one had remained on the surface.
