At the age of 11, when most children are clueless of what they want to be when they grow up, Jinadevan Hasu wrote poems in Malayalam and found a strange passion for music. Somewhere in his house in Kallar, a small town in Thiruvananthapuram, was a computer left behind by a brother. He switched it on to find English songs of Michael Jackson and Backstreet Boys. “Old music,” he called them, as he listened and got drawn towards music from the West. Without realising it, he began picking the language he heard, and one day, wrote his poems in English.
The poems became songs that with a group of friends he would turn into music videos. An album called ‘Antibeauty’ got made and months later, American video hosting service Vevo verified his channel and his music video, 'Remorse'.
Now 22, Jinadevan is setting foot in the world of internet music. “I have always wanted to sing but I have had no training and I didn’t think I was skilled enough. But once I discovered the internet, I began to explore all sorts of music, genres I hadn’t heard of before,” he says.
There was no one else to tell him about world music. At home, his mother listened to songs on the radio but that was all. So Jinadevan had to find them all on his own, and when he liked the music, he read the lyrics and learnt to sing them. “I didn’t realise I was picking up the English language by doing so. Not just music, I’d also watch movies with subtitles and pay attention to the new words.”
He did go to a government school in English medium but Jinadevan believes it is from music that he picked up the language. On the internet, he chose the name ‘inixial’ – what he says is his artiste name. “I wanted ‘initial’ but that was taken. All it means is the beginning of things,” he says.
Friends with ‘similar dreams’ joined Jinadevan – in creating VFX effects, in editing, in helping with the background music. The sound he preferred was R&B (Rhythm and Blues), after listening to many genres.
“I was attracted by the melancholy of it,” he says. ‘Antibeauty’ has 11 songs, with names like Destination, Remorse, Soft Violence, Illusions and Fugitive among them. “They are all in between fantasy and reality, like a poem,” he says The music video of ‘Destination’ is also dark, deliberately so, he adds.
“When I say Antibeauty, I don’t mean ‘against beauty’, but the beauty in ‘anti’. Like a beautiful garden full of venomous snakes,” Jinadevan says.
He is clear about what he wants to write, just as he was all those years ago, as a boy in school. Jinadevan had told his parents he wanted to do music engineering after school but they made him join a degree course at a college far away. Every day, Jinadevan would take two buses to go there, and sit in class like a robot, he says.
“The only good thing about it was the music I listened to during the bus rides. At one time, it got so bad that I didn’t go to class, but took random buses without looking at the board names, one after the other. The college let my parents know that I have been missing class. I dropped out and turned to music full time. There is a team of us, called Trident 84. We do odd jobs to make money and then pool it together to create the music we love,” he says.
Watch 'Remorse':