Campaign earworms: Candidates' teams compose catchy tunes to woo voters

To ensure their election campaigns have a lasting impact on voters, candidates are working in full swing to bring out carefully composed and catchy campaign songs in Kannada. 

Congress party’s candidate for Bangalore North M V Rajeev Gowda’s “Rajeeva Nammava” (Rajeeva is ours) song banks on familiarising Gowda and the party’s promises. Amaan Asim, part of Gowda’s campaign, said an external agency put the track together. 

“The goal was simple: it had to be a catchy song. One part of the jingle aims to highlight him and another part highlights the party’s promises,” he said. 

The song mentions the guarantee schemes introduced by the Congress, linking them to Gowda as a “development-focused and service-oriented people’s leader”. 

Bangalore South BJP candidate L S Tejasvi Surya’s campaign song “Gellona Baa” (come, let’s win) was conceptualised by himself and filmmaker Vishal Atreya. With a rap portion that highlights Surya’s work in five years and his vision for the next five, it calls for votes for both him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

Atreya explained how the song came about. “Tejasvi sat down with me past midnight just one day before the nomination papers were filed. Through this song, we wanted to assure people he would continue to be there for them,” he said, adding that it was produced in about 16 hours. 

Shashank, a friend of Bangalore Central constituency’s Congress candidate Mansoor Ali Khan, composed the “Mansoor Nimmavaru” anthem. The whole process took about two days. Mansoor’s team is also using short tamate-beat jingles and popular film tunes. 

“One thing was to introduce him to the public and to emphasise who he is. The song highlights his main traits of being a Bengaluru huduga, an educationist, and an accessible leader, besides talking about the guarantees by Congress,” Shashank said.