"Suman's music thus, despite its participation in the commercial mode of production, moves through several modes of dissemination, working at times through the industry, at times outside it. More than the urban folk (song) hero that his politics can easily make him out to be, Suman Chatterjee is a professional musician who produces and sells his craft to earn a livelihood out of an industry that has built itself on the commodification of music. At the same time, he consciously reaches out to audiences through direct communication from both stage and street. The corpus of Suman Chatterjee's work as a whole palpably connects the Bengali music industry in an ambivalent, though polydirectional, loop circulating between Stage--Studio--Street, that, as of April 1997, plays on"
---Sudipto Chatterjee ('Staging Street, Streeting Stage:Suman Chatterjee and the new Bengali Song' in Radical Street Performance: an international anthology, ed. Jan Cohen-Cruz)
While reading the last paragraph of this rare English language excursus on 1997's Suman Chatterjee and 2014's Kabir Suman, I was wondering how beautifully these words have stretched out into the future.
Kabir Suman কবীর সুমন has by and large ceased participating in what Sudipto babu here calls 'the commercial mode of production'. Kabir now produces his own music on his website without any subscription charges which means not only does he control the production and dissemination of his music but he also subverts the music market by making his music available to all without the money making agenda.
It is a fitting culmination of these insightful observations made 17 years back!
Kabir Suman has been and continues to be 'free to sing'!
His street running like a 'tedious argument of insidious intent' has now matured into the World Wide Web: a non-commercial aesthetic platform!
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