Sri Lankan music videos have seen a huge revolution. But as with all things, you get the good, the bad, the ugly and the absurd. 

Many videos have upped the ante in terms of the quality of the production with tasteful visuals and a great story to tell. Others blatantly ape western rap videos. Another set of videos aim to gain more views using tasteless shock value. The rest? Questionable and meaningless at best. Nevertheless there's always a lesson or two to be derived and learnt from the content of these videos. 

We talked to a few people who shared their opinions with us. Here are the lessons they learnt and what they think of local music videos.

Navam
“1. Most Sri Lankan women are prone to cheating.
2. Most Sri Lankan women are gold diggers.
3. Shades/sunglasses and a relatively new European car are symbols of affluence.
4. Most Sri Lankan guys suffer from undiagnosed bipolar disorder - emotional state can go from heartbroken, wallowing and crying, to suicide, and then to murderous rage in the space of 2 out-of-tune verses, and an eight-bar verse by a local rapper.
5. Most poor Sri Lankan village guys will end up being successful; primarily to show the gold diggers, mentioned in point 2, what they could've had.”

Shehani
“Iraj’s videos - if a girl is interested in you, you probably have something she needs. If she seduces you, you would probably get robbed! Lol.”

Nicole
“You think this is a bloody hotel? Come and eat! On a more serious note, women always seem to break hearts or die.”

Rizman
“Insert borderline adult rated scene with relatively unknown model. Watch the view count reach astronomical figures on YouTube.”

Menaka
“Too much of make-up. Annoying love stories. Too much of colour. No dress sense. The girl is always the reason for the guy's downfall. The singers with sad faces. Sometimes the video doesn't make any sense to the song.”

Kamanthi
“-Cheating by both parties is the most common feature. 
-If you break-up that's the end of your life. 
-If the mother or father doesn't like it then you tend to elope.
- A happily ever after couple never exists. 
- If one exists either the girl or the guy is disabled (but it's very rare).
- BUT there are also those handful of them which go well with the song and even give out a message.” 

Nimra
“Tormented love stories, random homosexuality, a lot of hair tosses. (It’s ALWAYS a girl with long hair in videos), choreographed dance moves that suddenly burst into scene, a party scene with some sponsored food product. It feels a like a long commercial sometimes. SIGH.”

Dinika 
“What Sri Lankan music videos have taught me is that you don't really need to be a good singer to be famous... there are so many other ways like mentioned above - girls, half naked girls, totally naked girls, cars, shades etc. But to be fair and surprisingly there are still some very decent and meaningful videos. But sadly people find the indecent songs more entertaining. Now coming to think of it Old is Gold.”

Chavika
“It is mostly depressing garbage about relationships. You get onto a bus and by the time you get down you are several degrees depressed. End of a relationship is the end of world so you inflect self-harm - eg. drug abuse, cutting oneself and suicide. It reinforces behaviours of learned helplessness. Defeatist bullshit mostly.”

Melanie
“I've been feeling very disappointed lately seeing these 98% useless videos with some nonsensical lyrics. I believe most of the so called musicians like Iraj are making videos for money, nothing else. They do claim that those videos are conveying a message to society but if they were truly concerned about the message being conveyed, they could have made the same video with less crudeness. Who would want to use a little kid for such a video? By showing how she's getting killed, what kind of a message does he try to convey? I believe, people, at least a majority of people do acknowledge that there are psychopaths out there, had it been his intention, he could have showed the same storyline, with less graphical scenes! Just like his previous ashawari music video, I didn't know he was talking about the drug usage! Lol. If his true intention was to show how drugs can ruin one’s life he could have made it easily, without showing that sports bra scene. That part was deliberately included in the video to increase the number of views, hence the cash flow. The very recent one, what's the point of showing such sadistic crudeness?? He's just throwing ideas at those people, especially the young generation, who are curious, who would like to experiment with new stuff, it's just giving more ideas. If he really wanted to show what a woman could go through under a hands of a psycho, the same scenes could have been used with different techniques like, blurring, showing at a distance, shadow, etc. and add even more weight to the video. But no, it's purely done for the money.
I believe this new music video trend is doing more harm to the young minds than any 'message' the makers say the songs 'convey'. When we were small we used to listen to songs, not watch songs, but nowadays, you can watch songs without being bothered to pay attention to lyrics or music because lyrics and melody are horrible! I must say, there are still few good singers left with great songs but they receive less publicity as there's nothing to 'see' in such songs.”

By Rihaab Mowlana