If we are to understand what a ‘skit’ in a musical album means, we only have to look at 30, Adele’s last record. In it, the British superstar sings about her divorce, pouring her heart out like a waterfall in a lonely valley that’s waiting to be heard. The third track is called My little love, where the music stops abruptly around the two-minute mark only to be interjected with the recording of a real-life conversation she has with Angelo, her six-year-old son. The mother tells the child about her turmoil. “I feel like I really don’t know what I’m doing,” Adele says. “Oh, at all?” her son asks. “At all,” she replies at the end of the non-lyrical interlude that takes the album’s narrative arch forward, which is what a skit embodies in the musical sense. Here, Adele uses that recording to explain the story of her divorce better, and the heartbreak that two parents in love go through when they decide to part ways. 
    
Such skits seem to be making a comeback in the music industry with a slew of global biggies — Lana Del Ray, The Weeknd and Frank Ocean among others — employing the ingredient to flavour their songs with a sprinkling of drama. The Indian indie circuit hasn’t missed the bus either. Mocaine is a Delhi-based collective that released The Birth of Billy Munro late last year. It’s the first installment in an ongoing concept project that’s divided into three parts — an album, short film and novella. The completed album is 43 minutes long, and in it, each track starts with an author-cum-narrator taking the tale of the troubled titular character forward, before the actual song starts. They begin with a skit, in other words.

Rajesh Radhakrishnan aka Dope Daddy (right) performs live with Dopeadelicz crew mate Tony Sebastian