@ NickH
Many of my western friends simply cannot listen to Indian music, however adventurous they may be with other musics. If they really don't like it, then what they have to say is not really relevant. But what does your friend say about non-fusion carnatic? It may be lyrically repetitious, but I don't see how it could be said that the melody "does not go anywhere." Would be interested to know.
While tastes are personal and some tastes are too personal to adjust, WCM has an eltist image and one factor is very complex compositions. But they make up for this with their superb sound and other factors. One thing here is that for a long time, the majority of CM (except the top of the pyramid) has ignored this one thing called 'tone', which is the first thing that takes over you when you listen to a WM or HM recording or even an all time classic film song. I know a not insignificant number of cases who turned away from CM as their first experience was ruined by a very poor quality or "apaswaram filled" recording. Having a mridangam on board gives the artiste a lot more opportunity to adjust the "energy level" of the performance. Then there is the tala, which because of it's typically short cycle length, keeps the melodic line constrained to a reasonably small length, but your friend might have wanted more space to explore before recapitulating (this one is really doubtful). But some of these are real excuses I've heard from many friends.
But none of this should be the prime factor with your friend. I just think he hasn't listened enough at all to gain any measure of familiarity with CM (and sadly there are few who go beyond the 1st 10 seconds). Familiarity is the very first step. Only then we can even talk about even superficial appreciation of an art. Having developed the ears to listen to WCM, I found chords strange to my ears at first, but a few days of listening and knowing the most popular compositions helped. Now I am an up and coming WCM rasika as well. In my experience, knowing Carnatic Music makes it very easy to appreciate and adapt my ears to a huge variety of genres (but I am not sure it's true the other way round).
The degree of difficulty and the complexity (and length) of a concerto for e.g. is far greater than a krithi once the gamakas are mastered. In CM it's about ragas, neravals, a large repertory, tanam (sadly going beyond the usual cliched phrases nowadays), talas, pallavis and the like. Very few compositions in CM are too long or too complex (not that it is impossible, but then no one would be able to understand them). Manodharma is 3 quarters of it.
There's also the other dimension of many CM songs following a "rondo" melodic format similar to A B A CB A where each letter denotes a different series of phrases (A is the typical pallavi, B the anupallavi, C the 1st half of the charanam, B is the 2nd part of it which differs only lyrically from the anupallavi). Dikshitar is an exception to the rule. The lighter numbers follow a pattern like A B A B A with each charanam returning to the pallavi and differentiated only by lyrics. This is not to say that concertos don't recapitulate (they do quite a LOT) or explore several variations of an opening theme (while we explore several lyrical variations of a charanam), but there are other formats. Each movement can be in a completely different style or key or tempo. They start somewhere and end elsewhere, sometimes on another continent and perhaps your friend prefers that sort of non-repetitive format. Or he wanted something more energetic. Maybe you should show him LGJ's incredible Dhaarini Telusukonti recording.
And regarding lyrics, I went almost 20 years listening to CM and just barely managing to understand the Tamil songs (and Sanskrit) and for all purposes I would be an illiterate in all the languages but my mother tongue, but I still liked it. I guess being familiar with many compositions compensated amply for the linguistic deficiency. Now I have sahityam.net to help me immensely in understanding quite a few of them, but still, one can be quite a rasika despite the illiteracy. For the record, I have zero knowledge of sight reading, but can appreciate WCM too. But I got there over time...not in 2 minutes.
But still, listening for extended durations of very heavy opera style vibrato remains out of reach...alas!
Coming back on track, one reason why fusion often strays into flash and fizz -- one popular excuse I hear regarding CM (or HM and especially WCM) is that they are all "too sentimental". The average non-rasika listener (the majority) really doesn't seem to want depth, the average listener prefers what fires up their nerves (something that can be done with just noise and bass). And then there are those who don't like any music...
