Veteran Music composer Bappi Lahiri recently fired a salvo towards Hindi film music by drawing parallel between modern day songs and one day cricket. Having domiciled a career in the music industry for more than five decennium and boasting a portfolio of several chartbusters like “Yaad Aa Raha Hai”, “Yaar Bina Chain Kahan Re”, “Tamma Tamma Loge” and “I Am A Disco Dancer.” Asked about the state of songs and lyrics in modern cinema, he said, ” “The lyrics which we had before we don’t have that anymore… Can you remember any wordings of a song? We are not going on wordings nowadays.”

The 64-year-old music director sounded embittered that Hindi film industry is not longer able to toss up songs like “Yaar Bina Chain Kahan Re”, “Sochna Kya…Jo Bhi Hoga Dekha Jayega” and also bewailed that the standards of lyrics have been on the decline. “The film may be a super hit, but the songs do not sustain. Songs today are just a one-day cricket match… The songs from the golden era… that is the test match. Be it Bappi Lahiri, Kalyanji-Anandji, RD Burman or Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s songs… People still hum those songs,” he added.

“If we don’t do something about it, then the future generations of listeners would know only one type of music- Item songs!”, so said the celebrated classical and pop singer Shubha Mudgal in a televised public conversation on the condition of Indian music and in that honest opinion, she had hit the bull’s eye.

In this day and age one doesn’t need to be a musicologist to interpret what revolutions have been going on in Indian popular music, he just has to toggle on the TV and surf around a a small amount of music channels. Immediately the ‘bare’ reality about today’s music starts dawning upon the mind!

Audio-visual onslaught

With the rapidly increasing satellite TV channels, the good old ‘listening’ conception about music has almost become superfluous and it has been substituted by a ‘watch and listen’ notion. Speedy urbanization with the consequential no-holds- barred, hi-speed rat-race for survival has practically left the people with little attention-span and no time to relax. So savoring music at leisure time is a thing of past and the predisposition is to take hold of some quick ‘tasty’ audio-visual bytes in the name of amusement. Titillating videos with skimpily clad girls prancing around have thus become the bywords for successful promotion of music. It’s almost as if the video content of the song has become much more important than the audio content and most songs are being tailored to suit that requirement.

Many of today’s musicians disobediently try to rationalize this dilapidation by saying that they are just doing what the masses want and regrettably, they are right! The masses have really shown little regard for the good and bad when it comes to quality of music and some of the biggest selling albums of recent times have made millions, solely on the basis of ostentatious- almost pornographic videos.

Shifting Trends

Success of this type of music has prompted the film makers to follow suit, and steamy item numbers have become a hot trend. No wonder then that most of today’s songs sound reasonable when you ‘see’ them on screen but fall flat when you just ‘hear’ them sans those supplementary images.

Many filmmakers tried to defend this item number fascination by saying that item numbers existed since long in films and if Helen and Bindu were doing them as cabarets before, then what’s wrong if today’s films feature them. The answer is simple: Before an item number was used as a complementary but now it has practically become the only item on the menu.

Remix culture

One trend that should be avoided by filmmakers is overdoing the old song remixes. The first half of 2017 saw almost every entertainment oriented movie with one old song remixed. While 70’s-90’s classic songs are certainly evergreen but there is a beauty in preserving for their authenticity. Moreover, music directors don’t really create a thoughtful remix; they just append some modern beats and merge it with outlandish rapping. All these add-ons actually obliterate the radiance of the old songs and demean the music culture.

One might even wonder why do so many talented music directors need to take a help from old song when they can create something new-fangled and invigorating?

90s was the best decade for Bollywood music

Once Hindi film music showcased almost all indigenous musical genres be it classical, ghazal, bhajan, folk or qawwali. Today, all these beautiful musical genres have practically become extinct from film music. Forget these musical intricacies, simple things like male or female solo songs have started to dwindle in numbers, giving way to more and more duets. Why? It’s perhaps because duets offer more chances for ‘human interaction’ on screen or it could also mean that composers lack total confidence in present- day singers’ ability to pull off the song as a solo effort and feel safer to divide the workload between two singers as a duet.

Lyrics are integral to the music of movies. Without proper lyrics, songs remain lifeless. While the decade of nineties had its fair share of crude and double meaning songs, majority songs were simple in lyrics. Simplicity is quite important in poetry, especially in movie songs. Lyricists like Sameer, Javed Akhtar, Nida Fazli etc. wrote some of their memorable songs during the nineties.

An important reason for ‘Aashiqui’ being the best seller album of all times is attributed to its lyrics. Sameer, lyricist of ‘Aashiqui’, in one of his interviews attributed this to the simplicity of lyrics.

Listen to the songs of ‘Sadak’, ‘Aashiqui’, ‘Deewana’ and you will notice this. Songs of today, too, have good lyrics, but their recall value is not as good as it used to be in nineties.(not everyone might agree on this)

Appropriate portions of music, singing and lyrics is exactly what the doctor orders for an ideal song. Hindi cinema till some time ago had all of these, but off late things have changed in all three areas, a great deal.

Music : The music has become further electronic, more governing and less compliant & caring to the lyrics. In fact the music is so overpowering that at times people hardly care for what the lyrics are, or how fine the singing is. Basically lyrics and singing are only redundancy in most songs today.

Lyrics : Lyrics are said to be the essence of song. The less said about Hindi songs, the lyrics in recent times, the better. It is not that retro hits did not have any irrational lyrics but the proportions have got interchanged.

Singing : Singing is one of those domains where the role of technology is so undervalued. More often than you think, software is used which tune the voice for scale, pitch and everything else you can think of. You basically don’t need a learned singer to sing a song anymore.

Busy composers :  With the advent of multiplex culture, far more films release every Friday as compared to say, three decades back. This means that writers and musicians have much more music to generate in equal amount of time. Of course the time devoted to one composition comes down and so does the quality of songs.

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