There isn’t enough that can be said about SD Burman‘s talent as a music director. He brought to it an old-school class and memories of folk music and classical music, while also imparting it with a surprising modernity. What he also did on occasion was to sing his own songs for films, with a voice…
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As much of a startling change to the landscape of Hindi film music as A.R. Rahman was in the mid-1990s, his transition from Tamil films to mainstream Hindi cinema was also a gradual one from the audience’s perspective. He only showed up on the average film-fan’s radar with the release of the Hindi dub of…
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The clichéd ‘running around trees’ Hindi film song was made possible by that other strange practice that’s quite unique to Indian cinema, playback singing. As long as some much more talented singer was sitting in a studio singing their heart out, it allowed the actors to get up to all sorts of antics on screen…
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Being one of only three of the dozens of major Indian languages I can claim to know, I’ve always been curious about Marathi cinema. I watched my fair share on the TV in the good old days of Doordarshan, but all that taught me was that I was almost always in for either utter tragedy…
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Hemant Kumar, while never gaining the sort of insane popularity as other playback singers of Hindi cinema during his time, always had a unique presence. On the surface, the slightly quivering quality of his voice set him apart from the rest, but beyond that, he had a honest cadence and a truly emotional delivery that…
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As a band, the major members of Indus Creed had been creating and putting out music since 1984, albeit under a different moniker. But they really came into their own as Indus Creed and with the help of the unstoppable juggernaut that was satellite music television in India in the mid-1990s. When they released their…
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Most songs in any language end up being about love. Perhaps love provides some extra creative impetus for the penning and singing of songs. But if that is true, then the loss of love seems to be all that much more inspiring. Thus we have heartbreak Hindi-film style, circa 1965, in Ajnabi, tum jaane pehchane…
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The smoky confines of bars, the garish halls of old brothels, and such houses of mostly ill-repute have long been a great excuse for Indian films to break into song. In the old days, this on-screen responsibility was as likely to be handled by one of the main cast of actresses, as it was to…
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The girl at the window or the balcony is a classic romantic trope, probably tracing back to ancient theatre, lost in the mists of time. In Hindi cinema, with the majority of the audience living in an increasingly crowded urban environment, that quickly turned into lovers at windows in adjacent houses or apartments, forever separated…
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By the end of the 70s, Amitabh Bachchan was the undisputed king of Hindi cinema and he had settled into a comfortable niche of angry action hero and romantic rogue that worked out quite well for him with almost every outing. Kaalia, released in 1981, was another in this line of Amitabh starers, along with…
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As teenagers in the 90s, we had started to assert our tastes in music beyond our parents’ choice of old Hindi film melodies. While we liked those too, we were ever open to new influences, and so it was during a ride in our Aunt and Uncle’s car, that our cousins put in the audio…
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Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi is the first Hindi film I remember seeing in its entirety. I’m sure there were others before then, but this one made an impact as a film, something separate and different from all that other stuff on TV. That effect was in no small part because of the songs. As an…
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