Today songs vanish as swiftly as do their singers. A number is here today, gone tomorrow, landing in the dung heap of instant history. Television as a medium has composers, singers and song-writers indulging in nothing less than dogfights. Do they realize how diminished, in barking stature, they emerge, from such mock shows, in the public eye?
With a tender touch of irony, Alla Rakha Rahman arrived but a few years before the crucial Urdu content in our cinesangeet began disappearing by end-1996. His advent hurried the process! This even as we hugged the memory of Naushad’s aristocratic music elevating the tonal texture of K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960). In other words, it is the Shakeel Badayuni style of Urdu poetry that gave our cinesangeet its very special sheen in the covetous care of a Naushad. It is Sahir’s distinctive verse that Roshan brought to such pulsating musical life in Taj Mahal (1963). The Kaifi Azmi–Madan Mohan combination it was that made Chetan Anand’s Heer Raanjha (1970) immortal, both the poetry and the music being phenomenal. Majrooh Sultanpuri’s flowing Urdu verse and Roshan’s exquisite tuning formed the hallmark of Ashok Kumar–Meena Kumari–Pradeep Kumar’s Bheegi Raat (1965). It is the virtual elimination of such quality Urdu poetry from our cinema that ear-witnessed Hindustani cinesangeet declining to a point of no vintage return – by end-1996. That is the reason why I paused to examine the style and technique of Rahman, if only to spotlight the lyrical point that song-writing, in our films, chillingly changed, in form and content, as this composer compulsively aligned his musical versifying to the lingo of the gung-ho generation. In this light, it is crucial to keep an open ear while venturing to comprehend the cultural mores of the emerging composing community.
We have, through the last 40 years or so, experienced first R. D. Burman, then A. R. Rahman carrying out revolutionary experiments in sound. While the notes so ‘struck’by Pancham sounded novel at that Jawani Diwani (mid-1972) Agar saaz chhedaa taraane banenge time, we discerned that, unless kept strictly within bounds, such an insouciant approach to manufacturing hit tunes could lead, cataclysmically, to degeneration of film music into a base art. Where Bappi Lahiri carried out such ‘sound’ experimentation in a norm fleshing him out as the enfant terrible of Hindustani film music, Pancham did so without ever totally losing his inborn sense of melody. However, some 15 years after Pancham’s departure, music, as made in Bollywood by early-2009, became a sick joke, given our TV’s so-called reality shows, which debased Hindustani cinesangeet – alongside those participating in its telly mounting – to a ‘live’ dumb show.
Such is Asha Bhosle’s present-day standing (even when seated) that, in one widely watched reality show, she could, with a telemagnetic presence smacking of supernova impunity, reduce Ismail Darbar (someone clearly musically weighty) to a virtual nonentity. Against such a tele-backdrop, I was shocked when Himesh Reshammiya (composer, singer and actor), in natty nasal tones, proclaimed that the young of today are not to sing the golden oldies any more – Kabhee khud pe kabhee haalat pe ronaa aayaa! Thank you, Himesh, for letting us know where exactly the young of today stand before the mike. Yet truth to tell, once the shock effect of what Himesh said wore off, I fell to wondering how those vintage-era songs – that today’s singers are so bravely attempting to re-create on the podium –were no way in tune with the Music of Tomorrow. So let us reflect upon whether Himesh Reshammiya, after all, is not ‘on the button’– reflect upon whether our budding singers’ rendering those 1950s–60s’ songs on stage is of any mike value, when the idiom of tune-composing adorning such a treasure trove is the very antithesis of what performers are going to have to sing in Tomorrow’s Cinema.
How many singers! How many TV shows! Are all these singers really the voices of the future? Or are they going to melt away the way films disappear, today, almost before they arrive? No doubt Sonu Nigam, Sukhvinder Singh, Daler Mehndi, Abhijeet, Shaan, Alisha Chinai, Sanjeevni Bhelande, Sunidhi Chauhan, Shreya Ghoshal and Mahalaksmi Iyer have stayed the course and stayed it well. The lot coming after them, too, hold out vocal possibilities. But how far would such promise be realized in an age when TV, overnight, makes and unmakes voices? We have moved away from even the time when the ear-holdingly versatile S. P. Balasubrahmanyam had his Hindustani day. SPB, today, is a true Language TV icon, alongside another southern TV cult personality, Vani Jairam. How much music both these idols still have left to give to southern audiences, we get to divine, as they perform with flair, serving as tuneful judges, on TV. In Bollywood, first Vani, then SPB, came along to create the mental space for Kavita Krishnamurthy and Alka Yagnik, Kumar Sanu and Udit Narayan, to enjoy a good run, after our musical titans lost their vocal validity in latterday films. Mohammed Rafi (who passed away on 31 July 1980) will always remain embedded in our imagination but who today wants to hear clones Shabbir Kumar, Mohammed Aziz and Anwar? As for music makers, they come and go like fleas. Do the fly-by-night media-savvy and TV-friendly likes of Aadesh Shrivastav, Pritam, Vishal-Shekhar and Salim-Suleiman command the commercial standing that even an S. N. Tripathi or an N. Dutta did in our cinema a few decades ago? It is a mock moment in which Rahman, as the neo-linchpin, has ensured that no songster would be king, no songstress would be queen, any more.
Where, oh where, is that niswaniyat (femininity) gone? A niswaniyat which Sajjad Husain so descriptively identified as awaaz mein auratpanaa vis-à-vis Lata. Such niswaniyat, such awaaz mein auratpanaa, we get to feel distinctly in Sajjad’s presenting Lata in tones of Jaate ho toh jaaon hum bhee yahaan yaadon ke sahaare jee lenge – Raag Asavari in S. M. Nawab’s Khel (1950, Nargis-Dev Anand). This awaaz mein auratpanaa we get to feel, anew, in Sajjad’s composing Lata, in his own mellow métier, as Aaj mere naseeb ne mujh ko rulaa rulaa diyaa –Raag Lankdahan Sarang in K. Asif’s Hulchul (1951, Nargis-Dilip Kumar). One needs to be musically elevated to be able to vibe meaningfully with Sajjad, who created Ae dilruba nazarein milaa kuchch toh miley gham ka silaa (Raag Jaunpuri in Rustom Sohrab, 1963) – an all-time Lata classic, picturized on jaam-carrier Vinita Butt (Yasmin of Mr & Mrs 55)! An ‘Ae Dilruba’ Lata gem so squandered in a film starring ‘Yeh Kaisee Ajab’ Suraiya – one last time! When initially pitted against Lata, Suraiya just blinked, even as Asha was pinpointed by Naushad as lacking the subdued auratpanaa of Lata in her voice. O. P. Nayyar, by contrast, turned that very robustness surrounding Asha’s vocals into his strength.
Among the seniors, Asha alone welcomed the horrendous remix trend (invading our music at the turn of the century) in a spirit of: ‘Change is the name of the dame.’ The dame that ‘arrived’ with the video remix game is best described as symbolizing the rape of the celluloid. ‘We have become visually illiterate,’ noted the well-known designer and writer, John Gloag, tellingly summing it all up. The remix video to create a near media explosion (with each scene near obscene) was the one having its origins in the vividly executed Kaantaa laagaa Asha Parekh dance number from R. D. Burman’s Samadhi (1972). Its remix, as perniciously perpetrated by Shefali Zariwala in the DJ Doll album, was to turn this turn-on into the video vixen nonpareil on our wicked-wicked little screen. Shefali Zariwala, unerringly, is what Rupert Murdoch meant when he delineated Indian TV as ‘fairly raunchy’. No less noxious on the nerves, as video-enacted by Negar Khan & co., was the 1971 Carvaan number, originally coming over (as tuned by Pancham) as Chadhtee jawaanee meri chaal mastaanee. To teleview this wanton assault on our senses was to wonder how far from the age of sheer porn we were. It was all done in an idiom calculated to bring dubiously home Hollywood’s meretricious Marilyn Monroe maxim unfolding as: ‘Bottoms are on top again.’ It made vicariously voluptuous viewing all the way.
The pity of it all is that the younger generation ‘viewed’ the sexcesses in these remixes as original tunes done for their audio-visual edification! They pruriently watched it with no idea about the video remix of, say, Aap kee nazaron ne samjhaa pyaar ke qaabil mujhe having its Raja Mehdi Ali Khan–Madan Mohan foundation in the 1962 Anpadh classic seeing Mala Sinha lip-synching Lata in Raag Gaara. How remixes– better defined as ‘re minx es’– were, so drawing-room peace shatteringly, permitted to stay put on the small screen for so long passes comprehension. We had actually to wait for them to die out on their own overexposed momentum – like those Item Girls to follow on TV. The Rakhi Sawants to come had our remix Jezebels to thank for showing them the torrid TV way.
Lata was spot on when she said that there is no way she is going to accept such audio-visual vandalism – so revolting to our Hindustani musical sensibilities – as a dare-and-bare development attuning to the times. Shamshad Begum was no less shocked upon discovering her 1954 Raag Pilu O. P. Nayyar-scored Aar Paar lovely metamorphosing into an aural-visual monstrosity (on Deepal Shaw & co.) as Kabhii aar kabhii paar laaga teer-e-nazar. Shamshad, initially, felt equally strongly as she beheld her S. D. Burman-tuned 1951 Bahar beauty (on the willowy Vyjayanthimala), Saiyyan dil mein aanaa re aa ke phir naa jaana re, reemerging as a viewing nightmare on Nicolette Bird and Tanushree Dutta. How much Shamshad resented being prematurely shut out of the singer’s booth came through, as this peerless performer later rationalized it all by noting: ‘At least my voice got to be heard again through Saiyyan dil mein aanaa re – if in this form!’ Any number of such remixes – demeaning our top playback performers – could be instanced but I think the point is made.
If remixes dealt a body blow to our vintage tradition, the synthesizer, fatally surfacing even earlier, had killed, in any case, the prospect of any music coming to endure, afresh, for all time to come. The synthesizer turned melody into a malady, music into a mockery. Its multi-keyboard operation, its capacity to produce any sound needed by generating and combining signals of different frequencies, meant the most gifted orchestra players on our music scene being, one by one, reduced to near redundancy. This not excluding the santoor of Shivkumar Sharma; or the sitar of Rais Khan; or the flute of Hariprasad Chaurasia. Maybe the business of turning music into a ‘racket’ began with the Trio of Duos (SJ, KA, LP) having, in their so-called 50-piece orchestra, as many as 15–20 dummy musicians – to be paid by the producer without having played a single note during the recording! But the synthesizer was the ‘innovation’ that – even while ‘progressively’ de-employing the celeb Hindustani cinesangeet orchestra–made our film music, suddenly, distressingly tinny-sounding in the T-Series era of Gulshan Kumar & co. Anuradha Paudwal at T-Series set out to teach Lata and Asha a playback lesson. In the process, by the time Anuradha herself ended up as a ‘burnout’, the synthesizer that her T-Series perpetuated had reduced our music to an exercise in melodic futility.
It is the synthesizer – make no mistake – that destroyed the true quality of our vintage music. I was a fairly frequent visitor, as a kid, to the Dhobi Talao sports shops in the Marine Lines segment of Bombay. Resident in this sector I saw faces I was, much later, famously to encounter in the music studios of Bombay. Faces of a breed having its Portuguese roots in, say, trumpet player Chic Chocolate (Albert Francis Xavier in real life), piano performer Mickey Correa, flute exponent Sumant Raj, music arranger Johnny Gomes and clarionet player Francis Vaz. Not all these musicians survived into the synthesizer era, true, but their successor kith and kin did – music ran in their blood, they drank hard even as they played soft. To be viewing a whole Goan musical tribe reduced to chill penury by the synthesizer was to experience, in the raw, the human tragedy that was our film music by the mid-1990s. No longer could I hope to hear a Bhalchandra Barve holding me spellbound on the flute, the way he did in Suraiya–Shyam’s (1949) Dillagi duet tuned by Naushad to come over as Tuu meraa chaand main teree chaandnee. No more could I expect to hear a Lala Gangavane playing the tabla the way he did for Lata–C. Ramchandra’s Chal chal re Kanhaaii chhaliyaa, as picturized on a Vyjayanthimala dancing (in Aasha, 1957) with a verve and swerve calculated to make the eyes swim.
What a paradigm shift as voices by the dozen are good enough to perform for music makers numbering a score and more today! Music makers who believe that modern-day technology would do – in a fraction of the time that their predecessors took – the job of readying the singer for the mike. If only our composing giants had enjoyed the advantage of this scale of technology, what could they have not achieved? Maybe they would have accomplished nothing, if only because technology, today, makes the music maker its slave, not its master. No longer can one hope to see a Mohammed Rafi literally a-tremble as he awaits his Roothne waalee chip-in moment – after Lata has finished with her part of Sahir– Roshan’s Zindagee bhar nahein bhulegee woh (Barsaat Ki Raat, 1960). It was precisely because we had Rafi so a-tremble – as his Roothne waalee chip-in moment was almost upon him (with two singers sharing one mike) – that we got such Roshan music, such Sahir poetry.
In the decade still to end, we had a Gulzar penning Beedee jalaayale (for Omkara, 2006) and Kajraa re kajraa re (for Bunty Aur Babli, 2005). Good luck to Gulzar that these song-lyrics proved such runaway hits. But what is the true intrinsic value of such poetry that many today, alongside Gulzar, are upholding? Today songs vanish as swiftly as do their singers. A number is here today, gone tomorrow, landing in the dung heap of instant history. Television as a medium has composers, singers and song-writers indulging in nothing less than dogfights. Do they realize how diminished, in barking stature, they emerge, from such mock shows, in the public eye?
The picture was different even in the early’ 80s –when Nazia Hasan, the teenybopper from Pakistan, heralded the disco trend in India with her Indivar-written, Biddu-tuned Aap jaisaa koee meree zindagee mein aaye. The Binaca Geetmala topper proved a chartbuster long before it went on Zeenat Aman in Feroz Khan’s Qurbani (1981). Nazia’s lips hugging foot-tapper stayed put, as the Sartaaj Geet in Ameen Sayani’s Binaca Geetmala, for 14 weeks running. ‘Aap jaisaa koee is perhaps the first Hindi film song the essence of which is totally Western, not Indian,’ observed Ameen Sayani in explaining the emerging Indo–Pak nexus via Nazia. That it was the first stereophonic recording to unfold on the Binaca Geetmala scene also mattered.
After all, Priti Sagar’s all-time 1975 Julie hit, My heart is beating (going on Lakshmi, as scored by Rajesh Roshan), had made it to Binaca Top only twice – like had Runa Laila’s Kalyanji-Anandji-tuned Ek se badhkar ek (in the 1976 film of that name having nightclub dancer Padma Khanna enticing Raaj Kumar). Runa did later touch Binaca Top thrice, dueting with Bhupendra via Jaidev’s 1977 Gharaonda charmer, Do deewane shehar mein (on Zarina Wahab-Amol Palekar). Still this cutie duet remained no fewer than 11 notches behind Nazia’s Aap jaisaa koee. In the Geetmala final count, however, Lata’s Sheesha ho ya dil ho (on Reena Roy in Aasha, 1980), as scored by Laxmikant-Pyarelal, pipped Nazia’s Aap jaisaa koee at the post. Note that, until Nazia Hasan happened, the prime spot, in Binaca Geetmala, had belonged to Hemlata, her Ankhiyon ke jharokhon se (from the Rajshri film of that name) having proved (on Ranjeeta) the ‘Most Popular Song of 1978’. Nazia Hasan is no more. But the tone this Teen Queen brought to Aap jaisaa koee abides, in our cinesangeet, as symbolic of something daringly different.
Things are different today, as technology has created album opportunities for the young and not so young alike. For someone like, say, Shubha Mudgal, a performer to savour for her flavour – as the very calibre of ‘open’ voice that Lata Mangeshkar totally shut out when she arrived. But when music is reduced to gimmicky disc-jockeying on FM radio; to raucous ringtones; to deadly downloads; to ear-hugging I-pods on those Marine Drive tetrapods, one really wonders where we are heading. So much so that I feel an intruder in my own home as I bravely attempt to play music out of this world. Our young generation has absolutely no equation with preserving standards. I go to a show at which a mini Mukesh is merrily murdering the Sahir-penned Woh subah kabhee toh aayegee. I ask the singer who rendered the number, he hasn’t a crossword clue. Nor has he the solution ready as I want to know from which film the song is! He has not heard of Raj Kapoor–Mala Sinha’s Phir Subah Hogi (1958). So how does one enlighten him on its composer Khayyam being firm in his conviction that only someone who has read the Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky classic, Crime and Punishment (in superb Urdu translation), could venture to capture, in his scoring, the peculiar mood of the 1958 ‘have-not’– as so starkly portrayed by Raj Kapoor in Phir Subah Hogi?
Khayyam has done just 55 films in 55 years, yet what authenticity he has brought to music scoring! How much of Bappi Lahiri’s work, from 369 films, do you remember in comparison with Laxmikant-Pyarelal (a massive 502 films)? True even Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s standards later dropped but this Lata-lorne duo did give us a great deal of quality work. Just look at the number of films bracketed against each name below and determine for yourself the class of composer, the standard of tuning, that made music what it was in the era when the customer was king because melody was queen. R. D. Burman (292 films), Kalyanji Veerjee Shah + Kalyanji-Anandji (245), Shanker-Jaikishan (173), Chitragupta (145), Rajesh Roshan (137), Ravindra Jain (132), Sonik-Omi (117), Nadeem-Shravan (116), Ravi (112), C. Ramchandra (109), S.N. Tripathi (104), Madan Mohan (93), Anil Biswas (91), Sachin Dev Burman (89), Salil Chowdhury (79), O. P. Nayyar (73), Hansraj Behl (70), Bulo C Rani (69), Naushad (66), Avinash Vyas (63), Jnan Dutt (58), Roshan (56), Hemant Kumar (54) and N. Dutta (54).
The Passing Parade speaks for itself. Look how quality was upheld only by those scoring, roughly, 125 films or less spread over 20 years or more. Absorb how numbers saw the eternal threesome (SJ, KA, LP) decline steeply in their later output. Discern how Vasant Desai (49 films), Husnlal-Bhagatram (49), Khayyam (55), Roshan (56), Naushad (66), Hansraj Behl (70), O. P. Nayyar (73), Salil Chowdhury (79) and S. D. Burman (89) upheld values against all odds almost to the very end. Pioneer-composer Anil Biswas (91 films), Madan Mohan (93), C. Ramchandra (109) and even Ravi (112) produced nuggets without compromising their market value. Do you see a single composer of today (given the pace at which he is going) doing 150 films and sustaining standards in an era when Rahman alone has chosen, farseeingly, to cut down on the number of movies he is doing? Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy too – like Rahman – have done some sterling work outside the fold of films. But the rest, they opt trendily to walk the talk rather than meaningfully swing the baton.
Or is it too early to judge the true value of today’s music as crafted by the Now Generation of composers? Am I being too condemnatory of the music being made today? Music with which today’s youth tunes? Am I expediently forgetting that music at root – being Panchamly-Rahmanly – is generational in its appeal? Hearing the music of Rahman extensively, recently, did make me wonder if I was not a whole generation behind the times in my daily listening. Remember how intolerant our elders were as we, swayingly, coasted along with a C. Ramchandra generating a new sound wave altogether via his 1947 Shehnai notes of Aanaa meree jaan meree jaan Sunday ke Sunday? At the time, did we have any idea that C. Ramchandra was going to endure – as ‘Valentinely’ valid – for all time to come? Likewise, how contemptuous we were of R. D. Burman as Pancham came to the party with his own sound of music – as distinct from the original Dada Burman style distinguishing his February 1962 debut score for Chhote Nawab? Where a genuine innovator like Salil Chowdhury hailed Pancham as a trackblazer, we vintagers (Majrooh Sultanpuri included) roundly condemned R. D. Burman as he ventured to sound different from S. D. Burman. Like with C. Ramchandra, we awakened to R. D. Burman’s true worth only later. Only after Pancham had teamed up with Gulzar to create a whole new musical repertoire holding us seatbound.
Clearly there was something more to R. D. Burman than Dum maaro dum. The cardinal difference between Rahman and Pancham is that the younger composer has carried his music beyond all frontiers by the sheer consistency of quality that he has brought to his internationally visioned scoring. Even while remaining within cinema, Rahman has reached out beyond films – something that even Naushad did not manage to do. By all means stay hooked on Naushad even in 2010 – that is your generational prerogative. I, too, rate Naushad highly, very highly. But how does that give me the right to downgrade Rahman as a pathetic product of his era? Kabhi Kabhie, I feel I should be listening in to, not only Khayyam, but also Rahman. In a seasonal 1976 Sahir–Mukesh– Amitabh spirit of:
Kal aur aayenge naghmon kee
Khiltee kaleeyaan chun-ne waale
Mujh se behtar kehne waale
Tum se behtar sun-ne waale
Kal koee mujh ko yaad karein
Kyun koee mujh ko yaad karein
Masroof zamaana mere liye
Kyun waqt apnaa barbaad karein
Main pal do pal ka shaair hoon…