Category: Pop culture
-
Madan Mohan’s Story In 5 Songs
You may think it odd, but when I think of Madan Mohan, I can’t help but think about the parallels between his career and R.D. Burman’s. Both Madan Mohan and R.D. Burman had to work hard to grow out of their fathers’ shadows. R.D. Burman’s lineage is well known. What isn’t known well is the…
-
Music Directors Who Sang For Other Music Directors
This post documents the work of music directors who have sung Hindi film songs for other music directors. I’ve limited the scope of this exercise by considering only those music directors who meet the following criteria: As a result, I’m not including artists like Shankar Mahadevan, Hemant Kumar and Vishal Dadlani who are music directors…
-
Relatives Collaborating In Hindi Film Songs
This blog post started as a Twitter thread. The idea was to create a list of Hindi film music artists who are related in real life and share credits in a song. There were many artists who were related but didn’t share credits in any Hindi film song. These artists were not included in the…
-
Rise Of Recreated Songs
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “2011 – 2020: Review of a Decade of Hindi Film Music” from the e-book BollySwar: 2011 – 2020.] The Hindi film industry had tried to come up with new ways of mass-producing hit songs ever since the 1990s. In the 1990s, they experimented with Jhankaar Beats and in…
-
BollySwar: 2011 – 2020 is now available
As you may be aware, four volumes of the BollySwar e-book have been released so far – BollySwar: 1971 – 1980 (Volume 5), BollySwar: 1981 – 1990 (Volume 6), BollySwar: 1991 – 2000 (Volume 7), and BollySwar: 2001 – 2010 (Volume 8). I am happy to inform you that the new volume – BollySwar: 2011…
-
Film Music’s Shift from Melody to Sound Design
Music composer Kaushal Inamdar recently posted an insightful Twitter thread about how film music had changed in recent decades. The crux of the point he made was that technological advances in music production had shifted the focus of music directors from music composition to sound design. He argued that creating interesting sounds was becoming more important than…
-
MySwar References
One of the things we love on MySwar is the trivia – the story behind the music and the musicians. We source the trivia from books we read and from the World Wide Web. While we stored these source references, we didn’t have a way to show them to our users. Not anymore. We just…
-
Anand Bakshi’s Generation-Spanning Work
[Starting this week, we’ll re-publish here the Bollywood Retrospective series published in DNA blogs. This post was originally published here.] This post is based on a question posed a few years ago on Twitter by film historian Pavan Jha, a passionate follower and chronicler of films and film music. The question – “Name the 5…
-
2016 Bollywood Music Review and Top 20 Songs
As in the past, critics were not happy with the state of Hindi film music in 2016. The charge – yet again – was that it Hindi films were using an “assembly line” approach to create songs using multiple composers and re-packaging hit songs from the past. One thing is certain – music is no…
-
2014 Bollywood Music Review
2014 was not a great year for Hindi film music. The Indian Express carried a bleak piece discussing the death of Hindi film music in 2014. We have observed the rise of multi-composer albums and albums riding on one or two item songs for a few years now. This trend continued in 2014. The other…