Music - aaj kal

Music, it’s been ages since I wrote something on one my favorite thing to do, i.e. listening music.

Prime reason being, it’s also been a long time since I heard something pure class, something which touches you and makes room for itself in your heart, in your mind.

That rare magic of combination of nice tune, touching lyrics and soul-stirring voice is not happening these days.

If you look around, these days there is an increasing trend of music directors singing some of their own songs, I don’t know if this is a good thing or not but know for sure that this trend is somewhere limiting the boundaries of creativity of the composers.

Great Rahman has been a frontrunner in this trend, right from Bombay/Rangeela to Ravaan, he has sung to his own compositions. And regardless of some small pronunciation ‘issues’ one can still feel that no one could have done a better job for those songs than Rahman himself, primarily because of super complex composition.
But it was good till only Rahman was doing these experiments, or when only very few music directors were doing it, and that too once in a while, one song here and there.

But now almost all music directors are doing it, and doing it to the point of singing almost ALL songs of the album.

Worst culprit are Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani, they both just love their voices, and always find a way to sing maximum songs of an album.’

They were good in the beginning when then composed like “Jhankar beats’ and all but now its going crazy, they’ve supremely limited their composing capabilities by binding them within the boundary of own their singing talent.

And another thing makes them worst culprit are, they’ve also ventured into writing lyrics, that too in wholesale manner.
Now imagine how many limitations they are putting on themselves, like first write the lyrics, then compose them and them sing them, and end result either can turn out to be really really good like ‘Ankhon mein teri ajab si…” of Om Shanti Om or total disasters like songs of ‘Aladin’.

This trend is seriously disturbing, it’s like they are composing tunes which only suits their singing styles.

Examples are endless, Shanker-Ehsaan-Loy for instance, now they sound almost SAME in all albums, one slow-number, one-party ‘It’s the time to Disco’ types, and ALL of them sung by Shanker. It’s damn repetitive.

Then there are Salim-Sulieman, again supremely talented guys, I really loved their Dor, Chak-De-India, Fashion, and Rocket Singh scores. But again now they try to-fit in Salim or Sulieman style of singing and too much of Arabic beats in almost all songs.

Sajid-Wajid are the ones I hate most for a single crime of killing Gulzar Sahah’s beautiful lyrics in movie Veer, they stuck to their ‘woh-kehndi-po-po’ mode to even delicate-st lines in Veer. Disgusting.

And then there is a classic case of Mr.Himesh Reshmiyya, only his name is enough.


Though still all hopes are not lost yet, we’ve ever delectable music of Vishal Bharadwaj, and flavor of these days ‘Amit Trivedi’ who are continuing to give fantastic music, the kind which sucks one into it and makes one forget all worries for sometime.
At least that’s what good music does to me, I get so charged up, so happy, to the extent of looking like a loony.

And then there is bunch of unsung/low-profile composers/ lyrists’ like Swanand Kirkire, Shantanu Moitra, MM Kreem, Shandesh Shandilya , Amitabh Bhattacharya , Nilesh Mishra who keep on creating little gems and spreading happiness.

And yes, how can I forget to mention this, has it become mandatory to have atleast one Rahat Fateh Ali song in every movie?

Don’t know why I started writing this, and may be started as a rant against Vishal-Shekhar, but kept on spilling my views about others as well.

I know, you must be thinking what’s the purpose of this, even I don’t know, all I know is that this kind of incoherent posts happen when you write it over a span of 5-7 days.