Stories
16 pieces
Where these songs came from, who played on them, which raag they sit in, and what they were borrowed from. Researched, sourced where a source exists, and honest where none does.
Mehbooba Mehbooba travelled from a Cypriot village to SholayThe most famous campfire song in Hindi cinema has a paper trail: a Cypriot folk tune, a Greek singer, and R. D. Burman singing it himself in a voice like gravel in a tin.Borrowed, adapted, stolen: how Hindi film music actually workedHalf the songs you love have a foreign parent somewhere. That is less scandalous and more interesting than the plagiarism lists suggest.Jaan Pehechan Ho: the Hindi song a room of Americans can humA murder mystery from 1965, a masked dance troupe, and the opening scene of a cult American film thirty-six years later.Lag Ja Gale is sung by a ghost, and Lata Mangeshkar picked it as one of her own favouritesMadan Mohan wrote it for a film about a haunting. It is now the song Indians reach for at funerals, weddings and last calls.What a raag actually does in a film songYou do not need to know theory to hear it. A short, practical guide to why some of these songs make your chest hurt.Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya: rejected lyrics, a folk line, and the only colour reel in a black and white filmNaushad turned down two complete sets of words before an all-night session produced the most defiant four minutes in Hindi cinema.R. D. Burman: what he actually changedNot the borrowed melodies. The bottles, the breathing, the decision to record a voice up close.Yahoo: the yell that broke the Hindi film heroBefore 1961 the hero stood still and sang. Then a man threw himself down a snowy hill and the rules changed.What actually makes a Hindi song work in the gymIt is not tempo. Most Bollywood workout anthems sit slower than club music and still hit harder, and the reason is the dhol.Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and the specific sound of 2003For about five years Hindi film music had a house style you can identify in two bars: live strings, a choir used as texture, and a refusal to let the beat rest.The 1990s did something strange to the playback voiceBetween Kishore's death and Arijit's arrival, Hindi film singing moved closer to the microphone and further from the orchestra. You can hear the seam.Bela Ke Phool, and what a radio station plays at one in the morningAll India Radio ended the day with a programme named after a flower that opens after dark. The song list it built is still the best argument for late-night listening.The friendship song is a Hindi film invention and nobody else copied itWestern soundtracks have love songs and breakup songs. The dosti song - two people, no romance, one melody - is almost entirely ours.Every Holi song is the same song, and that is the pointDholak, a call-and-response chorus, and a woman threatening a man with coloured water. Fifty years of it, and the formula has not moved because it was never trying to.How the qawwali became the Hindi film industry's favourite emotionA devotional form built for a shrine courtyard got borrowed for love songs, then for heartbreak, then for end credits. Something survived the journey.Hindi cinema wrote its best songs about leavingNot about arriving anywhere. The safar song is about the middle of the journey, and it is the one thing the industry has never stopped getting right.