Film Songs Research Articles

If only Bollywood… The case of British Asian theatre

The present article attempts to understand how British South Asian diasporic theatre practice uses Bollywood dance, music and songs, using two examples, namely Tanika Gupta’s Wah! Wah! Girls and Tara Arts’ The Kanjoos. While the first section deals with British South Asian theatre, the second part of the article investigates the use of Bollywood dance, songs, and music in these two productions. The final section of the article highlights the ways in which Bollywood generates particular aesthetics in theatre productions in British South Asian theatre. It also examines the reception of such Bollywoodised theatrical narratives, and the need for a better understanding of two diverse opinions among theatre practitioners’ use of Hindi film songs and dance in British South Asian theatre productions.

‘Crazy Kiya Re’: Explaining the consumption and popularity of Hindi film songs

Hindi film songs are now ubiquitous worldwide. Their cultural impact and musical nuances have been well researched. However, their marketing ramifications have not been explored. We adopt an exploratory approach to find out the reasons behind the consumption and popularity of Hindi music. Existing literature on music theorizes that music arouses emotion which creates affinity among the listeners, and this affinity gets diffused among the larger audience through sociological processes like collective effervescence and emotional contagion. Simultaneously music is marketed both as an experience and as a service and is packaged to serve consumer needs. Focus group interviews were conducted across two different geographies among the cohort which is the principal consumer of Hindi film songs. We find that emotional arousal remains the primary reason for the pervasiveness of Hindi songs in Indian psyche. From the marketing perspective, packaging of music and ‘sound design’ ensure that it spreads among the masses.

Performing the Political in Lust, Caution

Examining three dramatic scenes of performance in Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, based on Eileen Chang’s short story of the same name, this essay proposes to read Lee’s film as an epilogue to a long-running narrative highlighting the intersection of performance and politics in twenty-century China. It argues, through a close examination of Lee’s creative use of such elements as popular music, political theater, and leftist cinema from the 1930s, that nationalism and revolution staged an intriguing comeback in Lust, Caution, intensified, rather than negated, by its intricate intertwinement with sexuality and ethics. In particular, the two popular film songs from the 1930s with lyrics penned by Tian Han quoted in the film, and their fascinating afterlives in contemporary popular culture represented by Leehom Wang, highlight the power of performance in shaping a complex range of gender, ethical, and political identities. The intersection of performance, politics, and popularity works magic throughout the film. It enables Lee’s film to go beyond Chang’s story in reinvigorating the political through the performative and the popular.

Bollywood Bhajans: Style as ‘Air’ in an Indian-Guyanese Twice-migrant Community

During weekly services at Indian-Guyanese Hindu temples in Minneapolis, participants sing devotional songs from Hindi films as well as songs rooted in Bhojpuri-speaking North India that are maintained through oral tradition in the Indian-Guyanese diaspora. In this context, the Bollywood song style comprises a stylistic language that becomes disarticulated from film songs and re-articulated with Bhojpuri songs, Sanskrit verses and distinctly Indian-Caribbean religious practices. Despite some disparagement of the older Bhojpuri style, an ideal of inclusion leads participants to assert that bhajans (devotional songs) can be sung in any ‘air’, a term that encompasses style, melody and affect. In this paper, I argue that ‘air’ serves as a powerful resource in the creation of new class and ethnic identities for Indian-Guyanese migrants to North America. Although there is little interaction in Minneapolis between direct migrants from India and twice migrants from Guyana, many Indian-Guyanese-Americans self-consciously ask themselves what their Indian neighbours would think of their Hindi pronunciation and rural song style. The disarticulated film style adds a sonic layer of Indian ‘authenticity’ to Indian-Caribbean religious practices. Moreover, it serves as a medium for Hindi language pedagogy and a tool for positioning selves and others in intra-community and inter-community systems of belonging and hierarchy.

More than Bollywood: studies in Indian popular music

List of Contributors List of Figures List of Companion Media Introduction - Popular Music in India - Gregory D. Booth and Bradley Shope Part One: Perspectives on Film Song 1. A Moment of Historical Conjuncture in Mumbai: Playback Singers, Music Directors, and Arrangers and the Creation of Hindi Song (1948-1952) - Gregory D. Booth 2. Global Masala: Digital Identities and Aesthetic Trajectories in Post-Liberalized Indian Film Music - Natalie Sarrazin 3. Kollywood Goes Global: New Sounds and Contexts for Tamil Film Music in the Twenty-First Century - Joseph Getter 4. On Nightingales and Moonlight: Songcrafting Femininity in Malluwood - Kaley Mason Part 2: Audio Cultures, Music Videos, and Film Music 5. Film Song and Its Other: Tracing the Boundaries of Indian Music Genres - Jayson Beaster-Jones 6. Play it Again, Saraswathi: Gramophone, Religion, and Devotional Music in Colonial South India - Stephen Putnam Hughes 7. Filming the Bhangra Music Video - Anjali Gera Roy 8. Mimesis and Authenticity: The Case of Thanda Pani and Questions of Versioning in North Indian Popular Music - Peter Kvetko 9. Making Music Regional in a Delhi Studio - Stefan Fiol Part 3: Live Music, Performance Cultures, and Re-mediation 10. Latin American Music in Moving Pictures and Jazzy Cabarets in Mumbai, 1930s to 1950s - Bradley Shope 11. The Beat Comes to India: The Incorporation Rock Music into the Indian Soundscape - Gregory D. Booth 12. Be True to Yourself: Violin Ganesh, Fusion, and Contradictions in Contemporary Urban India - Niko Higgins 13. At Home in the Studio: The Sound of Manganiyar Music Going Popular - Shalini Ayyagari 14. The Liveness-es of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi's Popular Abhangas - Anna Schultz 15. Bollywood in the Era of Filmsong Avatars: DJing, Remixing, and Change in the Film Music Industry of North India - Paul Greene Afterword: Capitalisms and Cosmopolitanisms - Timothy D. Taylor References Films and Music Cited Index

The long smouldering night: Sex, songs and the desi feminist noir

Abstract This article argues that the films Ishqiya/Romance (Chaubey, 2010) and Dedh Ishqiya/Romance 1.5 (Chaubey, 2014) by Abhishek Chaubey, represent a new genre of films, namely the ‘desi feminist noir’, which is characterized by all the elements of film noir, such as the murky distinction between good and evil, the lawlessness of the streets and the femme fatale. However, in these films the figure of the femme fatale is used to forward explicitly feminist trajectories of love, romance and sex. I give a brief history of romantic coupling in Hindi cinema, and analyse the films’ departure from these articulations of romance. Next, I focus on a song sequence from each of the films to explicate the desi feminist femme fatale’s subversion of the romantic conventions of the Hindi film song and her inauguration of a new aesthetic of romance. In conclusion, I consider the implications of this new genre for Bollywood cinema.

“My Foolish Heart:” Bill Evans and the Public Life of Feelings

After 1961, any published commentary on Evans seemed incomplete without a comment on the peculiar emotional register of his ballad playing in the trio setting. The fervor of Evans's fans and the sheer quantity of praise he received in Down Beat magazine was enough to inspire skepticism in some corners. This essay analyzes the critical reputation of Evans's emotional signature in the 1960s with regard to the material most crucial to that part of his reputation: the popular romantic ballad. Following a discussion of the problem of anti-sentimentalism in jazz criticism and scholarship, the essay moves to the Evans trio's celebrated 1961 recording of “My Foolish Heart.” After considering the film song's lyrics and noting some musical characteristics of the Evans trio's performance, the essay turns to the whirl of critical discourse that met this and other Evans recordings in the 1960s. Special attention is given to the rhetoric of poignancy in jazz criticism. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, “poignant” and a related cluster of evaluative terms about music and emotions (e.g., introversion, introspection, lyrical, impressionistic, and reflective) circulated around the ballad playing of Evans, his former bandleader Miles Davis, and others. The circulation of the term “poignant” and its analogues in jazz writing was in part a response to the gendered reputation of “sentimental music” as feminine, emotionally excessive, and aesthetically inferior. Although he strongly regretted his reputation as a ballad specialist (which he found diminishing), Evans's balladry nonetheless exemplified his stated project of pursuing what he called the “finer feelings” in music. The pianist's sense of jazz's relationship to the “finer feelings” in the 1960s also informed his vocal resistance to emerging paradigms of expanded improvisational freedom and new avenues of tonality, timbre, and emotional communication in music.

Lata Mangeshkar’s Voice in the Age of Cassette Reproduction

For almost three decades after independence, the ubiquitous presence of Lata Mangeshkar’s voice was enabled through the radio and gramophone records. The 1980s became a period of critical transformation in this trajectory as the arrival of new technologies of sound dispersion allowed listeners to participate in a range of activities involved in the circulation of film songs. Spurred by the cassette revolution, Lata Mangeshkar’s voice was reintroduced into the market, not in her own voice but that of the “copy artists.” Based on the art of imitation, these “version recordings” are reminiscent of an earlier practice of dubbing that formed the underbelly of the music industry in the production of a techno material voice. This brings to the surface an ambivalent relationship that the younger aspiring singers had with Lata Mangeshkar, simultaneously marked with anxiety and deep devotion. Finally, the article examines the strategies adopted by the Gramophone Company of India (HMV) in staking its claim over the rightful ownership of the most treasured archive—the authentic voice of Lata Mangeshkar.

Outside/in: Performance and belonging in Loins of Punjab Presents …

The question of belonging is central to Manish Acharya's satire Loins of Punjab Presents, which, I argue, uses a Hindi film song contest set in a New Jersey hotel and sponsored by a pork company to explore the processes of exclusion that are an essential part in the construction of national and cultural communities. This essay looks at the critical cinephilia in Loins, which positions itself in dialogue with existing films about diasporic South Asian communities – especially Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Khabie Gham – implicating cinematic representation in exclusionary practices and revealing the centrality of performance to ideas of belonging. Through its emphasis on representation and performance, the film celebrates the pleasures of film spectacle yet critiques and challenges cinematic constructions of ‘Indian’ and ‘American’. But while the film broadens both categories, it resists uncritical multiculturalism by incorporating a paranoid, post-9/11 US nationalism and white liberal orientalism.

Performing ‘Soviet’ film classics: Tajik Jimmy and the aural remnants of Indian cinema

ABSTRACTThe Indian film Disco Dancer (Subhash, 1982), which was wildly popular in the Soviet Union in 1984, tells the success story of Anil, a destitute child who dreams of fame. Anil moves to the city, is discovered by an agent, and is branded as the disco star Jimmy. More than twenty years later, Baimurat Allaberiev, a guest worker from Tajikistan, has enacted this plot by performing film songs from Disco Dancer. Uploading his performances on media-streaming hosts under the name Tajik Jimmy, Allaberiev achieved notoriety, parlaying his online success into live concert performances in Moscow and St Petersburg. The reappearance of Disco Dancer songs is by no means a uniquely Russian phenomenon. However, these texts serve as an appropriate departure point to explore the role of amateur online media in contemporary post-Soviet culture. The reworking of Indian film songs more than twenty years after the film's original screenings recalls not only the popularity of the Indian film in the Soviet Union, but also conflates it with many other aspects of Soviet and post-Soviet life. An entangled web of meaning negotiates the divides between professional and amateur performance, the social plights of guest workers and their cinematic representations, and finally, the modes of circulation between old and new media formats.

Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution ed. by Alfreda Murck (review)

Reviewed by: Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution ed. by Alfreda Murck Richard King (bio) Alfreda Murck, editor. Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution. Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2013. 248 pp. Hardcover $35.00, isbn 978-3-85881-732-7. In August 1968, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong received a gift of man-goes from the visiting foreign minister of Pakistan, and passed the fruit on to the Workers’ Propaganda Team that had recently been sent to Qinghua University to quell the violent confrontations between Red Guard factions that were ravaging the campus. In doing so, Mao signalled his disaffection with the Red Guards, the youth vanguard he had unleashed against the state apparatus at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and declared his support for the proletariat and the military as forces of order and stability. The suppression of the Hundred Day War at Qinghua was a pivotal moment in the Cultural Revolution: the truculent and charismatic student leader Kuai Dafu, previously the darling of the Cultural Revolution Group appointed by Mao, was summarily removed and incarcerated, and the high school graduates of the Red Guard generation were dispatched within months to new challenges in villages and frontier farms. The Pakistani mangoes, exotic and virtually unheard of in 1960s China, briefly played an important role in Cultural Revolution discourse, as the physical expression of Mao’s love and concern for his people at a time when the Mao cult was at its most frenzied. The mangoes were transported nationwide, despite their deterioration in the summer heat; they were replicated in wax and placed in glass vitrines for presentation and display; paintings and photographs of the fruit became objects of veneration; and they appeared as an auspicious motif on the ubiquitous Mao badges, on quilts, on household goods, and on floats at public ceremonies. The events surrounding Mao’s golden mangoes can serve as a microcosm of the political maneuverings, the personality cult, the mass hysteria, the sporadic violence, and the devotional iconography of the early Cultural Revolution. They also remind us of the ephemeral nature of such obsessions: within a year, mango fever had subsided, its [End Page 143] artifacts no longer treasured. Half a century later, the art historian and curator Alfreda Murck dived into the dumpster of history (and the curio markets of Beijing) to retrieve the memorabilia of mango fever and mount an exhibition of her collection at the Museum Reitberg in Zurich. The volume under review contains the catalogue for that exhibition, prefaced by an introduction and six short essays placing the event in its historical, social, and cultural context. The essays in the first section of the book comprise a history of the student unrest at Qinghua, a memoir of mango celebration in a factory, analysis of the National Day Parade of October 1, 1968, a review of the role of food images in the history of Chinese art, a summary of a 1976 film attempt to revive mango fever, and a tracking of the changing images of the peasant and worker in contemporary China. Three of the essays are particularly notable here: (1) Xiaowei Zheng’s “Qinghua University and Chinese Politics during the Cultural Revolution” is a summary of events at Qinghua—a longer version can be found in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Andrew C. Walder (Stanford, 2006)—with valuable material from the author’s interviews with Kuai Dafu and other participants. The essay is illustrated with photographs, including one of Kuai’s most notorious stunts, the public humiliation of Wang Guangmei, leader of an earlier “work-team” at Qinghua and wife of State Chairman Liu Shaoqi. (2) Daniel Leese’s “Designing Spectacles: The 1968 Beijing National Day Parade” is a careful exposition of that tightly scripted procession (with a mango-themed display on float three) and an analysis of what this and other public events reveal about contemporary policies and the stratification of power within the leadership and among the classes that formed the ranks of the revolution. (3) Adam Yuet Chau’s “Political Awakening through the Magical Fruit: The Film Song of the Mango is amply...

It takes a little lawsuit: The flowering garden of Bollywood exoticism in the age of its technological reproducibility

The Hindi film song ‘Thoda resham lagta hai’ [It takes a little silk] written by the music director Bappi Lahiri for the film Jyoti (1981) was a long forgotten tune before being rediscovered in 2002 by American music producer DJ Quik. Based around an unauthorized 35-second sample of the recording, the Truth Hurts song ‘Addictive’ famously inspired Bappi Lahiri to sue Quik's associate Dr Dre (executive producer of the song), Aftermath Records, and Universal Music (Aftermath's parent company and distributor) for $500 million. Beyond Lahiri's claims of cultural imperialism, obscenity, and outright theft, DJ Quik's rearrangement of the song was, in turn, adopted by music producers, including Lahiri himself, in a wide variety of international genres. This paper tracks the use and reuse of the melody in Indian, American, and Jamaican contexts, focusing on the song's remediation for new audiences. Yet even as this well-traveled tune evokes different historical and local meanings, it evokes an eroticized Other in each context, including its original context.

DVD compilations of Hindi film songs: (Re)shuffling sound, stardom, and cinephilia

Much of the current scholarship on DVDs within the context of India specifically, and the global South more generally has explored emerging informal economies, shifting urban landscapes, and re-mapped relations within and between the global South and North with respect to copyright and piracy. In order to broaden the scope of this research, I approach the DVD as a textual object and explore how the DVD technology's (re)produces intergenerational cinephilia as well as ‘visual’ and ‘aural’ stardom. In pursuing this line of inquiry in the context of Bombay cinema, I seek to widen the range of available textual analyses of DVD, which are largely anchored in western cinema. This research focuses on the fidelity and technical virtuosity of sound on DVDs; here, sound, remains, an aural entity. A cursory glance at the DVDs produced in India show that the picturization sound is also a crucial feature of DVD organization. DVD compilations of Hindi film music offer a particularly rich site for beginning research on how DVD technology has re-structured sound, stardom and cinephilia as the songs are untethered from the filmic narrative and re-classified.

Cine-sangeet Indra ka ghora hai aur Akashvani uska samman karti hai!/Film Music is Lord Indra’s Horse and Akashvani Respects It!

Narendra Sharma was for long associated with All India Radio, headed its Vividh Bharti station, was a well known literary figure, and contributed as a writer to the Bombay film industry. The piece reproduced here, published in Madhuri, Filmfare’s sister publication, captures the ambivalent relationship Hindi literati had to film music and dialogue. Poised at a key moment of transition in national radio, on the anvil of commercial development, the article displays awareness of the great popularity of the film song, and of its value as repository of folk and classical traditions. It also shows an attempt to think about distinctions between the audiences of radio and cinema. In its overall tone, the article showcases the instincts of a Hindi literati, ironically often retailed with great wit and literary verve, to discipline and even censor film songs for their culturally deracinating effects.

Knowledge based Semantic Annotation Generation of Music

storage capacity and the cost of the storage devises gives raise to voluminous music collection management. Various MIR techniques exist, but getting the required songs from large collection of music files, is still a challenging problem. Getting the required songs from voluminous collection with good recall and precision depends on good annotation, indexing and retrieval techniques. Among this annotation plays a vital role in developing an efficient and effective retrieval system. Tag bases annotation or the low level feature based annotations retrieval systems performance is very poor, though the processing is very simple. Semantic concept based annotation, indexing and retrieval techniques are trying to fill the gap between the machine understanding and the human preferences. This raises the need for semantic based annotation of film songs. Ontology plays a major role in semantic web and information retrieval. This raises the need for an ontology based annotation generation tool for film songs. The current research designs and implements a tool M- SAGT -Music Semantic Annotation Generation Tool. Which is flexible, user friendly and ontology based semantic annotations can be generated and stored in RDF/XML format. The generated semantic annotations can be used in semantic indexing and retrieval, which will enhance the performance of the retrieval system.

WHAT IS KĪRTAN?

This paper attempts to answer a fundamental question – what is kīrtan? Much emphasis has been laid on the singing of gurbani in rāgas (classical Indian melody systems), the use of tālas (rhythmic patterns unique to Indian classical music) and the use of musical instruments related to the Sikh gurūs. Uniquely, all these three aspects are mentioned without elaboration in gurbani itself. Only the rāga and tāla names are mentioned, but no written specifications are given about their forms and modes of performance. Furthermore, though certain instruments are mentioned in gurbani, such as the rabāb, pakhawaj, kinnari vina and khartal, it contains no descriptions of their making, tuning, stringing and/or playing techniques. The implications of this mismatch are explored in this article, where it is argued that the oral tradition and its particular pedagogy and training is still extant and provides many of the answers that are highly sought after in the recent turn to ‘traditional’ methods, styles and instruments. The author argues that four major elements (rāga, tāla, shabad and avadhanu or surat) are essential factors in the performance of kīrtan. Due to the various social and political upheavals that Punjab has undergone in the last 150 years, much of the tangible and intangible wealth has been lost. The loss of many pedagogical streams has led to an apparent hermeneutic chaos. The author argues that the research carried out in this field in the last three decades lacks academic integrity and has yet to be responded to academically, and assesses the relevance of kīrtan in the current social order and the institutions currently offering education in this field. The transformations that have occurred in kīrtan due to the methodological changes in the teaching of gurbani are considered, and suggestions are made for future research. The author argues that the proud oral history of gurbani kīrtan and kīrtaniye has not received serious and sound academic attention. He offers his reflections while suggesting ways to intervene in order to facilitate the recovery of this near-extinct oral tradition. One evening in the fall of 1990, Amarjeet, my dad, knocked on my door and announced that my grandmother, Sant Kaur, has decided to shift to our house. ‘Clean up your bed’, he ordered. ‘She has asked to stay in your room and with you!’ he responded to my obstinate ‘why?’. The neighbours around bore the brunt of my still out-of-tune wailings and sometimes I would find solace in the film song, ‘can't touch the notes, what song can I…’ My grandma would start her nitnem at midnight till 5am and she would stop in between to tell me as I sang, ‘your grandpa sang this too … uncle Jwala Singh sang this very well’ and, so on!One night as my voice was near hoarse yet again, she asked me to never underestimate and undervalue this gurūs' treasure. I teased her back, ‘Grandma, I have renounced my flying career and all that came with it – what else do I need to prove?’ Ignoring my remark she told me, ‘Your great ancestor, Baba Tehel Singh, during the years of persecution walked in the jungle at times with battle bloodied bare feet, a khanda in one hand, a rhino skin-shield in another but, with a saranda slung at his back’ … ‘You must remember the journey this gurūs’ treasure has taken to reach you' … ‘There are just too many comforts these days – never forget this!’

English in film songs from India: an overview

‘C-a-t, cat. Cat mane billi; r-a-t, rat mane chooha’ went a song from a Hindi film of the fifties (mane = ‘means’, billi = ‘cat’, chooha = ‘rat’). The song, enormously popular with Indian youth of that generation, was scoffed at by the then contemporary purists who found it hard to accept such ‘blatant’ dilution of the Hindi language. This song, like a few more of its times, was merely an exception to the largely acceptable language of songs, then largely a mix of Hindi, Urdu and Persian. English was, thus, used in songs either when it depicted (literally, since songs are acted out as autonomous scenes in Bollywood) a comic actor in a light-hearted situation or a semi-literate character desperate to accommodate to the urban ways of life. A celebrated song from Gopi, a Hindi film of the early seventies, goes a step forward with its novel coinage. The hero is a rustic who tries to impress his fellow villagers by dressing up in city (read English) style and sings:Gentleman gentleman, gentleman/London se aaya mein ban-than ke……Yeh dekh mera suita/Yeh dekh mera boota/Yeh dekh mera comba

Re-embodying the “Classical”

The 1950s is considered to be a golden era for Hindi film music. Interestingly, it was this period in which film music came under severe attack from the state in the guise of the then Minister of Information and Broadcasting, B.V. Keskar. Film music was banished from All India Radio (AIR) for a few years, forcing music lovers to tune in to Radio Ceylon to catch their favorite film songs. This article interrogates the debate around film music in the wake of Keskar’s policies, focusing on the response of the film industry. Through the circulation of interviews, editorials, and articles in film journals, the film industry fought back against the “highbrow” attitude of the state, foregrounding its role in giving music to the common man, as a self-conscious cultural project. These contestations brought under its rubric, the cleavages between the constructed notions of “classical” and the “popular.” Films like Baiju Bawra, Basant Bahar, and Shabab, based on the lives of classical musicians were central in shaping this debate, articulating an aesthetic that privileged the “affective” registers of the film song over the technical virtuosity of the classical/court musician.

Malayalee Diaspora in the Age of Satellite Television

Malayalee Diaspora in the Age of Satellite Television

From The Life of Wu Xun to the career of Song Jingshi — Crisis and adaptation of private studio film-making legacy: 1951–1956

ABSTRACTCurrent literary studies frequently assume that early PRC cinema is monolithic and univocal. Historical research has started to reveal the complex and shifting divisions in both the cultural leadership and film-making ranks in early PRC, but offer little in-depth textual analysis to expand our understanding of the films beyond the prevailing assumption that all of them are identical. This study seeks to introduce a fluid understanding that departs from the conventional homogenization of this cinema. It calls for a turn to user-centered study of discursive cases, and analyzes the film Song Jingshi (1957) as a key case showing how conflicts and compromises among multiple agendas rendered early PRC films ambivalent and polysemous. The film Song Jingshi was meant to be a coherent part of the campaign against The Life of Wu Xun (1951) and other private studio productions. But because various groups had high, competing stakes in the outcomes of this production, the film was forced into a long and painful revision process, in which rival interests produced contradictory interpretations of and inserted contending voices into the text. When examining this multipartite struggle, I particularly focus on how former private studio artists, constituting most of the film crew, actively adjusted and strategically defended their private studio film-making legacy.