Song Project – Part I
A recent post by HG on musicals reminded me of a project that I did few months back.
It was based on Exploration of the Song in the Hindi film. The project was called Are You Song For It/Whose Song Is It Anyway?
I plan to share some of the text from that project here in a series of articles.
Here I go again. Bollywood. Songs. Dreams. Exploration of thought. Tradeoff of dreams. Consumption of songs.
The vantage (I don’t know what it means, I just like the word) point of this project is my love-love relationship with Hindi film songs. There is no need to tell how much I have loved and lived these songs. If I was to calculate, I would have spent more time living these songs than the combined time put in sleeping, studying and fighting my entire life, well, whatever there has been till now.
A typical song would be different from a film song in myriad ways. While a simple song like a pop song would be ‘blank’, a film song has images attached, emotions hanging with it. If Chhaiyya Chhaiyyan was a pop song, I would love it as much, but I am not sure if I would read into its Sufism so much had it not been picturized atop a moving train, a memorable moment in film music.
Let me take the emotions that the songs evoke and classify the respective flagbearer songs thereafter in the categories.
Love:
Nahin Saamne,
Jiya beqarar hai
Hum aapki aankho mein
Dard-e-dil dard-e-jigar
Ghar aaja ghir aayi badra
Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya
Waqt ne kiya
Jaane wo kaise log they jinke
Tum pukar lo
Jalte hain jiske liye
Mere saajan hain is paar
Din dhal jaaye
Abhi na jaao chhod kar
Kabhi khud pe kabhi haalaat pe
Aao twist karein
Beqarar dil tu gaaye jaa
Ye raatein ye mausam
Naam adaa likhna
Pyaar ye jaane kaisa hai
Saawan barse tarse dil
Door na jaa mujhse
Thaiyaa thhaiyya
Kal nahi thaa wo kya hai aaj ye
Tum ho meri nigaahon pe
Anjali anjali
Dholna(thakshak)
Dubbed songs
Sun ri sakhi
Item songs
Chhaiyyan chhaiyyan
Dance songs
Humma
High on emotion but coldly shot songs
Hum hain is pal yahaan
Great visual quality but relegated to the background songs
Ae ajnabi
According to my project partner, Deepak:
My exploration of “Bollywood in our psyche” is influencing a nascent project that I only recently initiated. Very briefly, the project hopes to examine the sub-conscious hold mainstream cinema exerts on the Indian. This, I propose to do using theatrical tools; the idea is to utilize energy derived from the melodramatic emotional displacement popular film songs (as an element) bring about. This energy will be used in the process to deconstruct the melodrama (read cliched expression within the song formula) and re-direct/channelize into another space. This is presently designed such that actors with modest to elaborate theatre backgrounds and an iota of interest in Bollywood (ranging from fantastical stardust romances or absolute repugnance) workshop in a space and share/examine/dissect their inclinations. The idea, as I see it may either shape up to be a theatre representation or the filmed sessions serve as material for motion-film documentary.
To be continued…
Tags: Songwriting, Soundtrack, Teaching Film-making, Theater
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Tushar,
I have not yet understood what sufism really means. How do u define sufism?
- Manjeet, a thorough article on Sufism…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism
manjeet
Sufism is out of bounds or definitions of religion or arts or any possible measurable.
Though I cant say much about it, as I have just experienced it through some poetry of Baba Bulleh Shah,some songs of Abida Parveen & Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and through some more writings, it is like an unending quest. The Sufi emotion can reflect anywhere, irrespective of it being belonging necessary to any place.
My No. 1 song in the list of “High on emotion but coldly shot songs” would be “Tere liye” of Veer-Zaara…
An interesting anecdote about the “Tere Liye” song – The tune was originally composed by Madan Mohan for the “Dil Dhoondta Hai” song for Gulzar’s Mausam. It was one of the three tunes that he had made for this song. I have the recording of the three tunes in the voice of Madan Mohan himself but don’t know how to post it here.
- Pratap, I’ve sent you an email… please check and advice.
yeah, the veer-zara soundtrack comes with two CDs, the second being the “making of” the music, where you hear yash chopra himself talking about madan mohan and his music, and the tracks blend in and out between madan mohan’s original songs/tunes and the actual songs and tunes used in veer-zara.. an awesome CD collection to have.
I somehow didnt like the score of veer zaara, it didnt fall in the classic madan mohan league.
may be it was the timing, or the lack of on-screen chemistry/magic. the music didnt get me ticking, the film was worse.
wonder how the song would have fitted into the brilliant mausam score…
yes, Tushar, tis I! Recognise me?? strange we meet this way now, but that’s how it should be for now I guess, came online here and saw the “song project”…
well, we have left it in the dinghy halls of forgotten memory havent we?
I seriously wanted to start this again, but now you caught up in a web..it wont work unless we lock ourselves up in a space…but my groans aside…
this forum could be used to kind of re-trigger our passion for it…so my request with people reading this is, please dont intellectualise and think musically superior thoughts yet, kindly search your memory of emotion, what does a song (you like, dislike) make you feel, what are the images, apart from the picturization, your own if any,any story that emerges as you play a song (yeah, try playing it for real- maybe sit in front of a mirror) and go thru the song…allow the body to move, if not, stay with the thoughts that come…stay with the music…
and if you have a story and an interesting experience…come on out with it, if you wanna share…
@deepak, hullo sir!
good to have you read this post
and sorry for any liberties that i might have taken.
agree with your views. i will post the second edition as soon as i get time to breathe. lots of musical fanatics at PFC so it could do wonders.
having good discussions on my GURU/GULZAR posts.