Lyrics n Music

Munni badnaam hui Darling tere liye, main Jhandu balm hui darling tere liye..  

This is a very popular song doing the rounds of various radio and TV stations these days. It makes me wonder where are we heading towards? Lyrics, at one point of time used to be the essence of the songs in hindi cinema. The films were recognized by the songs and the songs in turn were liked because of their lyrics.

 It was India's very first sound film, Alam Ara,http://www.indianetzone.com/22/alam_ara_indian_movie.htm that established the song-n-dance convention in our cinema. 

Seventy-five years on, look at the state of film lyrics today.The lyrics are supposed to not only reflect the spirit of a film, but also capture the essence of the time and place it's set in. Today's songs seem labored because of a huge disconnect between lyric writing and poetry. Words are rustled up to fit pre-composed tunes. Today the beat is important, not the words.

Today's lyrics aren't poetry. They aren't even prose. They are bad prose. The attempts at rhyming are painfully laboured. In the past, a Hindi film lyricist had 70-75 words to play around with. Today he has no more than 30 or 35. Their vocabulary is very limited. Today's cinema has no gentle dissolves, no flashbacks. It's cut-to-cut. Images and sounds are thrown at you one after the other. In song sequences, the movements usually have no connection with the words. Words are just an excuse to hang a tune on.

In an interview Gulzar once said, "You don't have to wear heavy glasses to write film lyrics." Beeti na beetayi raina in Parichay was a classical bandish that conveyed the pain of separation. It worked wonderfully well in the '70s. Today's Hindi cinema has no room for such songs. If we think old classical poetry will still work, we'd be deluding ourselves. Do we still wear the kurtas or pants we wore in the '60s? To survive, you have to move with the times. You have to think of images relevant to the contemporary environment. "In Satya, I wrote sara din sadkon pe khaali rickshey sa peechhe peechhe chalta hai to refer to a lover pursuing her beloved. I couldn't have used the traditional Radha-Krishna imagery here. It would've been completely out of place."

So you see, the scenario has changed, the times have changed and so the imagery needs to be changed too but not the depth and the meaning behind the lyrics...because at the end of the day, no matter how nice the music is, its the lyrics that hook the listeners to a song!!!

To be continued...