This Sunday Hindustan Times' supplement 'Brunch' carried an article called "Ultimate Bollywood Playlist". They asked 17 people from Bollywood Music Industry including Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Shantanu Moitra, Kavitha Krishnamoorthy, Abhijeet, Ameen Sayani, Prasoon Joshi, Piyush Mishra, Anu Malik, Alka Yagnik, Sunidhi Chauhan among others.
They all selected some songs. We agreed with some, we laughed at some of the more ridiculous choices. Without going into too many details, let us just say that we could not find much fault with lists of Ameen Sayani saab or Kavitha Krishnamoorthy or Prasoon Joshi. At the other end of the spectrum, some of the song choices were so bad, there was room to doubt musical brain of the person.
Next we we started discussing what would be our ultimate playlist. Within a short time, we decided finding all time best 10 or even best 50 would be next to impossible. Hence we turned to next best thing. We decided to select up to 10 songs per music director. Even this is not very simple. We can keep discussing worth of one song over other till cows come home. But this is our list.
How we chose the 10 songs? Although we are calling it "The Music Director Project", the selection is not just about composition. A hindi film song has three important facets namely, music, lyrics and singing. If any one of these falters, it will pull the song back from the greatness ladder. Some may ask, what about picturisation? We feel that most of us like to "listen" to the songs than to "see" them. Videos of songs were not available to masses easily till just a few years back and it certainly did not help that many great songs were picturised on cardboard actors and actresses. But there are some songs, where the on screen actors add to the beauty of a song and seeing them instead of listening is certainly worth the trouble. Also as a mark of versatility of a music director, we tried to choose songs of different moods and, if possible, from different films. Popularity is not an important factor and also we tried avoiding songs which are based on tunes of other composers.
Enough of this talk. Lets get going. Next posts will start taking up one music director at a time.
They all selected some songs. We agreed with some, we laughed at some of the more ridiculous choices. Without going into too many details, let us just say that we could not find much fault with lists of Ameen Sayani saab or Kavitha Krishnamoorthy or Prasoon Joshi. At the other end of the spectrum, some of the song choices were so bad, there was room to doubt musical brain of the person.
Next we we started discussing what would be our ultimate playlist. Within a short time, we decided finding all time best 10 or even best 50 would be next to impossible. Hence we turned to next best thing. We decided to select up to 10 songs per music director. Even this is not very simple. We can keep discussing worth of one song over other till cows come home. But this is our list.
How we chose the 10 songs? Although we are calling it "The Music Director Project", the selection is not just about composition. A hindi film song has three important facets namely, music, lyrics and singing. If any one of these falters, it will pull the song back from the greatness ladder. Some may ask, what about picturisation? We feel that most of us like to "listen" to the songs than to "see" them. Videos of songs were not available to masses easily till just a few years back and it certainly did not help that many great songs were picturised on cardboard actors and actresses. But there are some songs, where the on screen actors add to the beauty of a song and seeing them instead of listening is certainly worth the trouble. Also as a mark of versatility of a music director, we tried to choose songs of different moods and, if possible, from different films. Popularity is not an important factor and also we tried avoiding songs which are based on tunes of other composers.
Enough of this talk. Lets get going. Next posts will start taking up one music director at a time.
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