What in the world is this trend of Music called ‘Remix’? To me it’s nothing but a gory gang rape of melodious Hindi Songs of yesteryears by some weird people with distorted sense of music. These second-handers have regaled themselves by indulging in heinous crime of relegating the memorable old tracks that are still pleasant to the ears in its original form to a cheap cacophony which they recognize as ‘Music’.
These creators of Remix are guilty of violating the innocence of those old hits which even today are a genuine Music connoisseur’s delight.
Remix of old songs doesn’t involve any labor at all. All one has to do is replace the soothing tunes of the original composed by maestros who were well acquainted with the aesthetics with a loud din made by the haphazard blend of Western musical instruments. One can add any nonsensical rap in the midst of a song even though absolutely unnecessary. Also, the voice of great singers like Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar or Lata Mangeshkar is substituted by a singer whose voice is either hoarse or nasal or shrill enough to set your ear-drums on fire.
Ironically the musicians and the singers of these Remixes are half-baked men who have only a surface knowledge of music but who never had the experience to dive deep in this field. Most of them wouldn’t be able to distinguish ‘Alto’ from a ‘Bass’ and are much oblivious of ‘Tenor’ or ‘Counter Tenor’!
But most surprisingly, it is these remix which are very popular with our present day youths and teenagers. The reason is not difficult to find but it quite obvious. Our present generation of youngsters has been blindly aping the culture and music of West to the extent that its influences have numbed their faculty of original thinking and have distorted their musical senses. As such they interpret ‘Noise’ for music and vice-versa. Sad to say, but it’s an undisputed fact that most of our present generation have invariable reduced themselves to second-handers who are incapable to write original songs or compose decent original music.
A look at the present coterie of singers; Sonu Nigam prides himself for copying Rafi, Kumar Sanu blindly apes Kishore and then there is a singer who sings through his nose but yet his songs end up being chartbusters. And lets not even start talking about that copycat going by the name Anu Malik.
It’s high time that we get rid of those parasites who masquerade as musicians and singers and create an atmosphere wherein the fresh breeze of originality rushes in.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, and...
Comments
9 comments | Add your comment »
shadows
May 28th, 2007 at 6:20 am | #
Who is MA ?
Saakshi O. Juneja
May 28th, 2007 at 6:23 am | #
Shadows – MA is a guest blogger on TEIO.
shadows
May 28th, 2007 at 6:45 am | #
Well, the quality of music has been worst since the 90s. Also, DJs are the worst in the scene, they behave as they are great musicians even though they know zilch about music and are more interested in the chicks rather than music. Even DJing is an art, and most of the DJs fall terribly short of standards. An example of a good DJ would be Chicane (the guy who mixed Bryan Adams song) or the guys in the Linkin Park ReAnimation album.
Rishi
May 28th, 2007 at 6:56 am | #
Hehe … its the rape of the original music. Pardesia Yeh Sach where its REKHA was a footu great tuned song but when Pardesi Remix where its RAKHI came, it was a type of insult to the originality!
Dipika
May 28th, 2007 at 8:38 am | #
Well, not all remixes follow the standard play-random-beats-on-skeleton-melody-and-insert-rap/englishvocals model. The Dance Masti series had some really good remixes. Take ‘Raat ke Humsafar’; even my father loves the Faces In The Dark Mix. The heavy instrumentation (is that a word?) of the original gives way to a more laid back arrangement. Mahalaxmi Iyer’s voice is divine (Shankar Mahadevan is just supposrting here). I prefer this version to the original. ‘Woh hai zara’ (Mahalaxmi again) was an old song that I never paid much attention till this wonderfully playful remix came along. Admittedly, there are the occassional english vocals that do nothing for me, but stuff like this are arguably new spins on classics and as much as a homage as something like Jhankaar Beats was. Though I was glad that movie had only one ostensible remix, that too interspersed with a original creation.
Dipika
May 28th, 2007 at 9:59 am | #
And sometimes I think present day youths and teenagers at any point of time had a fairly large capacity to accept all kinds of crappy music, movies, etc. Keeping aside the fact that filmi music (even the variety we consider the work of maestros) was seen as crippling appreciation for real (classical/folk/whatever) music, we’ve always had our share of Himesh Reshammiyas, in different degrees, churning out mass-manufactured, highly but temporarily popular songs. A lot of Bappi Lahiri’s stuff was fluff. And Anu Malik’s It’s raining was as bad as ‘Aap ka Suroor’.
And despite the overblown media sensation of HR, we’ve had a string of interesting music in the last few years. A bit too much punjabi-style dance numbers, sure. But there’s Vishal Bhardwaj, A.R.Rahman, the under-used Sandesh Shandilya, M.M.Kreem, Mithoon (with Anwar) Swanand Kirkire singing ‘Bawra Mann’, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan with ‘Naina’, Mohit Chauhan in ‘Guncha’ and ‘Khoon Chala’, Naresh Iyer crooning ‘Roobaroo’ and Kailash Kher rocking ‘Chak De Phattey’; none of them wannabes.
The Piker
May 29th, 2007 at 4:35 am | #
Well that can be said of remixes in the Indi-pop scene. Actual remixing is serious business. Ask around and you’ll know that people who are into remixes in the international stage, are great musicians as well as acoustic technicians. I am talking of international music here so that people don’t get generalize based on indipop and say that those who remix music are crap.
In order to remix music, one needs to know a LOT about music. Alto and Bass are basic stuff for these people. They need to know scales and if so are they pentatonic or classical or whatever (not getting into details here). And once they analyse the song they plan to remix they need to deconstruct it to its basic components, add some of their parts to it and rebuild it.
Agreed that the essence of the song may not be original, but the act of remixing is an art. It gives the remix artist a chance to take a look at the song elements of the original composer and try to add elements of his own to add his interpretations to it. Nothing wrong to it if you ask me. Famous artists such as Nine Inch Nails these days upload their songs online free to other artists to dabble in remixing it.
(If you understand programming it is something like open source software where every one can contribute. Remixes can be a good thing)
I have dabbled in music composition myself, so I thought I might add my two cents of opinion here.
Of course, the Hindi pop industry takes a very lazy approach to remixing, which is worrying.
Full2njoy
May 29th, 2007 at 6:46 am | #
Gimme a dhinchak dhinchak remix anyday. As for all the complainers, they are losers who got nothing else to do other than complain. Ignore them
Dhinchak dhinchak….
Anil
May 31st, 2007 at 5:29 am | #