IT’S A MAN’S WORLD

While the music of Badmaash Company is just out and its prospects unclear as yet and also dependent on the film,the music of Rocket Singh did not work at all,even with the young metro lovers and (presumably) NRIs at whose sensibilities songs like Gadbadi hadbadi (Vishal Dadlani),Pankhon ko (Salim Merchant) and the title-track (Benny Dayal) were aimed.
Badmaash… fares better,though,with Pritam pushing the Rahat Fateh Ali Khan envelope again after De Dana Dan’s Sab rishte naate with the rock number Fakira,KK’s splendid rendition of Ayyashi and Chaska leading the list.

However it was the much more mass-oriented Tum Mile that saw Pritam at his creative peak among his many hits last year with those KK twin towers,Dil ibaadat and O meri jaan as well as Iss jahaan mein,Tu hi haqeeqat and Tum mile from accomplished talents like Mohit Chauhan,Shafqat Amanat Ali,Javed Ali and Neeraj Shridhar.

Many other recent scores tend to be male-dominated with just token concessions to the female voice (Jannat,Paathshaala,New York,Kites) and the imbalance is clear. In the older group,it was only Anurodh that had proved a hit musically as Kishore shouldered Aap ke anurodh pe,Aate jaate khubsoorat, Aaja ho aaja and Na hansna mere gham pe along with the two-part Manna Dey song Tum besahara ho to kisika sahara bano.

The strange part is that this male dominance in music is happening even though most of the newer heroes like Ranbir Kapoor and Neil Nitin Mukesh are barely keen on having ‘conventional’ songs filmed on them,whereas the female side,come Katrina Kaif,Priyanka Chopra or Kareena Kapoor are “item” song favourites.

Kunal Deshmukh,director of both Jannat and Tum Mile,explains this as current flavour and a passing trend and does not necessarily look at this as a lasting phenomenon. “I agree that Hindi films have always been largely hero-centric,but in the past,you could break into a song by the heroine alone or a duet very easily. But for me,so far my films have always been hero-centric so I have to look at songs too that way. In Jannat,the only female song comes when the hero enters a place where a woman is singing.”

Sulaiman Merchant of the Salim-Sulaiman duo admits that there is a lot of variety in the male voices today,which could be a contributing factor. “Nowadays you don’t have love songs of the running-around-trees kind,’ he says. “Mostly,it’s all about the situation and it just happens that there is a male singer who is the demand for a point in the plot.”

Admittedly,musical stars like Shammi Kapoor,Rajesh Khanna or Rishi Kapoor generated music scores with a tilt towards males,but then their heroines had a strong presence too. And in many a case with macho heroes like Amitabh Bachchan and Sanjay Dutt,it was the heroines who would have more songs,but ultimately,it does boil down to the director’s preference and trends.
Concludes Shreya Ghoshal,“In any field,especially creative art,a balance between male and female voices makes for a wholesome sound and feel. What else can I say?”