Now, singers face the music
Remember the decades when a band of six or seven singers—Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhonsle, Mohammad Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh and Manna De—held sway in the playback arena, leaving only crumbs for other contenders?
The next generation—Anuradha Paudwal, Alka Yagnik, Kavita Krishnamurthy et al—didn't do as spectacularly but stayed put for at least a decade. In the last couple of years, however, staying power has become as elusive as a tuneful song from a yesteryear singer.
"Playback singing will never see total domination again," says music composer Annu Mallik, who believes that so much talent is being thrown up by reality shows and other sources that new singers will henceforth have only 15 minutes of fame.
"Gone are the days when a singer could notch up 30,000 songs in his or her career like Rafi or the Mangeshkar sisters, or even 5,000 songs like the bunch that came after them. Today's playback singers are unlikely to touch posterity."
With the influx of new kids on the block from Shaan to Kay Kay to Kunal Ganjawala and Kailash Kher, '90s male singers like Udit Narayan, Kumar Sanu and Abhijeet have been completely overshadowed and are on the lookout for greener pastures.
Narayan, these days, concentrates on Tamil songs, while Abhijeet lends his vocals to Rabindra sangeet compositions. Kumar Sanu has got into producing movies.
However, given the sheer numbers of new entrants—among the women, there's Sunidhi Chauhan, Alisha Chinai, Vasundhara Das and Shreya Ghoshal—even the current lot is not exactly swamped with work in Bollywood.
Says Ghoshal, "Today's singers may never have a golden period like the one enjoyed by Lataji and Ashaji. There is so much more talent visible and the competition is far more cut-throat."
Ghoshal has been singing more in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati and Bengali—around 800 songs in all these languages collectively—and admits she is lucky to share a fantastic rapport with music legend Ilayaraja and thus get regular songs in Tamil and Telugu films.
Male singers too are journeying to other parts of India to keep themselves occupied—Udit Narayan, Sukhwinder Singh, Hariharan and Shankar Mahadevan are big names in South India, and even Adnan Sami and Lucky Ali have sung songs in Tamil for director Shankar's Boys, says the film's producer R Madesh.
And now there's a new threat to the already dwindling opportunities: the music director who's itching to turn singer.
An R D Burman or a Rehman sang their own compositions very rarely, but composer Annu Mallik has sung four of the six songs in Firoz Nadiadwala's Deewane Huye Paagal.
"It was Firoz's idea," he says lamely. "I was only to do one number. But since he felt my voice suited three more numbers, I had to yield to his requests."
Himesh Reshammiya, the new hotshot composer on the block, has also made it a practice to lend his vocals regularly—he has playbacked six songs in this year alone and will be releasing a solo album soon.
"I have a good, trained voice," he says by way of justification. "And since I sang the title track of Aashiq Banaya Aapne, which is the biggest musical hit of 2005, I have been inundated with offers to sing. However, Himesh the music composer decides whether Himesh the singer should be used. I don't impose myself on any producer."
The fight between composers and singers to steal the best song in an album is on for another reason as well. "A hit song can fetch a singer big money and repeat value at shows," points out a renowned music critic.
"Sonu Nigam (Rs 15 lakh per show) and Sunidhi Chauhan (Rs 10 lakh per show) have made a fortune out of stage shows with their solo hits."
Annu Malik candidly accepts that "playback singing is very lucrative today because world concerts are a big money-making avenue. And only those who sing their own songs qualify to do stage shows".
"The time when playback singers called the shots are over," he adds, summing up the current trend. "Today it is the music composer who's in command.
If a music composer comes up with a great tune, he can use any singer to render his song. And while certain singers may have an edge over others, no one has an absolute advantage anymore. People now have no choice but to fight for airwave space."
| |
comment:
p_commentcount