Musicology- Shadow Bollywood.

Unlike any other country; what we call Indian music is dominated by film industry be it north India or south India.  The most popular singers are playback singers. I wish someday Indian music would come out of the shadow of the bollywood, tollywood etc.

Why I wish so?

Because, the film industry uses music just to spice up the story. It has fixed formats of emotions. The lyricist writes on demand of the story.  We can guess the kind of the songs in a movie with rare exceptions.  Love song, sad song, happy song, marriage song, party song etc.  Film industry rarely uses other than popular genre. It uses some folk songs distorted in bollywood istyle.  If we could really see the diverse cultures and diverse singing styles of India, it’s a sad situation that many singing styles have died and continuously dyeing because of lack of patronage.

I do not know why, we people do not accept independent singers as we lovingly embrace the filmy songs. Perhaps we are obsessed with the film stars and we give more credit to the actors than the actual singers. All this is causing lack of songs related to our day to day life, no social singing, not a song related to social issues.

We have no songs related to -corruption, honor killings, female foeticide, price rise, women issues, environment issues,children issues, against riots, against terrorism etc.

Where are genres like jazz, reggae, rap, hip- hop etc. with independent prominent artists?

 We have classical music, bhangra songs in Punjabi, Ghazals, bhajans and bolly wood music. But music sales tell the story; we have only two genres that take more than 95%.

Filmy music (~ 70%) and bhajans(~25%). Rests of the genres come under 5%.

 Two artists prominently survived out of the shadow of the bollywood are Jagjit Singh with his Ghazals and Daler Mehndi with his Dhol beats. Sonu Nigam tried well but gained not much.

Indian music listeners! Please wake up.

So the music industry could.

AnMoL  VaChAn :   Mora sainya tou khoob hi kamaat hai , MAHANGAI  DAYAN khaye jaat hai.

The song on the issue of mahangai (Price rise) touched the public heart, because it affects their daily life.