Arijit Singh stepped away from accepting new playback assignments, saying he had grown weary and wanted to explore independent music so that he did not have to deal with singing what the labels wanted and he did not.
I HAVE, over the years, begun to suspect that Bollywood has developed a peculiar form of musical amnesia. We remember our greatest songs so fondly that we keep forgetting how to make new ones and continue stealing from the old ones. In every Indian music lover’s life, this is the moment when nostalgia ceases to be nostalgia and becomes evidence.
Evidence that there once was a time when Bollywood made songs. Now, it makes announcements that happen to rhyme. This is particularly painful for those of us who grew up believing that a film song was not a decorative item placed between the second and third acts, but an essential part of the storytelling.
In the great Hindi films, the hero did not suddenly develop choreography because the producer had remembered there was a music launch next Tuesday. The song belonged to the story.
I love Bollywood music enough to be annoyed by it of late. That, I suspect, is the correct qualification for discussing its present condition.
