By Poojil Tiwari
At one point in 2020, right around the time the pandemic had fully taken roots, the lockdown had been extended indefinitely, and the realization that this was going to be a long-drawn affair had begun seeping in, T Series released Masakali 2.0. And the internet went crazy. The song met the wrath of an overwhelmingly online millennial generation. An incredibly sacred part of our childhood had been tampered with and the internet did not take kindly to it, trending memes and hashtags against the song and running campaigns to dislike it on Youtube. (T-Series has now hidden the like-dislike count, but the video has had a consistently higher number of dislikes). The composer of the original song, Oscar winner A.R. Rahman expressed his displeasure with the remake. Even Siddharth Malhotra, who starred in the video of the remake, felt that the original holds a sacred place in the hearts of listeners and should not have been touched.
The Masakali saga however, is not a one-off incident. It is a part of a larger trend that has taken over Bollywood's music industry in the last half of the decade. To chart how the remake fever gripped the industry, I took a look at ~500 of the most popular songs from the last decade.
In all fairness, Bollywood’s tryst with remaking songs is not new. Who can forget the legendary Indipop scene of the 90s when bands like Instant Karma (today: Shankar-Ehsan-Loy) and Bombay Vikings (Neeraj Shreedhar) remade songs from the 70s and 80s to immense critical acclaim and success. And yet there was something different about the remakes of the 90s. Rather than being a direct reproduction of the old songs, they were an interpretation of them. Often these Indian classical tunes were mixed with more peppy, western beats converting timeless classics into funky dance numbers.
“Today remaking is more about changing the beat. Kaala Chashma, which was arguably the most famous remake of 2018—there really wasn’t much done,” says Raghav Mathur, a film student at Jamia and an avid Bollywood buff. “Now it’s like, anything which more than ten years old like Das Bahane could be put in as a really easy promotional tool, because a few people who liked that song will also listen to this song, the music video will make nice, and the movie will be sold for a certain amount of people before it is even released. We know now to expect this in every film, and we know that there is nothing new coming with it.”
This evolution in style is not random though. Neither is it born out of the traditional reasons why people remade songs—nostalgia, the everlasting appeal of a hit song, or the classics informing your own musical sensibilities. To understand why remakes are becoming the mainstay of popular Bollywood music, we need to look at the musical journey of one man.
Bagchi entered the music industry in 2015, as one-half of the musical duo Tanishk-Vayu. They shot to fame with the song ‘Banno’ from Tanu Weds Manu Returns— also a remake of a popular folk wedding song. While the duo eventually went their separate ways, the former’s love for remaking songs stood the test of time. And while these remakes are often sentimentally panned in internet culture, they regularly go on to feature in lists of most popular songs for the year.
Bagchi capitalised on the growing Punjabi music industry of the 2010s and brought it to Bollywood. With high-scale production budgets that make for glossy videos, fast-paced dance numbers and incredibly catchy tunes, these songs bear a close resemblance to the average big-budget Bollywood number. The videos sell you an aspirational standard often found in rap cultures of the west—money, fancy cars, women fawning over you. Punjabi music, just like Punjabi culture, is out there. It is lavish, it is in your face and there is just something so catchy about it that despite groaning about another Punjabi remake, you will find yourself singing along to High Rated Gabru. The bling of Punjab made it perfect for Bollywood, and the industry embraced it wholeheartedly. Over the last decade, the number of songs made from the Punjabi music industry has steadily increased.
Anuracti Sharma is a music researcher at IIM-Ahmedabad. I spoke to her to dig deeper into how the landscape of Bollywood music is evolving as we experience it. “The purpose of a song has changed. Why a song was made in the 60s and 70s was for the film. It had a message, it had a close knit group of director, composer, lyricist, singer working together to produce one song, which was very symbolic of the time. Today, the shelf life of a song has reduced drastically. The reason they are making a song is not to make it memorable. They are just making it for a shelf-life of one to two weeks or for purely promotional purposes. This whole culture of reproducing songs makes sense, because you have to create so much so often.”
Given the similarity in musical texture between Punjabi and Bollywood music, the former has provided great fodder to mass produce songs at fast rate. These remade songs are often just blatant translations of the original, with little of the inventiveness required to interpret an old song with new musical sensibilities. There is a great overlap between the audiences of these industries, and the makers have a guarantee that song will be a hit even before it is released.
The boom of streaming platforms such as Spotify and JioSaavn in India has greatly fuelled this change. The physical investment made in owning a CD or a cassette of songs, and a music system is now non-existent. In a world where we are being constantly bombarded with information across platforms, and our brains are being adapted to consume information in 15 seconds or less, the attention economy has taken a hit.
When we look at the data for remake songs between 2011 to 2020, the numbers substantiate what Anuracti says. The highest number of remade songs from the decade, have come from the decade itself. The shortened shelf life of songs has meant that they can be reproduced within a few years of their release.
Not all factors that have led to the growth of this remake trend are external to Bollywood though. The early 2010s were marked by the rise of what I call the “specialist composer”, a trend that has only increased with time. In between 2001 to 2010, the average number of composers for the most popular Bollywood movies went up by 140%. Bagchi himself is a product of this phenomenon.
The close knit relationship between directors and music composers that Anuracti spoke about has been diluted greatly. Today, most movies look to a wide array of composers to produce songs of a specific type i.e. their specialisation. Directors will look to an Amaal Mallik or a Rochak Kohli for a slow romantic number, Baadshah for a rap song, and Tanishk Bagchi for the remakes. The art behind music composition has never been more formulaic.
However, not all is lost for the Bollywood music industry. With multiple composers becoming the norm in Bollywood, new voices are entering the mainstream at a faster rate than ever. “It is a brilliant change for regional music. Gujarati music is finally opening up to being heard by an audience beyond Gujarat and Maharashtra. The quality of Gujarati music and how it has this Navratri, Garba dance feel, that is going to work very well for Bollywood.”, says Anuracti. Composers from regional industries also bring with them a sense of ownership over their songs, that has been missing from Bollywood. Punjabi music in particular has been characterized by pop icons who are superstars in their own right, and they have brought this ownership and their individual stardom over to Bollywood. It will be interesting to see how the industry goes from here. If 2021 has been any indication, remakes are firmly in the 'here to stay' camp.