Henry
BANNED
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2012
- Messages
- 297
- Reaction score
- 0
In 100% Love, a recent Bengali potboiler which was a huge hit, actor Jeet prances about in his distressed denims, with a cluster of blondes in myriad hot pants for company, to the song Its a 100 per cent, love love love, sung by Mika Singh.
In 100% Love, a recent Bengali potboiler which was a huge hit, actor Jeet prances about in his distressed denims, with a cluster of blondes in myriad hot pants for company, to the song Its a 100 per cent, love love love, sung by Mika Singh. Very kitsch. Very Salman Khan. But a growing league of Bengalis don't mind stepping out of their intellectual wilderness to gulp down mouthfuls of Bengali item numbers. For, after RD Burman and his Hindi versions of popular Bengali songs bowed out in the 80s, the golden age of Bengali cinema, a generation of Bengalis grew up on plain bad cinema, and worse music, through the 90s and early noughties when ill-written scripts, jarring editing and dialogues uncannily similar to 80s Bollywood ruled the roost. Music was usually a sad extra, in the blood-and-melodrama feast that a Bengali mainstream film was then. Bollywood thus gained prominence in their list of must-watch films, marginalising the shoddy regional productions. Towards the late 2000s, the regional movies improved, with promising original stories, exotic shooting locales and music as peppy as their Mumbai counterparts. The formula clicked.
Today, a host of Bengali films such as 100% Love (2012), Le Halua Le (2012), Shotru (2011, the Bengali adaptation of Singham), Dui Prithibi (2010), and Le Chakka (2010), for example, make generous use of Bollywood romance staples such as mahi ve, soniye, dil and pyaar. These borrowed idioms define a Tollywood potboiler today, as much as an abs-flaunting hero. Culture hawks would shake their heads and point an admonishing finger at Challenge, a 2009 Tollywood blockbuster, directed by the then fairly new director Raj Chakraborty and starring a two-film-old Dev, who gave up assisting filmmakers in Bollywood with dreams of being a Tollywood pin-up someday. The film stood out for how it packaged the Bengali para (a para, or a neighbourhood, being a Bengali youngsters first brush at groupie cool-dom) vocabulary with celluloid hipness and made a lunge for Bengalis across social divisions. It sent the Tollywood poster-worshipping crowd berserk, and the sizeable minority who wouldnt venture anywhere near a Bengali potboiler, were felled by their own curiosity. Part reflection and part self-deprecation, part-cool and part- funny, Bengali music had found a way back to its listeners. In short, it had got a bit of its mojo back.
Music director Jeet Ganguly, one half of the Jeet-Pritam duo which scored the music for Bollywood blockbuster Dhoom, and the newly crowned hit-machine of Tollywood, describes the phenomenon best. Romance in Bengali, Ganguly says, jombe na Bengali for will not cut ice. Theres this song I composed for Challenge, Masti maange dil, maahi ve. Try translating it to Bengali... he says. The result, one has to accept, is ridiculous. Not only does maahi ve beat its possible Bengali counterpart in music television spunk, the whole expression in Bengali is nothing short of lead-heavy on the tongue. The hero is not subject to such linguistic atrocities and made to revel in Bollywoodised Bengali instead.
The confirmation that he was headed in the right direction came to Ganguly in Mumbai. I was in the food court of Inorbit Mall. Someones phone rang and the ringtone was that of Oh my love, a song I had composed and my wife Chandrani had written for the film Amanush (2010), he says. A curious Ganguly walked up to the man and learnt that the Punjabi software professional had taken the ringtone from his Bengali flatmate. He said he didnt understand the entire song, but from some Hindi words in it and the English bits, he could figure out what it says and he loved the melody, adds Ganguly.
What attracts the intellectual Bengali to such over-the-top commercial music? Of course, besides the huge marketing budgets of films which blare out the songs on radio and elsewhere, almost forcing the audience to listen to them, fact is, Bengali music has hit the right nerve, giving a Bengali twist to the language of cool. Bengalis always had a predilection for the Bollywood brand of college slangs, its rap and hip-hop. Filmmakers like Raj Chakraborty and progressive film production houses like Sree Venkatesh Films sensed that, and brought the same into Bengali music to hard-sell it. Filmmaker Rajib, who directed the hugely successful Amanush, a spin-off on Darr, made sure that like the heros biceps and the heroines chiselled figure, the films songs too were pan-India, which in India is mostly identified with Bollywood.
But Ganguly refrains from saying Bengali films and music are getting Bollywoodised. Lets not call this Bollywood. This new idiom of music is one that appeals to people across languages. True, it is partly invented and mostly used in Bollywood, but theres a reason why it is popular. People like melody, spunk and easy-to-digest lyrics. Something that was missing from Bengali music, he says.
Bengals Bollywood Number - Indian Express
In 100% Love, a recent Bengali potboiler which was a huge hit, actor Jeet prances about in his distressed denims, with a cluster of blondes in myriad hot pants for company, to the song Its a 100 per cent, love love love, sung by Mika Singh. Very kitsch. Very Salman Khan. But a growing league of Bengalis don't mind stepping out of their intellectual wilderness to gulp down mouthfuls of Bengali item numbers. For, after RD Burman and his Hindi versions of popular Bengali songs bowed out in the 80s, the golden age of Bengali cinema, a generation of Bengalis grew up on plain bad cinema, and worse music, through the 90s and early noughties when ill-written scripts, jarring editing and dialogues uncannily similar to 80s Bollywood ruled the roost. Music was usually a sad extra, in the blood-and-melodrama feast that a Bengali mainstream film was then. Bollywood thus gained prominence in their list of must-watch films, marginalising the shoddy regional productions. Towards the late 2000s, the regional movies improved, with promising original stories, exotic shooting locales and music as peppy as their Mumbai counterparts. The formula clicked.
Today, a host of Bengali films such as 100% Love (2012), Le Halua Le (2012), Shotru (2011, the Bengali adaptation of Singham), Dui Prithibi (2010), and Le Chakka (2010), for example, make generous use of Bollywood romance staples such as mahi ve, soniye, dil and pyaar. These borrowed idioms define a Tollywood potboiler today, as much as an abs-flaunting hero. Culture hawks would shake their heads and point an admonishing finger at Challenge, a 2009 Tollywood blockbuster, directed by the then fairly new director Raj Chakraborty and starring a two-film-old Dev, who gave up assisting filmmakers in Bollywood with dreams of being a Tollywood pin-up someday. The film stood out for how it packaged the Bengali para (a para, or a neighbourhood, being a Bengali youngsters first brush at groupie cool-dom) vocabulary with celluloid hipness and made a lunge for Bengalis across social divisions. It sent the Tollywood poster-worshipping crowd berserk, and the sizeable minority who wouldnt venture anywhere near a Bengali potboiler, were felled by their own curiosity. Part reflection and part self-deprecation, part-cool and part- funny, Bengali music had found a way back to its listeners. In short, it had got a bit of its mojo back.
Music director Jeet Ganguly, one half of the Jeet-Pritam duo which scored the music for Bollywood blockbuster Dhoom, and the newly crowned hit-machine of Tollywood, describes the phenomenon best. Romance in Bengali, Ganguly says, jombe na Bengali for will not cut ice. Theres this song I composed for Challenge, Masti maange dil, maahi ve. Try translating it to Bengali... he says. The result, one has to accept, is ridiculous. Not only does maahi ve beat its possible Bengali counterpart in music television spunk, the whole expression in Bengali is nothing short of lead-heavy on the tongue. The hero is not subject to such linguistic atrocities and made to revel in Bollywoodised Bengali instead.
The confirmation that he was headed in the right direction came to Ganguly in Mumbai. I was in the food court of Inorbit Mall. Someones phone rang and the ringtone was that of Oh my love, a song I had composed and my wife Chandrani had written for the film Amanush (2010), he says. A curious Ganguly walked up to the man and learnt that the Punjabi software professional had taken the ringtone from his Bengali flatmate. He said he didnt understand the entire song, but from some Hindi words in it and the English bits, he could figure out what it says and he loved the melody, adds Ganguly.
What attracts the intellectual Bengali to such over-the-top commercial music? Of course, besides the huge marketing budgets of films which blare out the songs on radio and elsewhere, almost forcing the audience to listen to them, fact is, Bengali music has hit the right nerve, giving a Bengali twist to the language of cool. Bengalis always had a predilection for the Bollywood brand of college slangs, its rap and hip-hop. Filmmakers like Raj Chakraborty and progressive film production houses like Sree Venkatesh Films sensed that, and brought the same into Bengali music to hard-sell it. Filmmaker Rajib, who directed the hugely successful Amanush, a spin-off on Darr, made sure that like the heros biceps and the heroines chiselled figure, the films songs too were pan-India, which in India is mostly identified with Bollywood.
But Ganguly refrains from saying Bengali films and music are getting Bollywoodised. Lets not call this Bollywood. This new idiom of music is one that appeals to people across languages. True, it is partly invented and mostly used in Bollywood, but theres a reason why it is popular. People like melody, spunk and easy-to-digest lyrics. Something that was missing from Bengali music, he says.
Bengals Bollywood Number - Indian Express
