Ever wondered why millennials listen to old film songs from the '60s and the '70s? How did they get into the habit in the first place? Were there composers other than RD Burman operating in the golden era, and who were they? Was there any film music produced in the south of the Vindhyas? This book attempts to answer those and other questions...from the point-of-view of an inveterate film music junkie now exiled to the world of rock! So, how does one go from Mohammed Rafi to Mick Jagger? Read on to find out.
The author is a chartered accountant working in the field of exports with an unquenchable thirst for writing and singing. He has written about music and film music on his blog and also contributed articles to the blog of a well-known film critic. Before the pandemic, the author was also a passionate amateur tennis player with a proud record of losing in every tournament he participated in! The time not devoted anymore to tennis is now spent unleashing his vocal gymnastics on a small audience of relatives, friends and well-wishers.
I have previously made half-hearted stabs at writing novels before. I have a bunch of plotlines waiting to be thrashed out into full length novels. Those were the books I decided to write that nobody told me they needed to read. This one on the other hand originated from what a couple of my blog readers said. They liked my blog posts about film music and asked why I couldn't write a book about film music.
The simple answer as to why is I hadn't thought of it before. I am just a voracious listener and a semi-voracious reader of articles about music. I don't have and never had access to anybody remotely bigtime in the film. music set up. So...I never thought of myself as qualified to write such a book. But upon receiving the requests, I thought of a way to write such a book.
Which could be to talk about my journey of discovering their work through the years.
You see, I am not a boomer/Gen X curmudgeon who heard the songs of the 'golden era' as they happened, on radio or LP or cassette. I am a millennial, albeit a bit of an older millennial born in the mid 80s, and I spent my childhood in Kalyan, a long, long way from the throbbing heart of Bollywood.
So, in a sense, I shouldn't have whatever knowledge of old Hindi film music or of Ilayaraja that I do. But that's how it turned out. As for Rahman's work, I did have the vantage point of watching it unfold though I would have understood what he had achieved even better back then had I been a few years older circa 1992.
Again, none of that matters. A combination of being born to a father who was and is devoted to the golden oldies and having strong roots in Tamil culture through my mother-all of these I will explain in due course- as well as the very wide availability of music since the advent of the internet as we know it have shaped my tastes and sensibilities, for what that's worth.
So let me lay down what this thing is going to look like. I am not going to just yap, yap, yap about when, where and how I discovered which song or which composer. I am also not going to just fill up pages and pages of musical analysis (especially because I am not exactly very educated in music) and bore you to death. Rather, I am going to combine the two (voila!) and dovetail that into how each composer appealed to my tastes and also discuss some aspects that maybe I wasn't hot on..
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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