Bollywood For Beginners: Part 10

Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.

Bollywood For Beginners 10

SONGS AND MUSIC: 

Who makes all those Bollywood songs?

There exists a certain kind of cultural snob who considers the Bob Dylan model of the singer-songwriter to be the purest form of music. Singers who do not write their own material are considered less worthy than those who do. Just enter “doesn’t write his” into Google to see the list of searches from indignant music fans questioning whether or not various singers write their own songs. But the dirty little secret in the American music business is there aren’t that many hugely successful singers who write their own songs but that image is still important. For example, Taylor Swift is a pretty young woman with a serviceable voice singing songs written with a lot of help from a music industry professional like Butch Walker but her popularity is built on how “personal” and “authentic” those songs are. Butch Walker remains firmly hidden in the liner notes. Americans are just not comfortable with overt artifice in the arts. Even our “magicians” like Criss Angel go out of their way to say that they are not doing “tricks” but real feats of endurance. But the singer-songwriter himself is an illusion propped by legions of talented engineers who tweak vocals, producers who can polish songs, and managers who create an image without seeming to create an image. All artists use artifice to different degrees, it just so happens that Bollywood wears its artifice on its sleeve.

The way music is assembled for a Bollywood film works like this: a filmmaker goes to a person called a music director, who acts as both composer and soundtrack assembler. The filmmaker describes the scenarios they have in mind for the different songs for a film and the music director provides the music (and only the music) for those songs. Depending on the prestige of the filmmaker, the music director might write all new music for the songs himself or he might farm out the work to ghostwriters or he might recycle old demos or some combination of the above. When the songs have been approved by the filmmaker, a lyricist is brought in to write lyrics and then finally, they are recorded using specialized singers called playback singers. Because not only do Bollywood actors lip sync, they are lip syncing to somebody else’s voice!

Nobody in the audience of a Bollywood film is under any illusion that the actors are actually singing the songs. Unlike the legions of Butch Walker-types toiling away behind-the-scenes in the American music industry, in Bollywood, playback singers, lyricists, and music directors are all very well known to Bollywood audiences. Playback singers go on tour; music directors put their names all over soundtrack albums; and many a respected poet has contributed lyrics to Bollywood songs. The Bollywood songwriting system operates a  bit like Tin Pan Alley, which remained active and visible until the mid-1960s when the confessional singer-songwriter style became the norm in American music. Ella Fitzgerald didn’t write her own songs and yet is considered one of the best singers of all time and playback singer Asha Bhosle is no different. Richard Rodgers (the Rodgers of Rodgers & Hart) could compose music for any situation, just like music director RD Burman. And Broadway lyricist Stephen Sondheim is known for his clever wordplay, just like Bollywood lyricist Gulzar.

That still leaves the hurdle of accepting actors lip syncing to songs sung by somebody else. That the infamous musical duo Milli Vanilli, who were exposed as lip syncing to somebody else’s voices way back in 1990, are still a cultural touchstone in America is proof enough that lip syncing has a very negative connotation. Perhaps the best way to think of lip syncing in Bollywood film is as a specialized type of acting. And though lip syncing gets dismissed as mere fakery, it’s not easy to do well. Lip syncing should be invisible to the audience. Not only do actors need to memorize lyrics but be able to mouth them--and all additional sounds--perfectly in time to the singer and with a great amount of feeling. 

And though it doesn’t often get discussed, much like the use of professional song writers like Butch Walker, there is plenty of lip-syncing going on in Hollywood, from Glee to music videos to the occasional “live” television performance. The only difference between somebody like Britney Spears and a Bollywood actress lip-syncing to a song is that Bollywood audiences understand and accept the artifice. Bollywood heroes and heroines often go on world tours to lip sync and dance to songs in front of live audiences who know exactly what’s going on. But when performers like Britney Spears do the same thing, the audience is supposed to think she is really singing.