Himesh Reshammaya

The sound of Himesh Reshammaya...

marks the sound of the city.

It booms out of every second auto, and burps occasionally through every second mobile phone. Like a perpetual soundtrack to the city, it circulates, never settling and always passing from place to place. The highly irritating nasal voice is a different sound when filtered through many mediums, the computer, the phone, the radio, the tv, the scratchy tape recorder ... but it always reaches your ear. Is this the Indian version of the legendary Cher's Believe - everyone has heard it, even if you don't know you have. If you lived through this year... so far... you would have heard Himesh Reshammaya, inspite of trying to avoid it.
To the point where you search for a bearable song, just to be part of this swell of music that is beneath the hot tar of every Indian city you visit right now.

The only people I pity now are those who actually buy the music and hear it in isolated rooms. This is not that kind of sound, its best when mixed with the sound of the streets, the snores of bored shopkeepers, the haze of students piling into autos in the hot afternoons, the bored gaze of each roadside lecherous guy.

Its not music to dance to in dance clubs, its music that you walk to, in your mundane life, to the bus, auto, train, on your way to work, or on your way to lunch during work. Its music you hear when returning in the morning from your booty call fuck and say - groan, not now. I know what I’m doing is stupid, I don't need Himesh Reshammaya to remind me how....

The sound is not of passion as the man would like to believe, its of enormous weariness, a sound too tired to carry from one street to another, so its lost, and someone else has to pick up and play it two streets down. Its not the rock of Rang de basanti, the powerful voice and stirring sound of Lagaan, its not the nasal romanticism of most Bollywood movies now, its the sound of heat, dust, piracy... its a sound we knew before it was invented.