HINDI FILM SONGS IN THE POST-MTV ERA: ANALYZING THE NEW LYRICISM

Songs, dance and melodrama are idiosyncratic to Hindi Cinema which has a formidable presence in South Asia. Over the years both Hindi cinema and songs have crossed their native boundary and become a global cultural product. In recent years aggressive marketing of Hindi cinema in Europe and America and their easy access through internet have earned Hindi songs new popularity in the western world too. However, there’s also a perceptible qualitative change in the lyrics over the last few decades. The lyrical, poetic, aesthetic and emotional type songs of yesteryears are being overshadowed by a large number of songs which sound trivial in comparison. This phenomenon may also be a concern of ethnomusicology. Principal objective of this paper is to examine the changes in the lyrical quality of Hindi film music in the post-MTV era through a comparative analysis of the songs over the decades and to explore the change in their lyrical and musical quality.