The perverse trend of tagging great songs with the names of actors who happened to be part of their screen rendition is gross injustice to the artist. It robs the credit from the real creative minds and bestows it on the passive vehicles that lend songs a face. Actors should serve as no more than useful associations, and should remain as such. If you loved the food the credit must go to the chef and not the waiter or delivery boy.
It is painful for those who care about music to hear expressions like “a Dev-Anand song”, “an Amitabh-Bachchan song” and “a Kamal-Hasan song” when what really should have been said is “an O.P. Nayyar song”, “an S.D. Burman song” or “an Ilayaraja song”. Who would have pardoned Rajesh Kahanna or Shammi Kapoor if they had really sung “Mere naina” and “Yeh chaand sa roshan chehra”? (Well, we are sometimes forced into submission when catastrophes like “Kolaveri” happen, when the actor is also the singer, where one horror becomes the voice of another, and the gullible public mind is surprised and overwhelmed by publicity machines.)
It is needless to say that many of our cine superstars are owners of stolen fame and they prospered from the simple tastes of the audience. Their glory is unearned and disproportionate to talent, if not totally undeserved. On top of that we give them the credit that is actually due to the real talents that make them stars.
Justifying it as the fate of all behind-the-scene contributors is illogical too. Music is primarily the tune, which is what we hear. The one who makes the tune owns it. His is the actual performance, realized in the act of listening. Who invited the actor into this?
See how two popular online music services group songs:
The actors may be easy reference points to identify a song, but we cross the line when the song is attributed to them. This may seem a convenient but innocent method of categorization that helps a layman look for his songs easily. This is however not so. The musician is forgotten faster than the actor, he is paid less, gets less recognition and is appreciated by only the minority that takes the effort to discover the antecedents of a song they loved. The actor on the other hand profits from the beauty of the song, and walks away with the fame, just like a child that gets an A+ for the assignment done by the parent. The analogy isn’t harsh enough perhaps.
“Hiindi films are an excuse for the music,” Lata Mangeshkar is known to have said. Only a great musician can produce great music. A monkey with money and a dozen rehearsed antics is a superstar at least in India. Their publicized squabble about who can claim to be the king of clowns is the extreme opposite of music.
Is this mere ingratitude on the part of the distributors and consumers of creative products? Injustice, gross and mindless, is what we should call it. Manipulating value perceptions is fraud indeed. Yet, everyone seems to surprisingly tolerant of this, letting crass TV show hosts, radio jockeys and website designers tamper with sacred ideas of creativity and authorship.
Intellectual Curry 