Gehraiyaan music review: Instagram Reels make the songs float on surface, but were they ever meant to plunge deeper?-Entertainment News , Firstpost


The vocals in the music of Gehraiyaan are strangely unsentimental, almost anesthetic, a trend in the music we have seen right from Prateek Kuhad to Ritviz.

Ananda Coomaraswamy, the early 20th Century philosopher of Indian art and interpreter of Indian culture had said about Indian music and the relationship between the audience and the performer, “The listener must respond with an art of his own.” That the music performance, the music itself was only made complete when received and acted upon by the discerning audience “who prefer conviction [in singing] to prettiness”. 

But what does it mean for the listener to respond “with an art of [their] own”? And how has that changed over the century, since Coomaraswamy’s rather bold assertion in 1917? Is it still merely screeching and sighing in ecstasy, hands suspended in the air, palms skyward? Is it demanding an encore act? Is the production of music criticism, then, art?

Is producing an Instagram Reel to the music, folding one’s life into the background score, also, “the listener [responding] with an art of [their] own”? In the case of Reels, the listener is certainly responding to the music by giving it their visuals, their life, their pretension, their joys, and their flinging, choreographed arms. 

It is difficult to disagree with that sentiment — as much as I hear you grumbling at calling Reels ‘art’ — given how so much of the experience of music is mediated, then inundated, and finally buried by the algorithm. 

That even cinema is looking to capitalise the cascading popularity of Instagram Reels is apparent in Gehraiyaan, which released its teaser in the vertical orientation, optimum for Instagram, producing a smallness on the laptop screen that is both sleek and worrying. So much empty space. 

But if the teaser was made for Instagram, so were the first two songs which came out — ‘Doobey,’ followed by the title track. Both were immediately baked into the possibilities of Reels — videos of friends on vacation, people staring into the sunset, biting their lips, jumping on beds, doing yoga, drinking chai, making chai, styling pants, cutting cake, drinking watermelon cocktails, walking in the wilderness, boyfriends giving girlfriends sushi and a bouquet knowing they are on their period, trekking with a shuddering selfie camera documenting a decked-up face, making coffee for your sleeping lover slumbering under a duvet, surprising your daughters with a visit, slow motion walks on the beach, twirling lovers, hugging lovers, hand-holding lovers all while giving a sly look at the camera to make sure it is being recorded, dogs staring, birds flying, drinking milkshakes on lazy Sundays. 

We were given a glimpse of the title track ‘Gehraiyaan’ in the teaser, what struck initially as a mournful, moody piece that slurred its pitch to seem tired, an exhaustion that is musical and evocative, the visual equivalent of a slump into a plush couch after a weary day. But the voice — OAFF [Kabeer Kathpalia] featuring Lothika Jha — is strangely unsentimental, almost anesthetic, a trend in the music we have seen right from Prateek Kuhad to Ritviz. There is a deadness that is suddenly creeping up into our soundscape, pointing towards the death of expressionism in music. 

Siddhant Chaturvedi and Deepika Padukone in Gehraiyaan

In public intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s eulogy of Lata Mangeshkar, he wrote for The Indian Express, “[T]he greatness of playback singing in Bollywood’s halcyon days was that no actor really needed to act. The entire affective burden of movies was carried by the songs: In fact, the songs were the script, if there was such a thing.” I was thinking of how Lothika tried to stretch the ‘Aa’ in the lyric “AAdat hai hamein” or the ‘Aa’ in the lyric “Hai saanson mein dhuaA.” In music, these emphatic stretches are usually accompanied with a swell of feeling, like how Lata Mangeshkar stretched her Aa in the lyrics ‘Lagta Nahin Hai Dil YahaAn’ [‘Aaja Sanam,’ Chori Chori, 1956]. The longing was a product of the voice, not the musical production, which, in ‘Gehraiyaan’ is almost threatening you into feeling that empty, lonely, cyclical urban existence in the deep hues of twilight. The Aa in Gehraiyaan’s music is a vapid embellishment, a stretching of a lyric beyond its shape. 

It certainly is not surprising that people are able to present and perform a variety of life — happiness, ponderousness, joy, wanderlust, weepy sentimentalism — into this song. They see in it what they want because the song itself does not have an emotive register that is striking and singular. It is everything. It is nothing. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that with Instagram Reels, it became everything; it became nothing. 

Melody is resuscitated by Mohit Chauhan in a reprise of ‘Gehraiyaan’ where the spare production allows for the depth and range of his voice. There’s enough goodwill here to ignore the strange decision to add Lothika’s voice as a cracked, gilded overlay to this reprise and the lethal, choppy ‘Skeletron Remix,’ which mistakes resuscitating a dead body by thumping it, with life-giving, serving jolts instead of breath.

This compelling nothingness is given a percussive, upbeat soundscape with ‘Doobey,’ where the spare, expectant guitar strums segue into a heady bounce. Based on the video they put out — Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi in various stages of dress and undress — there was supposed to be palpable eros. Dar Gai’s direction of the song, which looks more like her music videos — charming, with an intimate, almost life-affirming attention to detail like the the delicate thoughtless fingering of a glass’s rim, the cracking of a toe, the caressing of chest hair, the lingering and distracted finger on the page of a book being read — than a song in a movie. 

But the problem was deeper.

Can there be desire in a voice that is so barren of feeling, where ‘besabar’ and ‘besafar’ and ‘bekhabar’ are pronounced with the same emotional pitch?

Maybe it does not matter what the lyrics [by Ankur Tewari and Kausar Munir] are, then, if they are rendered in the same slurring tone, the limited vocal range compensated with a musical production that is lush but also ecstatically claustrophobic, where even a second’s pause in the song — the one in ‘Gehraiyaan’ — feels like you have been let go off your collar.  

The larger point here is that if Coomaraswamy is right — and I think he is — one cannot judge the music of Gehraiyaan as a distinct individual but as an individual embedded in an ecosystem where the song is blaring at you without you asking for nor yearning it. Both these songs were everywhere, if everywhere was Instagram. Soon — incredibly soon given the compressed life cycle in which the spurt of curiosity we feel towards a song tapers into indifference then annoyance — I got sick of the songs, swiping immediately away from their low-octave slurring. ‘Beqaboo,’ another song on the album [sung by Shalmali Kholgade and Savera], falls squarely into this category, what OAFF would call “atmospheric pop”. 

This is not to say that the album is unbearable — that would be extremely ungenerous, not to mention cantankerous —  but that the songs in it that were repeatedly thrown at me made it unbearable. The nuance here, however, is that Reels do not necessarily plummet all the songs they consume to the dustbin. I have spent hours — and will spend hours, still more — watching reels of kids, women, men, men with men, men with women, women with women, dancing to ‘Chaka Chak,’ ‘Oo Antava,’ and ‘Srivalli.’ There is a charming vigour to dancing that cannot be replicated in the pretentious promotions of one’s lifestyle that accompanied the music of Gehraiyaan, which is unequivocally popular — take any number, on YouTube [trending at #1], on Spotify, on the radio [fastest to top National Radio Network charts].

And therein lies the irony of this whole situation. To make music hoping for its popularity to burn bright, and to then see the very bearability of the music being shredded by this brightness. Such is the fragile nature of contemporary fame — to be known, but also struggling to be known for long, to be loved, but also seeking to be loved forever, undimmed by the very excessiveness of the algorithm that gave you the love to begin with. 

You can listen to the full album here.

Gehraiyaan will release on 11 February on Amazon Prime Video India.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at prathyush.substack.com.



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