Jayson Beaster-Jones - Böcker

The vast majority of films produced by Mumbai's commercial Hindi language film industry - known world-wide as Bollywood - feature songs as a central component of the cinematic narrative. While many critics have addressed the visual characteristics of these song sequences, very few have engaged with their aurality and with the meanings that they generate within the film narrative and within Indian society at large. Because the film songs operate as powerful sonic ambassadors to individual and cultural memories in India and abroad, however, they are significant and carefully-constructed works of art.Bollywood Sounds focuses on the songs of Indian films in their historical, social, and commercial contexts. Author Jayson Beaster-Jones walks the reader through the highly collaborative songs, detailing the contributions of film directors, music directors and composers, lyricists, musicians, and singers. A vital component of film INSERT: Featured in British Forum for Ethnomusicology insert 2014 on broadcast media, Bollywood songs are distributed on soundtracks by music companies, and have long been the most popular music genre in India - even among listeners who rarely see the movies. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark compositions, Bollywood Sounds illustrates how the producers of Indian film songs mediate a variety of influences, musical styles, instruments, and performance practices to create this distinctive genre. Beaster-Jones argues that, even from the moment of its inception, the film song genre has always been in the unique position of demonstrating cosmopolitan orientations while maintaining discrete sound and production practices over its long history. As a survey of the music of seventy years of Hindi films, Bollywood Sounds is the first monograph to provide a long-term historical insights into Hindi film songs, and their musical and cinematic conventions, in ways that will appeal both to scholars and newcomers to Indian cinema.

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. The vast majority of films produced by Mumbai's commercial Hindi language film industry - known world-wide as Bollywood - feature songs as a central component of the cinematic narrative. While many critics have addressed the visual characteristics of these song sequences, very few have engaged with their aurality and with the meanings that they generate within the film narrative and within Indian society at large. Because the film songs operate as powerful sonic ambassadors to individual and cultural memories in India and abroad, however, they are significant and carefully-constructed works of art. Bollywood Sounds focuses on the songs of Indian films in their historical, social, and commercial contexts. Author Jayson Beaster-Jones walks the reader through the highly collabora

This book examines music stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India. Analyzing social practices of selling music in a variety of retail contexts, it focuses upon the economic and social values that are produced and circulated by music retailers in the marketplace. Based upon research conducted over a volatile ten-year period of the Indian music industry, Beaster-Jones discusses the cultural histories of the recording industry, the social changes that have accompanied India’s economic liberalization reforms, and the economic realities of selling music in India as digital circulation of music recordings gradually displaced physical distribution. The volume considers the mobilization of musical, economic, and social values as a component of branding discourses in neoliberal India, as a justification for new regimes of legitimate use and intellectual property, as a scene for the performance of cosmopolitanism by shopping, and as a site of anxiety about transformations in the marketplace. It relies upon ethnographic observation and interviews from a variety of sources within the Indian music industry, including perspectives of executives at music labels, family-run and corporate music stores, and hawkers in street markets selling counterfeit recordings. This ethnography of the practices, spaces, and anxieties of selling music in urban India will be an important resource for scholars in a wide range of fields, including ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and South Asian studies.

The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Cinemas is the first collection of original contributions to comprehensively analyze one of the most diverse and prolific cinema-producing regions of the world. It features chapters by up-and-coming and established scholars from a diverse array of academic specialties that survey South Asian cinemas, placing an emphasis on new, emerging, and underexplored cinematic terrains.The handbook is organized in two parts: Regions and Themes. The first part examines the film industries from a regional perspective, including the cinemas of various Indian languages, in conjunction with the cinemas of other South Asian countries, including Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The second part examines issues, themes, and practices that cut across regions, including distribution platforms, audiences, song and dance, and gender and sexuality.A crucial intervention in the field of South Asian Cinema Studies, this handbook is an essential reference work for students and researchers of Asian cinema, film and culture and a significant contribution to South Asian Studies.

Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity provides a rich and detailed look into the unique dimensions of music in Indian film. Music is at the center of Indian cinema, and India’s film music industry has a far-reaching impact on popular, folk, and classical music across the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora. In twelve essays written by an international array of scholars, this book explores the social, cultural, and musical aspects of the industry, including both the traditional center of "Bollywood" and regional film-making. Concentrating on films and songs created in contemporary, post-liberalization India, this book will appeal to classes in film studies, media studies, and world music, as well as all fans of Indian films.

Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity provides a rich and detailed look into the unique dimensions of music in Indian film. Music is at the center of Indian cinema, and India’s film music industry has a far-reaching impact on popular, folk, and classical music across the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora. In twelve essays written by an international array of scholars, this book explores the social, cultural, and musical aspects of the industry, including both the traditional center of "Bollywood" and regional film-making. Concentrating on films and songs created in contemporary, post-liberalization India, this book will appeal to classes in film studies, media studies, and world music, as well as all fans of Indian films.

This book examines music stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India. Analyzing social practices of selling music in a variety of retail contexts, it focuses upon the economic and social values that are produced and circulated by music retailers in the marketplace. Based upon research conducted over a volatile ten-year period of the Indian music industry, Beaster-Jones discusses the cultural histories of the recording industry, the social changes that have accompanied India’s economic liberalization reforms, and the economic realities of selling music in India as digital circulation of music recordings gradually displaced physical distribution. The volume considers the mobilization of musical, economic, and social values as a component of branding discourses in neoliberal India, as a justification for new regimes of legitimate use and intellectual property, as a scene for the performance of cosmopolitanism by shopping, and as a site of anxiety about transformations in the marketplace. It relies upon ethnographic observation and interviews from a variety of sources within the Indian music industry, including perspectives of executives at music labels, family-run and corporate music stores, and hawkers in street markets selling counterfeit recordings. This ethnography of the practices, spaces, and anxieties of selling music in urban India will be an important resource for scholars in a wide range of fields, including ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and South Asian studies.

The 2001 buddy film Dil Chahta Hai (dir. Farhan Akhtar), had arguably the first rock soundtrack in Bollywood. The award-winning soundtrack is an entry point into the relationship between Bollywood film songs, Hindi language music, and the Indi-pop movement of the '80s and '90s.Beaster-Jones draws from reviews by music critics and fans, industry interviews, and his own close analysis of the music and the film to trace the role of the Dil Chahta Hai soundtrack in transforming both the sound and production practices of Bollywood cinema in the new millennium. These songs emerged from the rock band and live performance aesthetic of writing trio Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. Their collaborative compositional approach for this soundtracks and later soundtracks reveals the changing tastes of India’s urban youth audiences and how that taste fueled the rise of the rockstar narrative in Hindi films.The music for this soundtrack was the second Bollywood soundtrack composed by the superstar trio Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (i.e. Shankar Mahadevan, Ehsaan Noorani, Loy Mendonsa), with lyrics penned by the inimitable Javed Akhtar. The songs from this soundtrack paved the way for the rock and EDM-oriented compositions of Hindi-language cinema that came to dominate the first decades of the 21st century, making Dil Chahta Hai among the most influential soundtracks in Indian cinematic history.