Feb 12, 2026 11:13am IST
Javed Akhtar, Shankar Mahadevan and Hariharan on Leaving Behind Cultural Inheritance: “Who Exactly Are We Making All This Club Music For?” (EXCLUSIVE)
Indian film music has always been an integral part of our cinema. The emotions it evokes and the memories attached to it are priceless, and it is impossible to imagine our films without songs. The songs have conveyed heartbreak, devotion, rebellion and longing. Their words have stayed with us and are part of our cultural vocabulary. But now there is a feeling that is gaining ground that perhaps we are moving away from this rich cultural inheritance.
In a recent exclusive conversation with Variety India, Javed Akhtar, Hariharan and Shankar Mahadevan spoke about this very shift.
At the launch of the music app Goongoonalo, the three maestros shared their thoughts on the evolution of music. Javed Akhtar does not deny the change, but he refuses to attribute it to a single reason.
“Yes, we are. But for many reasons, there is no one reason we can point to. One reason is that the kind of scripts we make does not have that kind of emotional depth that they had 50 to 70 years ago. The tempo of the film has increased; the tempo of life has increased, so obviously the music has to move with life and the tempo of the time.”
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Akhtar added, “So music has become faster, and in competition with each other, it has reached, more often than not, a kind of frenzy. So, the situation does not have any emotional depth, the tune is very fast, and then, in some kind of blind following, the percussion has come above the voices in most of the songs. Because we are imitating a market that has a different purpose for music.”
For Akhtar, the distinction between India and the West is fundamentally cultural.“Average people do not sing in the West, only singers do. You might find someone singing in the subway to earn some money, or a local band formed in a garage. The average person there listens; does not sing. In India, everyone sings. There is no Indian who does not and especially after reality shows, everybody wants to be a singer. No matter how bad we sing, we will still sing. That is a difference; we need the song to sing, the West needs the song to listen.”
He also questions the industry’s fixation with club music. "Plus, we all keep mentioning club music all the time, but how many cities in India have clubs? Rarely 4 or 5 or maybe 10? Then who exactly are we making all this club music for? Not all of the country has access to clubs. These are the problems that our commercial department does not understand. They think only heavy beats work. 90 percent of their songs are just that,” Akhtar added.
For Shankar Mahadevan, the issue is also rooted in how music is now consumed. “There is also a misconception that to make a good song, we need good videos. But if you look at a lot of the good songs we listen to, they do not have videos.”
Akhtar takes that thought further. “In a way, video is the undoing of music. Because you have started seeing songs instead of listening to them. Not like we do not have talent that cannot hold people, we have immense talent that needs to have proper exposure.”
Hariharan believes the solution may lie outside the structure of film music altogether. “I would say independent music, when music is music, you can have melody, the pace of the song the way you want. To have independent music, it is very important for music to grow. We all made film music because it is film music. But per se, if music has to grow with nice poetry, or any kind of phrasing, you do not have a drum or just guitar playing, if the song can hold you, no director is there to tell you this does not work in my film, that is so liberating.”
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