Kashika Saxena (BOMBAY TIMES; June 16, 2012)

 

We love to have a song for every occasion. Filmmakers seem to understand this sentiment all too well, which is why even though Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs Of Wasseypur is a film about gangsters, its music is being talked about as much as its storyline. The filmmaker explained the quantum of music in the movie, in a panel discussion at Cannes saying, “You can’t really get away from music in India. Another thing is that music has become a very important part of marketing. If you have good music, you get free airplay, you get awareness about your movie, because each Friday you have ten others competing for audience attention. I’ve learnt to try to use music in a way that does not impact the flow of the film, but becomes an extension of what is going on on screen.”

With lyrics like ‘I am hunter and she want to see my gun’, it isn’t much of a surprise. We love innuendos and Hinglish just as much as we love rustic tunes. 27-year-old composer Sneha Khanwalkar has used a mix of eclectic artistes from places like Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Garbandha, among others, for the songs of the film, and she says that the idea was to use simple, vernacular lyrics that can be sung and understood easily.

The feedback that she got from Cannes, where the film was praised by many international critics, was that the music wasn’t “very Bollywood”. She recalls, “It was sounding very global to them because they probably haven’t heard these voices before. More >