The Indie Musician’s Dilemma: To Bollywood or Not

Siddharth Basrur, Nikhil D’ Souza and Rahul Ram etch out the pros and cons of ‘going commercial’ if only for a song. While Rahul thinks there is nothing to be afraid of when it comes to Bollywood if you know your music, Siddharth says, “Even if you’re working with big films and studios, they pay peanuts”. Nikhil would just like to be the guy with the great voice and the great songs. 

Nikhil D’ Souza has made a smooth transition to Bollywood while being a regular at indie festivals

“When people were singing ghazals say 200 or even 50 years ago, the word ‘indie’ did not exist. And now suddenly there’s this move towards assimilating everything into ‘indie’ and that cannot be.” Rahul Ram, the front runner of Indian Ocean tells us who the indie musician is for him. “Indie is more suited for people who’re trying to do contemporary stuff which is not traditional. This has basically come down to mean pop and rock effectively. Indie refers to non-folk non-rural pop/rock musicians.”

Siddharth Basrur,  who sang the title track of David, says on the other hand, “Indie music is non-studio, coming from DIY styled musicians. Indie stands for independent. Technically, it is not really a genre; however  people have grouped them together and by virtue of that it has become a genre.”

Avant garde as it is often hailed to be; mostly everyone agrees that indie music is the exact opposite of a formulaic, mechanically structured commercial number. While in a commercial film, the music might or might not be the purpose behind writing a song, an independent musician will always hold his music dear, above everything else (in our idyllic world, Che Guevara meets Camus and engages in Tina Fey humour is the image that an independent artist cuts in our head). It is that song that you want to pause and listen to again, you cannot predict its next move, for it sounds different from the rest. Exciting right? It is this unpredictability, that has started drawing in the big guns of Bollywood towards indie musicians and bands to bypass the smoothened, often deadened sound of the decade and look out for that catchy tune/voice which will rope in the audiences.

Ask Rahul Ram how Indian Ocean manages to weave in their own music while collaborating on studio projects and Rahul has one principle that he sticks to: Stay true to your own music. “As long as we’re doing our own music how does it matter? If you listen to Black Friday’s songs they sound like our songs, our sound remains unchanged. Then there are others like Vishal Dadlani whose Pentagram music sounds vastly different from his Bollywood compositions as Vishal-Shekhar and he has publicly often said that it is consciously so. Or Shankar Mahadevan for that matter; he does a thousand indie gigs even though he’s hardcore Bollywood. Then there’s Rabbi who has managed mostly on his own, but he’s among the rare few.” Independent music has always been a forte of bands such as Indian Ocean, who have stood by their signature musical ethic. So what is in it for these guys, the lone hero in the big bad music industry?

Not much, according to Siddharth Basrur. While he has worked at a few commercial projects apart from his own music, he admits there are some scratches out there that he doesn’t quite care for as much, some of them are often done “…not even for money, as a favour to some guys and you expect payback sometime in the future. Or there are some directors who tell you that since it’s really low budget, they will pay if it does well. But it never works out that way. Even if you’re working with big films and studios, say singing for them, they pay peanuts.”

Siddharth Basrur – “Indie music is non-studio, coming from DIY styled musicians. Indie stands for independent”

Indie musicians walking the tightrope for commercial cinema have a lot of pitfalls to be careful about before they enter the commercial mainstream. Rahul Ram sees the growing number of musicians choosing to go the Bollywood way as a positive trend, “I see it as the mainstream getting broader, assimilating different kinds of music. If an indie musician gets to showcase his music in a commercial platform, I say, why not? It exposes a much wider segment of the audience to your music. There are people in the industry with so much experience. And people who think making music for Bollywood is easy are mistaken. It is very difficult for an indie musician to strike out on his own. Woh kitni der akele guitar bajaayega? Either he’ll go ahead and join a band, or go make music for movies if he has to survive.”

Nikhil D’Souza has been successful in both the indie and the commercial circuit, performing gigs regularly apart from making his debut with Aisha, and he corroborates with this sentiment, “Musically speaking I would just like to be the guy with the great voice and the great songs. I understand out there there’s this whole perception of me being the Bollywood singer, playback singer and everything and I know where that comes from, pretty much everyone in the country sources their music from Bollywood, so when they see six songs from a movie and one song by Nikhil D’souza they think  – Playback singer! But I wanted to get it out there and say that –  here look , this is a bunch of songs that I have written this is me and where I am coming from, now you can listen to all of the Bollywood stuff I don’t mind go on.”

Nikhil points to a very important phenomenon peculiar to movie-crazy India where songs are associated with the singer of the song, not the composer. However, he hopes perceptions will change over time, “With independent artists getting into the groove and introducing their music along with Bollywood stuff, let’s see what happens in the next five or six years.”