Links to the Hindi song collections for the periods covered in this section:
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2000s (All) 2000s GEMs
Commentary:
The Revival Period, which had started in the early 1990s, continued for about the first half of the decade, with the quality of the compositions being pretty good overall. The following were among the dominant players in the Hindi music arena during this period:
- Abhijeet, KK, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Shaan, Sonu Nigam, Sukhwinder Singh, Udit Narayan
- Alka Yagnik, Kavita Krishnamurty, Shreya Ghoshal, Sunidhi Chauhan
- A.R. Rahman, Anu Malik, Himesh Reshammiya, Ismail Darbar, Jatin-Lalit, Pritam, Shankar Ehsaan Loy
- Javed Akhtar, Prasoon Joshi, Sameer.
These were the final years that Lata and Asha were active in the field of playback singing. Interestingly, Lata got an opportunity of sorts to ‘team up’ with Madan Mohan again nearly three decades after his death! Madan Mohan’s son Sanjeev Kohli revived some of his father’s unused compositions and arranged them to music for Yash Chopra’s film Veer-Zaara, and I would say this ‘experiment’ was highly successful.
A few more interesting tidbits about first half of the decade:
- Two giants of Hindi song-writing passed away: Majrooh Sultanpuri (2000) and Anand Bakshi (2002). The latter was active until the very end, writing some great lyrics for Mohabbatein, Gadar and Yaadein.
- The Nadeem-Shravan musical duo came to an untimely end, with Nadeem fleeing the country after being accused of involvement in the murder of music mogul Gulshan Kumar.
- Rajesh Roshan had the biggest hit of his music-making career in the all-Roshan family affair Kaho Na Pyaar Hai.
From the mid-2000s, Hindi films and their associated soundtracks became more of a corporate business akin to the way things are in Hollywood. With the proliferation of smart phones and the digital-music ecosystem, the primary means of distribution of Hindi film songs moved from CD’s to the internet. Thus, Hindi music followed the film business in adopting the corporate model, and with few exceptions most Hindi songs became virtually indistinguishable from Western songs.
While there is certainly an audience for this kind of music which is popular in Modern Bollywood (primarily among the youth), there is no resemblance to the Hindi songs created in the latter half of the twentieth century. Starting from the mid-2000s, you will find my lists of songs becoming more and more sketchy, primarily because of my lack of interest in this style of music.