Bollywood music composer Raghav Sachar, has returned from a hiatus in music-making with a big project – Rustom. Rustom‘s music has been well received by critics. The film, which stars Akshay Kumar and Ileana D’Cruz, will release on 12 August. Meanwhile, in an interview with the Times of India, Sachar has spoken about the ‘lack of discipline‘ in Bollywood, and what it cleverly hides, drawing on his own experience in the industry.
Sachar, who has been composing for Bollywood films for over a decade, said the process was akin to a ‘surgical procedure’ today: “When I started my Bollywood journey in 2003, I was still lucky enough to be in the era where only one music composer would work on one film. Today, we have multiple composers working on a single film, so it has become a surgical procedure.”
He added that now producers, music labels, and actors have a say in what was originally a music composer’s turf,”Earlier a music composer would follow the vision of a director but now, there are a lot of people who are involved in it.”
Sachar, who dabbles in singing in addition to playing the saxophone, piano, harmonica, drums, flute, and 30 other instruments, said that remixing old songs was different from from recreating music. “I love recreations, but remixing them randomly without adding any flavour and offering anything new is useless. Remixing is essentially done by DJs who try to mix two songs. So essentially, they are like engineers rather than musicians,” he said.
Sachar’s comments are reminiscent of indie-pop band ‘Euphoria’ singer Palash Sen’s comments that Bollywood had allowed creativity to take a backseat. The artist, who chose to release his band’s album online, had said in a video, “The system is being controlled by marketing executives and businessmen. They can just be dealers who know how to peddle music and don’t know how to churn good music.”
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Sen also pointed out that well-known singers like Arijit Singh were being controlled by stars in Bollywood. “Big singers in this country have to go and apologize to actors. Can you believe it? That’s the way it is. This happens with everyone,” he said. Euphoria’s latest song ‘Halla Bol‘, explores corruption in a number of fields, including Bollywood, mirroring the singer’s comments on the suppression of creativity in Bollywood.
Photo credit: raghavsachar.com