Sadu: Remixes were one of the many reasons behind the decline of pop music in the nineties - Hindustan Times
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Sadu: Remixes were one of the many reasons behind the decline of pop music in the nineties

Hindustan Times | By, New Delhi
Sep 17, 2020 07:09 PM IST

Sadasivan KM Nambisan aKa Sadu, a former member of indie-pop group The Aryans, explains why his desire to express freely as a musician kept him away from the scene for a long time and how the Internet was instrumental in his comeback.

Expressing individuality is the idea behind creating music,” says Sadasivan KM Nambisan aka Sadu, who about 25 years back, made a big name for himself with the indie-pop act, The Aryans who are known for hits such as Yeh Hawa and Ankhon Mein Tera Hi Chehra. Perhaps that’s the reason which kept him away from singing in Bollywood as well.

Sadasivan KM Nambisan aKa Sadu is a former member of the popular indie-pop act The Aryans.
Sadasivan KM Nambisan aKa Sadu is a former member of the popular indie-pop act The Aryans.

 

“I have always been against this concept of lip-sync. If you look at our music videos as well, which featured Shahid Kapoor and other actors, none of them ever did any lip sync to our songs. It was always us, on screen, singing the actual song. I don’t think its fair concept, that in all the films, you have this concept where an actor or the star in the film is lip syncing to a song which is sung by someone else,” he says.

“It doesn’t help the singer or the musician at all. Every playback singer, be it in the current times or the previous generations, would have been 10 or 20 times bigger than what they are right now, if they weren’t playback singers, or some other actor didn’t lip sync to their songs,” he adds.

However, it isn’t easy. He accepts it as well, and shares that he too had walked away from the industry. One of the biggest reasons behind his comeback was that he was not worried financially. “For me, when you are not worried about releasing a song from a money making point of view, is when you are truly free. I have a successful pharmaceutical business, so I am not worried financially, anymore” he says.

“So,I get that it’s not easy. It is a very tricky situation, because unlike me, there are people who depend on that final cheque. You do need money to survive,” he adds.

That’s where, Sadu says, non film music, particularly the indie space, helps a musician in stepping out of the shadows. “No longer, do you have to listen to a producer or someone else, about how to create a song,” he says adding that Internet has helped musicians in a big way to break the shackles. “One of the many reasons why the indie pop music industry declined was remixes. Because all the companies wanted that. There’s no creativity there, because you already know that 80 percent of the song is already a hit,” he says.

“But, today because of the Internet, you don’t have to depend on big labels or music companies to release the kind of music you want to create. There are so many examples today, of musicians who have done that,” adds Sadu explaining that the Internet is another reason which motivated him to get back to music. “I release a song and it is on 800 different platforms! It’s a great feeling, because you know that you don’t really have to depend on anybody to say what you have to say,” he says.

 

His philosophy of “expressing freely” is quite evident in his latest single, Ankh Se Door Na Ho. “It’s a ghazal penned by Ahmad Faraz. A lot of people had asked me to release a ghazal kind of a song, and so I decided to wok on this one. But I didn’t want it to sound like a ghazal. I had to give it contemporary touch to it, in the sense that, today’s sound is very different and extremely dynamic. That’s what everybody is listening to these days,” he says. “Kehne ko ghazal hai, kyuki you have to give a genre to everything these days. In reality, it is a very peppy melodious number,” he laughs and signs off.

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  • ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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    Samarth Goyal writes on Hollywood and music, for the daily Entertainment and Lifestyle supplement, HT City.

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