Sahityam in Telugu Movie Songs

I had the Telugu movie bug in me since child hood. I was not an avid movie goer, but movie songs were a different story. I literally grew up waking up to the AIR Bhakti Lahari at 8:00 in the morning and Commercial movie songs at 9:00AM. My mom is a big fan of AIR even today when TV is a big thing. So I had listened to a lot of good Telugu movie music during those days.

While there definitely was a lot of good music then, there is load of bad music the last decade or so. I am not just talking about mediocrity of the composition, but more importantly the lyrics - Sahityam of the songs and the diction of the singers. Here are some of the few lines from here and there that bother me a lot.
1. Jakir Hussain tabla nuvvena - What kind of a reference is that?
2. Kullina Vankaya lo Jata purugulamai undam - Really, is that the best a couple would want to be like?
3. Naa Dress meeda ice cream vesi po - Oke Okkadu Movie Shakalaka baby - Yes that is a great way to entice a guy to make him fall in love with you.

Much of the above can be attributed to the hugely popular music by A.R.Rahman (hereto by referred to as ARR) where the translation from Tamil to Telugu was literal. In fact some of those dubbed movies of ARR were produced by A.M.Ratnam and he took the onus on himself to script (translate) the lyrics. I am not attributing the sole cause of this to ARR. But somehow the genius in his music lead to some unpardonable lyrics in his songs and became very accepted. His instrumentation and foot-tapping music dominates so much of the song that nobody other than few miserable souls like me have tried to make any sense of the lyrics and raised their voice against them. In Telugu everyone from Veturi, Bhuvana Chandra to Chandrabose are guilty of doing this. Sirivennela to certain extent has not been a part of this menace. Apparently, the same fate had been with Tamil Music composed by ARR and lyricist accomplice in this case was Vairamuthu. But the astonishing fact is that, the same fate escaped the Hindi music that ARR composed. He produced some great music in Hindi without compromising on the lyrics of these songs. Clearly the cause should be attributed to someone else other than ARR. It could be the Lyricist, Director and/or the Producer of these movies.

All the above examples were from dubbing movies. But I would be completely out of my mind if I put the blame on dubbing movies alone. That takes the blame away from our own industry which for decades has produced some insane lyrics themselves. My recent memory of bad lyrics is from a direct movie of our ever young hero Balayya's song 'Lux papa Lux Papa Lunch ki vostava'. What do you mean by Lux Papa and why are asking Lux to come for Lunch with you? That is sheer madness. Some other examples are 'Adis Ababa Allam Murabba choosthava naa debba' and 'Koko Komali korukku thinnadi kolatam lo'. I did not mean to pick our Balayya on this, but all the examples that I can think of came from his movies coincidentally (or are they).

The other common thread that runs common in dubbed as well as direct movies is the singers of these dreaded songs. Our industry has encouraged the blatant killing of our language by a non-Telugu singer. In fact the first one to introduce and encourage this was our own great late NTR (the irony is that he started a political party based on the pride of Telugu speaking people) who made the great Rafi sing a song in Telugu. The song was ’Naa madi ninnu pilichindi’. I can appreciate Rafi Saab's greatness in voice and his classical music background, but his lack of learning the basics of the language he was singing is very disturbing. I love his music in Hindi, but the 2 songs that I know he sung in Telugu were terrible. The other Telugu song of Rafi I know is ’Entha varu gani’. He breaks a word into multiple words and puts the emphasis on the wrong syllable.

Taking the baton from late Rafi are Udit Narayan, Kumar Sanu, Sonu Nigam, Suresh Peters, Adnan Sami, Sukhwinder Singh etc from our own generation. I don’t think the singers are to be blamed on this. They are probably paid very good money to do what they are doing and I would not be surprised if they were encouraged to sing in as bad a language as they can. It is the movie producers and music directors who in the name of novelty pay exorbitant amounts to these guys to bring such shame to our language. I guess the singers were only doing what they were told to. The producers and directors are doing it because we keep on accepting these songs every time they are thrust on us. We hate them, we find them funny, but we still listen to them and somehow accept them or get used to them.

To this the chorus and some incomprehensible phrases added at liberal doses make the matters go south. E.g.: Mukkambe Mukkambe, Addis Ababa(some one found it funny to have the name of a African Nations capital city as the start line for a song); Jumba Re Aa Jumba Re; Chuku Chuku Cha Cha;

The silver lining is that every once in a while a movie comes with some neat lyrics. Of late the movies made by Sekhar Kammula have some nice enjoyable music with good lyrics, the recent one of which is Happy Days. I do enjoy such songs with a good coffee. There is still hope.