ABSTRACT
The opening song sequence of Aashiqui 2 (Suri 2013) depicts the protagonist, an all-black-leather-clad rock star named RJ, front and center on a stadium stage before a crowd of thousands of screaming fans. As he sings “Sun raha hai na tu, ro raha hoon main” (“You’re listening, right? I am crying here”), both the instrumentation and his vocal style convey a mixture of sludgy grunge guitar and intense emotion imbued with detached alienation, providing the perfect heart-wrenching backdrop for his performance as well as the tone for the remainder of the film. As RJ unleashes the full measure of his soul’s angst over the multitude, we become uncomfortably aware of our own presence as onlookers, as if we are intruding on a deeply personal moment. Simultaneously cathartic and engaging, the scene divulges the fact that both on-screen and offscreen audiences are intimate voyeurs of an emotionally distraught musician, and goes so far as to suggest that the music itself is complicit in the effusive scene that is revealed before us.
