ABSTRACT
The remix has become a quintessential item of the contemporary Bollywood film. Emerging in the mid-1990s, remixes of film songs have grown increasingly popular over the ensuing years and Bollywood films in the twenty-first century frequently include remixed versions of their own songs, both in the films themselves and on their soundtracks (Beaster-Jones 2015; Greene 2014). In this chapter, I would like to examine the broader remix phenomenon of contemporary Bollywood and, in particular, focus on the remixed version of the classic item song, “Hungama ho gaya,” in the recent hit film Queen (2014). Item songs are essentially detachable elements of the film that have no necessary bearing on the larger film narrative and often feature equally detachable “item girls,” whose appearance in the film may very well be limited to such numbers.1 The “Hungama” remix, I argue, simultaneously exemplifies the remix phenomenon and embodies a significant departure from its typical deployment in the contemporary Bollywood film. This chapter will compare the remixed version of this song with its earlier version, which appeared as an item song in the film Anhonee (1973), and analyze the innovative sonic and visual changes the song undergoes in its remixed form. In the process, the aim of this chapter is to examine how this song’s redeployment reshapes the politics of onscreen female desire and emancipation in the twenty-first century.
To begin, I would like to provide an overview of the broader remix phenomenon and its subsequent theorization by Indian film critics. As noted at the outset, remixes of Bollywood film songs emerged in the mid-1990s. As Jayson Beaster-Jones (2015) has noted, however, a certain degree of elasticity has been enfolded into this term, with a “semantic slippage” between “remaking” and “remixing” a film song (159). While, broadly speaking, the remix entails the “layer[ing] of film song vocal lines over house, trance, and hip-hop dance beats, juxtaposed with passages of Western and Indian musics,” there are also significant technical distinctions between a remix and a remake (Greene 2014, 302). In the case of the remix, a vocal line will be taken from an earlier film song
