I went to a wonderful lecture by Robin Sukhadia at LACMA this week on the history of Bollywood film music – a varied and rich tradition that I (and most Americans) know *nothing* about (my previous knowledge of Bollywood cinema was limited to the random glimpses I’d catch at Indian restaurants). Robin’s lecture put what I’d assumed were just elaborate, silly music videos into a bigger context – and the macro work technique behind their production raises intriguing questions about going deep or going fast.

For starters – It’s important to note that Hollywood and Bollywood are separated by more than thousands of miles. While the American movie system produces about 700 movies yearly (including major studio and independent releases), Bollywood produces around 4,000 – nearly all of which are musicals. Over the past 50 years, the vast majority of music in these films have been dominated by a small coterie of Indian superstars that, while household names in India, are virtually unknown in the U.S. To qualify ‘dominated’ – Mohammad Rafi, one of the premiere playback singers in Bollywood cinema, has the Guinness world record for the most number of songs commercially recorded. Between 1944 and April 1980, Rafi claimed to have recorded 28,000 songs in 11 different languages (to put that into perspective, there are only 13,140 days between 1944 and 1980). Rafi, along with Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, and composers like Sachin Dev Burman, Naushad, and Rahul Dev Burman created vibrant cinematic hybrids, molding traditional Indian classical music into bite-size pop confections.

It’s interesting to think of how the sheer volume of films influenced their production. To meet the demand, being prolific was kind of a necessity – which brings up an interesting question: is Bollywood better for it? Is it better in the end to be prolific and have that work be of varying quality, or to be a perfectionist, with less output, but higher quality? Representatives on each side of the spectrum have their strengths and weaknesses. Frank Zappa, Bob Dylan, and Ryan Adams are all wildly prolific, but have all had pieces of work (or, in Dylan’s case, decades) that are significantly less celebrated. On the other hand, while Peter Gabriel and Tool have created singularly constructed gems, they only dole them out every five years or so – and that kind of overthinking can be a danger in itself (witness the bronze turd that is Chinese Democracy).

I would argue that now, however, with business models, distribution models, and attention spans changing due to work being released on the Internet, it’s in the best interests of an artist to be prolific. A few reasons:

• There’s less risk of a dud blowing out a section of your audience – everybody produces crap from time to time, but if you’re producing more material the crap will quickly be forgotten in favor of better, more recent material.
• It’s easier to market more stuff – a rapid production clip enables different distribution strategies, like subscription models. And there are just more things to sell.
• It’s easier to form relationships – more output means more paths for audiences to form relationships with your content, which is ultimately what sells art.
• We get better by practice – a fast clip of work takes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to make creative choices out of necessity that you wouldn’t normally make, expanding your horizons and ultimately improving your work.

Here are some of my favorites from the lecture:

Hoton Mein Aisa Baat – from Jewel Thief [Lata Mangeshkar; SD Burman]

Aao Twist Karein – from Bhoot Bangla [Manna Dey; RD Burman]

Tags: Process, Writing

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