Evergreens to Remixes: Hindi Film Songs and India’s Popular Music Heritage

Beaster-Jones examines the cultural history of film songs and their use and reuse in contemporary Indian popular culture. Beginning with a brief survey of film songs and their role in Indian media, he analyzes the constitution of the aesthetic-marketing category "evergreen"--a term used both in Hindi and English--that idealizes a particular set of aesthetic values, even as it serves as a category that enables music companies to capitalize upon their vast music archives. He then focuses on the conflict over the practice of remixing film songs and the consequences of their visual mediation. After examining remixing as a transnational music practice, he suggests that the particular cultural history of India has led to a conflation of the term "remix" with the term "remake" and that it is a category that is used to describe a musical genre rather than a musical practice. Beaster-Jones further notes that in illustrating the transformation of film song through remix practices, he would argue that the evergreen and remix categories mutually reinforce each other, insofar as they acknowledge that Hindi film songs are a kind of Indian cultural heritage.