Bollywood Sounds The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song

Bollywood Sounds focuses on the songs of Indian films in their historical, social, commercial, and cinematic contexts. Author Jayson Beaster-Jones takes readers through the highly collaborative compositional process, highlighting the contributions of film directors, music directors (composers), lyricists, musicians, and singers in song production. Through close musical and multimedia analysis of more than twenty landmark compositions, Bollywood Sounds illustrates how the producers of Indian film songs have long mediated a variety of musical styles, instruments, and performance practices to create a uniquely cosmopolitan music genre. As an exploration of the music of seventy years of Hindi films, Bollywood Sounds provides long-term historical insights into film songs and their musical and cinematic conventions in ways that will appeal both to scholars and to newcomers to Indian cinema.

Jayson Beaster-Jones is Assistant Professor of Music and Performance Studies at Texas A&M University. He has conducted several years of ethnographic research on music, commodities, and value in the North Indian music industry. He has published his research in the journals Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and South Asian Popular Culture and has contributed chapters to several edited volumes.