Adnan Sami slammed the increasingly convenient industry practice of churning out remixes from past hit songs. The composer-singer argued that while music companies conveniently blame the trend on the audience, the truth is that listeners are starved for original content, yet the stakeholders aren’t meeting those needs these days.
He claimed that while he doesn’t mind remixing old songs, he has contention with how the ratio between originals and remixes has shifted from 80:20 to 20:80 now. “The corporates are scared to experiment. It’s happening even in cinemas. Remakes are attempted and sequels are made; even prequels are planned! Offshoots are also working,” Sami said on the ‘Game Changers’ podcast.
Sami quoted the example of ‘Batman’ films. Once ‘DC’ hit a saturation point making ‘Batman’ movies over decades, it decided to make a franchise out of a spin-off. Hence came Todd Phillips’ 2019 psychological thriller ‘Joker’. The Joaquin Phoenix-starrer was a spin-off of Batman’s arch-nemesis. It was followed by a sequel, ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’, a couple of years ago, which didn’t yield desired results.
He even pointed out that Christopher Nolan’s recent blockbuster action-adventure fantasy ‘The Odyssey’ isn’t the first film adaptation of Greek scholar Homer’s ancient poem. Mario Camareni also adapted it into the 1954 classic ‘Ulysses’, starring Kirk Douglas as the protagonist Odysseus. However, Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ has now amassed almost 1.5 billion dollars at the worldwide box office.
Adnan argued that while sequels were also made of classics like Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 gangster epic ‘The Godfather’ and George Lucas’ 1999 space opera ‘Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace’, ‘this was not a regular thing’. The same trend has thus trickled down to Indian cinema and music, where only stanzas of songs from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s are tweaked, while retaining the memorable chorus and hook line.