The year of Shah Rukh Khan’s bumper Bollywood box office comeback looks set to continue with the September release of Jawan, directed by Atlee Kumar and featuring music by Anirudh Ravichander. While its trailer sure does pack a punch, Jawan’s newly released song Zinda Banda is no Jhoome Jo Pathaan. Not even close.
The teaser shows SRK taking a massive creative risk by attempting a double role for the first time since Fan (2016), but the accompanying soundtrack’s lead single Zinda Banda appears disappointingly pedestrian and aggressively average. The song, the rhythm and the dance appear more South Indian cinema in their aesthetic than the North. This division may not matter in the era of pan-Indian cinema – see RRR (2022), Pushpa (2022) and Ponniyin Selvan (2022 & 2023) – but will this song set the clubs on fire in Delhi and Mumbai? Hard no. The only thing that works is the sheer, unbridled energy of Shah Rukh Khan that carries the song through.
Zinda Banda lacks magic
The music video, which has amassed over seven million views (and counting) since its release, features the standard hallmarks of a modern-day Bollywood masala film, with remnants of Rohit Shetty’s 2013 film, Chennai Express. SRK is committed to transitioning away from romcoms and toward action thrillers, though with a bit of flair, as he puts on his trademark moves while surrounded by a sea of women, including Priyamani and Sanya Malhotra.
However, Anirudh’s composition can’t match Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani’s work for Pathaan. The musical duo made up for a mediocre, cliched January release with a catchy soundtrack that not only stayed in the limelight but played around with pop songwriting tropes just enough to sound fresh.
With Jawan’s lead single, Anirudh and his team have made writing and production choices that struggle to traverse the fine line between wearing sonic influences on your sleeve and shamelessly borrowing from older, better-produced tracks.
Zinda Banda begins with a string-heavy introduction and dialogues by SRK. Iconic Urdu poet Wasim Barelvi then provides strong soaring vocals to lead the intro into the main track.
With fast-paced percussion and a basic bass line, the rhythm section that carries the song has slick production. From a writing perspective, it would not look out of place in most Tamil film soundtracks or even one of Brazilian band Sepultura’s more indigenous-centred songs.
Almost plagiarised?
None of the choices made here are as egregiously plagiarist as much of Bollywood composer Pritam’s work, but the song’s melodies sound far too similar to one of Dropkick Murphys’ overplayed Celtic folk-punk work. The most obnoxious melodies can be heard at the song’s bridge two-and-a-half minutes in, sounding almost exactly lifted from the American band’s biggest hit, I’m Shipping Up To Boston (2005), which was popularised by the 2006 Academy-Award-winning film, The Departed.
Anirudh’s vocal writing and delivery, while competent and fitting for the instrumental track, consistently came across as the inferior sibling of Bajirao Mastani’s Malhari, a massive hit composed by the 2015 film’s director Sanjay Leela Bhansali and performed by Dadlani.
The final track resulting from these elements is built on an appropriately aggressive beat and may be perfectly relevant to the section of Jawan. But the best Bollywood soundtracks, year after year, transcend the contexts of the stories in which they are placed to maximise on radio airplay, online viewership and the compilation charts.
The Pathaan soundtrack arguably achieved its aims to a decent degree at the start of the year, but if lead single Zinda Banda is anything to go by, the Jawan soundtrack may struggle to scale up the standards set.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)