Sona Mohapatra Opens Up On The 'Music Mafia' Debate, Says Bollywood Is 'A Demoralising Grinder Of Talent'

Sonu Nigam may have just started a big movement in the music industry by challenging the music mafias who discourage new artists with his recent videos. The singer is steadily gaining favour from other artists like Monali Thakur, Adnan Sami and now Sona Mohapatra.

The singer who is known for her activism on social media, Sona penned a piece on how the media, audiences and artists too need to say no to mediocrity apart from talking about the dominance of music labels. In her note published by Mid-Day she claimed that Bollywood has for the past two decades been abusing creators and digging for short term gains.

Sona writes, “Bollywood is now merely regurgitating music from its past. It has lost all creative steam and cultural credibility. It's not the incubator for the next, Gulzar, Majrooh Sultanpuri, even Amitabh Bhattacharya or Madan Mohan, Vishal Bhardwaj or the next Shankar Mahadevan. Instead, it's a demoralising grinder of talent." She questions, "So where will the next A.R Rahman, Amit Trivedi, Ram Sampath, Shaan or even Divine emerge from?"

She emphasizes that we have to stop waiting for Bollywood’s validation of artists and their work and said that the audiences too “cannot be accepting of nursery rhymes or remixes as standard fare. Audiences need to question and reject artists who lip sync (too) on the live stage.”

She gave an example of Punjabi music and individual talents whose work garners nationwide attention and is later Bollywood picks it up and it is not the film industry’s marketing that made it a super hit.