Emraan Hashmi Says 'Awarapan 2' Will Revive Bollywood Music: 'We Are Going to Have Some Really Banger Tracks On It'
The actor reflects on the lost charm of lip-sync songs, the rise of algorithm-driven music, and why he believes 'Awarapan 2' might just bring that feeling back to Bollywood.
Emraan Hashmi has a theory about why Hindi cinema doesn’t move us the way it once did. Somewhere along the way, he says, we stopped singing our feelings.
“I was watching this Dharma film the other day,” Hashmi says. “People were singing on the streets, and I thought to myself, where has this gone? Why aren’t we celebrating love this way anymore? It’s become so sombre and so understated. Earlier, there was joy, a certain abandon in how we expressed emotions. We sang them out loud — literally. And that’s what I miss the most.”
For Hashmi, music has always been central to how Hindi cinema connects with people. “Music is the emotional bandwidth that you have in films,” he says. “I don’t know if that stopped when films began catering to multiplex audiences after 2014. People felt that instead of filling 500 seats in a single-screen theatre, it was better to please 100 people in a multiplex and match their elite taste. Make it niche, make it nuanced. But somewhere in that process, we lost the core value of what our films used to bring to the table.”
He points to the way Southern commercial films continue to embrace emotion. “They still wear their heart on their sleeve and play to the front gallery. We are not doing that anymore. We have started saying things in whispers and hush tones, and that’s become the language of our films — in the storytelling, and in the music too.”
Hashmi says the shift isn’t just about changing tastes but also about how films and music are being made today. “It’s all about the algorithm now,” he says. “I have heard people say a melody won’t work because the data says so. But you can’t create music like that. It’s not about who’s singing or how many followers they have. It’s about the feeling the song leaves you with.”
That, he believes, is what Awarapan 2 will bring back. “We’re going to get it back,” he says. “Awarapan is coming back, and we are going to have some really banger tracks on it.”