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Himesh Reshammiya: Uncapping the Pop-Culture Icon's Full-Blown Resurgence in 2025
Once dismisse, composer-singer-actor Himesh Reshammiya is back — and now, the irony has turned into affection. A deep dive into his surprising cultural renaissance.
A couple of months ago, I went down a Himesh Reshammiya rabbit hole. The trigger? A video by Yashraj Mukhate — the YouTube creator known for viral music riffs — performing a 15-minute medley of Reshammiya’s songs most people didn’t even realise he’d composed. The video serves as a reminder of just how prolific the singer-composer-actor has been, and how many of his tunes have lodged themselves in our popular imagination. These aren’t tracks critics typically cite when discussing the best music of the 2000s. Yet when we hear them now, in 2025, they hit like dopamine shots we didn’t know we needed.
The frenzy around his CapMania tour this year confirms what’s been building quietly for a while: Reshammiya is having a full-blown resurgence. His social media currency has been steadily rising. He’s become a meme, the subject of affectionate online irony, with Instagram pages like “Himesh Doing Things” chronicling well, Himesh doing things. Earlier this year, he starred in Badass Ravikumar, playing a spoofy version of his own persona — proof that he’s in on the joke and still very much in the game.
All of which makes this the perfect moment to talk about Reshammiya the composer — what he originally was, and what he excelled at. Because before the memes and the movies and the trademark caps, there was the music — and it was everywhere.
To Cap it Off
Listening to those songs again during my YouTube spiral, I found unexpected solace in the comments section, where strangers left notes on the pleasures of pop. Someone reminisced about the era of the music TV channel 9XM and Nokia phones. Another asked, “Who is listening in 2024?” Almost everyone agreed that “Lord Himesh supremacy is undisputed.” But it isn’t just nostalgia at work here. There’s something structurally satisfying about these songs — that heady mix of repetition, murkhiyas (those ornamental flourishes), and solid hooks. Reshammiya could build entire compositions around a single melodic line, then craft variations that made you anticipate the return. Basic compositional technique, perhaps, but executed with the kind of musical intuition that can’t be taught.
It’s useful to view Reshammiya’s career in two acts: before and after Aashiq Banaya Aapne (2005), sweetly timed in the middle of the 2000s. That’s when he started singing his own compositions, and soon enough, transformed into a pop phenomenon. Until then, he’d enjoyed a pretty solid career — winning a Filmfare for “Tere Naam” (2003), his breakthrough album. That soundtrack exemplified the ’90s tabla-dholak influences he’d carried into the 2000s, even as he was simultaneously showing newer instincts in other films with bangers such as “Janabe Ali” and “Bardaasht Nahi Kar Sakta.”
Looking back, this period seems like the prelude to peak Reshammiya — between 2005 and 2008 — when he sang an insane number of songs and became a certified hit machine. He wasn’t a technically great singer — nasal, one-note, often loud — but the conviction was undeniable. When he sang his own songs, voice and melody fused in a way no playback singer could replicate.
Dopamine Culture
Take “Viraaniyan” from Namaste London (2007), one of his “classier” outings, where Reshammiya’s tendency to stretch vowels gives the melody an unusual shape. Or consider the creative clipping of syllables in “A–a–aashiqui mein teri” from 36 China Town (2006). It’s almost as though Reshammiya the singer liberated Reshammiya the composer. Together, they were unstoppable.
Then came the downfall. The Himesh Reshammiya persona — the capped, stubbled crooner, holding his mic at that signature angle — had grown too large. The “trend” became tiring; there was simply too much of him. Worse, his ambitions of movie stardom took over, each film a bigger vanity project than the last. The composer started fading from the scene. In the 2010s, he’d occasionally resurface to prove he still had it — the addictive “Hookah Bar” from 2012’s Khiladi 786, the joyous “Prem Leela” from Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (2015) — but it seemed Reshammiya would never be culturally relevant again.
Until his CapMania tour was announced in April 2025. It was sold out within hours. In Mumbai and Delhi, where the concerts took place, the audience — millennials and Gen Z alike — went nuts. Reshammiya was back in his element.
“Naak se gaaon kya (should I sing through my nose)?” he asked the crowd at one concert, ready to make fun of himself. Except there isn’t much to mock anymore. Because when the beat drops and that melody line kicks in, it isn’t irony we feel — it’s muscle memory. It’s the recognition that these songs, dismissed for years as guilty pleasures, were never guilty at all. They were just pleasures, pure and simple.
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