Developed in the 19th century, the sociological theory of generations (or birth cohorts) is omnipresent in its everyday application today as Karl Mannheim’s seminal formulation of the theory approaches its centennial, the world’s great many Millennials enter the workforce, and the ill-defined Gen Zers begin to come of age. Although the theory has been widely critiqued on multiple grounds, notably for its lack of applicability to non-Western cultures, it retains considerable currency in our arguably evermore-homogenized global popular culture, and it prevails as a taxonomic given in writings on youth culture and popular music. This paper sheds ethnomusicological light on the work of Mannheim and others by focusing on the case of India’s Millennials and the changing mediascape of the Hindi language film and its music. Through analysis of musically significant scenes and songs like “Lazy Lad” (Ghanchakkar, 2013),“Wake Up Sid” (Wake Up Sid, 2009), “Radha” (Student of the Year, 2012), and “Jaane Nahin” (3 Idiots, 2009), it explores how Bollywood has attempted to cinematically and musically define, portray, and shape this generation even as it has adapted its formulas to better cater to it. The paper, while engaging with native classifications of generation, argues that by tapping into Rock, Hip-Hop, and R&B to mirror the Millennial plight of reconciling individualism with the pressures of education, career, family, and tradition in neoliberal India, Bollywood ultimately has become a cultural force (a social event in the Mannheimian sense), and has aligned India’s younger generations with their Western/American counterparts.

In early talkies, pre-partition, a handful of female playback singers dominated film songs, and forged distinctive sonic properties for culturally iconic characters. Out of this early mélange of singers emerged a single Hindi film female vocal aesthetic with distinctive sonic properties pitch, tonal quality, and tessitura associated with culturally iconic characters which still reverberate today.

Although there are studies on popular and film voices, a thorough analysis of Indian (Hindi) film voice is lacking. In this paper, I turn to Amanda Weidman's (2021) seminal work on South Indian film singing, and Victoria Malaway's (2020) research on the popular singing voice. Weidman’s ideologies of the voice and its constructed nature draw attention to character, gender, and other social categories help contextualize the voice within an Indian aesthetic, while Malaway's focuses on the parameters that convey a pop song's meaning, including Barthes’ examination of the “grain” of the voice (the pleasure, performativity, embodiment, and eroticism). Both frameworks signify the popular singing voice with identity markers and vocal realizations based in music theory model that interprets vocal delivery in popular music.

Beginning with classical and folk vocal aesthetics, I focus on vocal sonance (phonation, intensity, resonance, timbre), pitch, register, range, vibrato, situating the film voice within Weidman's idea of "aural public culture" and the subjective consumption of gender and film charactierisation. Separating the acoustic from the constructed properties, I analysis musical influences shaping female aesthetics, socio-cultural preferences for a dominant sound embedded in ideologies, and the stylistic sonance that satisfied the voyeuristic listener.

“Schizophonia” —the splitting off of a sound from its source— has been an enduring term in ethnomusicology for decades. Schizophonia is the site where musical utterances can be captured by modern recording technology (Schafer 1969, 1977), and, (particularly relevant for instances of cross-cultural borrowing), the beginning of a process where musicians can increasingly lose creative control over, and the ability to profit off of, their own sounds (Feld 1994, 1996). For the African contributors to Black Panther, this may have changed little. But with the introduction of Black Panther In Concert, a live stage adaptation of the blockbuster film, many of the original musicians were called back in to perform their parts. Drawing on participant-observation as an artist representative for one of those contributors, this paper demonstrates how Black Panther In Concert recentered the original African musicians from the Oscar-winning score, foregrounding their contributions and opening up new career possibilities, to an extent that the film itself never achieved. Starting with the film and reverse-engineering it to be performed live reveals what I call “enophonia”—the reuniting of the sound with its source— which counteracts the schizophonic process, repatriating the borrowed sounds back to the original creators, and increasing the amount of artistic credit and financial remuneration they could receive from them. It suggests that, though most critical attention is generally paid to mechanisms like copyright and royalties, live performance may continue to be the most empowering space for “sub-altern” collaborators, even on large-scale mass-mediated releases like Black Panther.