Some people love Baba Sehgal – simply because he is one-of-a-kind and has displayed such tremendous staying power. Others with more delicate sensibilities cringe at the quality of the ‘music’ he produces. Baba Sehgal is known to create some strange new sounds and is also known to make songs that are copies of copies (I’ll explain). He has also joined the lets-make-a-spoof-of-shape-of-you bandwagon – rather belatedly. We look at his latest and some of his worst best from the past.
He's made the whole thing using just the keys of a laptop – he speaks of having the tape of some woman who did ‘jhol’ with him and who has also not paid ‘toll’ (clearly he couldn’t find anything else to rhyme with jhol). Just for the 'record', he has made covers of Despacito and Sia’s huge hit Cheap Thrills as well.
His earlier offerings, Dilruba and Alibaba don’t really merit mention. The 1992 album Thanda Thanda Paani put him on the map so to speak. The title track was a copy of Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby, which we, of course, know as a copy of the iconic Under Pressure from Queen and David Bowie. In the early days of MTV, it was this song – Dil Dhadke (an anthem to stalking and harassment we now recognise) that we had to endure feasted our senses on.
Clearly, this was the creepy stalker phase of his career – the song has lyrics like aage aage ladki peechhe main hoon dewana and some seriously disturbing visuals of a voyeuristic creep peeking into a woman’s bedroom and bathroom through a TV. This was from the inexplicably named album Main Bhi Madonna.
OK, I have to confess – I simply loved this song! With completely random lyrics like these - lekar aaya hun main baja Manjula/baja baja kar bana main raja Manjula/duhd piyega raja aaja Manjula – what’s not to like, I say!
He made Memsaab o Memsaab for the film, Miss 420. He also created the upon-reflection-deeply-creepy (and I'm not even talking about the fashion disaster that each person in this song is) Aaja meri gaadi mein baith ja from the same film, and some other reasonably popular songs for Hindi films. Most recently he did the Bae, Baba Aur Bank Chor for the dubiously titled movie Bank Chor (Riteish Deshmukh).
Mere Karan Ayenge is the title of one song. Another pivots on the iconic line from Amar Prem, Pushpa I hate tears.
Roti round banana, he says in one of his songs. He also has a song dedicated to the great aloo ka parantha, about Rajma Chawal, O my lovely pizza (I kid you not), Mumbai ka Vada-Pav about Chicken Fried Rice; even a song where he explains the chemical formula of water; one more entitled O Ellen! Share some Watermelon. Why? Who can tell in these things!
GST, Mutual Funds, Black Money, Trump ka Mania he has made songs and videos for all of those. He made a song to Go to the Gym, about Google ka zamana hai and about how mujhe Wi-Fi chahiye. The man is certainly hugely prolific – as for the musical and lyrical merit of these songs – I’ll just leave you to decide.
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