What a hit is is decided by so many different people on such different platforms around the world that something is already a mega hit without you noticing. For example, if you drive to Mumbai Airport, there is a billboard that recognizes “Paani Paani” as the most successful song of the year, and as far as YouTube views are concerned, that works out.
the Song by Indian rapper Badshah has already over 345 million “Views” so it says on the poster, and that’s about the price range of another Asian pop phenomenon, namely the Korean boy group BTS. Her current hit “Butter” has already generated 480 million clicks. However, the song has been on the market a month longer and is sung in English. “Paani Paani” but in Hindi. However, one does not necessarily have to understand “Paani Paani”, similar to how the Korean rap “Gangnam Style” became the most played video in the world a few years ago (3.95 billion views, now several times overtaken) without non-Koreans deciphering a word could. In the song “Paani Paani” it is mainly the repetition of these two words that gets stuck, embedded in the overall hook in the line “Main Paani Paani Ho Gayi”, which means something like: “I blushed, my beloved.”
In the video you can guess why you blush. The actress and former “Miss Sri Lanka”, Jacqueline Fernandez, who is great in Bollywood, dances very veil-like with Badshah and moves her lips to the words that the singer Aastha Gill sang in the studio. Gill himself only appears briefly in the video. Instead, however, in contrast to the rather youth-free approach of “BTS”, the hips are circled, as it is just okay according to Bollywood moral norms, even in the large formation, with many background dancers.
Body language from the school of US hip-hop of the two-thousanders: Badshah in the video for “Paani Paani”
(Photo: screenshot)
Badshah benefited from the fact that some productions in Mumbai had been put on hold due to the pandemic, so it was possible to shoot for two days in a large studio. That Badshah then raps sentences like, “The glass is half full, will you fill it up?” – given. The video is held in the school of US rappers from the early 2000s, but with belly dancing in exotic palaces and on carpets that are upright in the desert (after all, they don’t fly). Badshah raps and moves between the dancers as if balls the size of dromedary humps were making him stumble. Oh, dromedaries also ride through the desert. And black horses. And a Rolls Royce hurtles through the sand. How well the exaggeration of the Indian film industry goes with old-school hip-hop becomes obvious.
The fact that the song stays in your ear, which is why you tend to want to hear it a few times in a row, is due to a traditional instrument called the Ravanhattha, which emits a slightly whining sound and which can be imagined as the Asian forerunner of the violin – both of them Instruments share the potential to be extremely annoying if they are not played with virtuosity. The brilliant strings in “Paani Paani” let the notes gently waft in and out, but remain present except in the moments when “I blushed, my beloved” is sung. There is also a rhythm group in which the drums don’t drive as much as the bass pushes, which somehow appeals to the right body regions for the associated dance.
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By the way, as with the always rather cute and decidedly asexual BTS choreographies, there are associated fan videos, so-called “Dance Challenges”, in which many of them from hip-hop to belly dancers Moves contribute. That doesn’t add to the total counter, but at the time of going to press, “Paani Paani” already had 374 million views, so they will soon have to put up new billboards in Mumbai.