How film magazines wrote about Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle
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Madhuri devoted an entire issue to playback singers in 1971, giving text and photographs equal space, while Filmfare carried cover page stories on Lata Mangeshkar in March 1971 and June 1987. Both issues relied on the biographical form, giving importance to Lata’s early days of struggle in the industry and showcasing her ability to survive in challenging circumstances to become a star.
The critics writing on aural stars had no official access to information about their private lives and drew on oral gossip to write biographical pieces. One of the key strategies deployed by the music critics was to draw attention to the sentimentality of the songs in order to write about the singer’s private self. The critic used his own listening experience— foregrounding the “affect” in the playback voice— to recuperate earlier regimes of listening associated with musical genres like the thumri, traditionally performed by the courtesan. Through the use of speculation and innuendo, the private selves of the singers were conflated with the narrative address of film songs.
Both Lata and Asha remained the focus of discussion in popular magazines from the 1950s to the ’90s. In the “Star Focus” series in Filmfare, an article by Lata (1964) carried photographs of her puja room...