Chasing dreams and riding the crest of a massive, unprecedented wave of popularity and yet hounded by crippling nightmares and unsettling media trials, rapper and music producer Yo Yo Honey Singh makes for an instantly fascinating documentary subject.
The intrinsic potential of his eventful story is substantially tapped in this 80-minute Netflix film produced by Sikhya Entertainment. The Mozez Singh-directed musical documentary pieces together the Yo Yo Honey Singh saga with all the fevered pace, spice and ebbs and tides of a big-screen crowd-pleaser.
It is riveting all the way, with twists and turns in the singer’s fortunes coming in thick and fast. It gallops at a fair clip as it brings out into the open the controversies, mental health struggles and public skirmishes that beset the embattled recording artiste in the midst of a dizzying journey of unparalleled success.
The songs, conversations and on-camera confessionals that constitute Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous are peppered with profanities and expletives reflecting the mercurial personality that the rapper chose to project to his diehard fanbase.
The portrait of a performer whose ascent on the charts bordered on the phenomenal is, however, carries marks of black spots that remind the world that success and its trappings often extract a heavy price.
Since he started out as an underground music producer as a callow youth dreaming of escape from dreary anonymity and enforced middle-class frugality, the popular singer saw incredible highs and crushing lows over the next two decades. Even as a string of reverses buffeted him on the personal and professional fronts, he kept going.
The makers of Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous clearly had much narrative meat to work with. They do a fair job of crafting a rounded picture that captures the rough and the smooth of the man’s life with equal force.
With unbridled access to his family, friends and key collaborators, the documentary seeks to understand Honey Singh’s mind and musical mojo in the context of where he has come from and where he has reached in twenty years and a bit.
Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous edited by Deepa Bhatia, captures the drama of the West Delhi lad’s topsy-turvy life with a keen awareness of the sensitivity of the issues that are at play.
It probes the repercussions of success and fame, and mass adulation and enormous wealth, of an ordinary boy whose life takes an extraordinary turn – not all of them, as the film shows, for the better. It excavates the man-child behind the Phenomenon, defiant in the face of the greatest of odds.
Stitching together interviews with a host of his contemporaries and collaborators, a couple of gender rights activists who wade into him, a friend with whom he grew up in Karampura, his mother Bhupinder Kaur and sister Sneha Singh and others (including Salman Khan), the film takes the audience into the heart of the singer’s frenetic and febrile world.
The constant whirl of activity in Honey Singh’s personal spaces and his creative domain rubs off on the film and makes it as high-energy as an underground hip-hop concert where people have the freedom to let themselves go without a care in the world. It is entertaining, informative and disorienting all at once.
Like the singer, who at one point of his life did three to four shows a day and did not have the luxury of relaxation between performances, the film moves with dizzying momentum and captures the blurring effect that work overload and the pressure of always being on the road had on the singer’s psyche. The film straddles a wide swathe of themes in the process.
From living for 24 years in a room without windows to being trapped in a paralysing and paranoid mental state to finding the will to wriggle out of thoughts that weighed him down, Honey Singh grapples with daunting challenges in the years that followed the massive success with his first studio album, International Villager. The rise was the meteoric. The consequences were perilous.
After throwing in passing mentions of a few of his biggest hits and their genesis, the film turns its attention to the setbacks that Honey Singh suffered along the way. The worst of them all but stopped him in his tracks. The film does not shy away from addressing the immediate and harrowing effects that the reverses had on the performer.
A segment also touches upon the storm that hit Honey Singh and his music after the Nirbhaya gangrape case. Accused of belting out vulgar songs and encouraging masculine toxicity, he is given a chance to defend himself against the grave charge. He has a firm advocate in his sister, who, too, is accorded plenty of footage as she speaks her mind on various aspects of her brother’s life and times.
Worse was in store for the singer and his family, ahead of a concert in Chicago. What transpires there, and thereafter, changes the mood of the hitherto buoyant film completely and investigates the fallout of a serious psychological crisis.
The film slows down just a tad at this point to examine the battles that Honey Singh waged in his mind in the process of reclaiming the life that he was on the verge of losing. As thoughts of death overwhelmed him – he says he just lay around in the house like a “paagal laash (mad corpse)” – he would imagine his worst nightmares playing out before his eyes.
He admits to drawing a life-altering inference from his horrific trip to hell and back: Life is false, it is a lie. Death is truth, it is inevitable and permanent. But that is certainly not the burden of Yo Yo Honey Singh’s music. Yet, in its all-out celebration of the vitality of youth and rebellion, it does present glimpses of the kind of contradictions and complexities that probably require far deeper analysis.
This documentary, which at the very least has a lot of what headbangers would demand, serves as a more than passable starting point of a larger conversation about the sounds – and the peripheral noises – that Yo Yo Honey Singh and his ever-popular ilk create. It’s sobering yet watchable.
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