SaareGane
Nine rooms of 90s & 2000s Hindi music
SaareGane is a free Hindi music player with no advertisements, no radio and no sign-up. Every room below is a hand-picked playlist rather than a search result: the love songs of the 90s, the heartbreak records that followed them, the ones built for a long drive, the late-night mehfil, the indipop cassettes, the ghazals, and three rooms built around one performer each. Pick the one that matches the evening and the music follows.
Pehla Nasha
The romance the decade was built on. Aashiqui and Saajan opened it, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai sold it to everybody, and Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai closed it out on the other side of the millennium. Four voices carry nearly all of it: Kumar Sanu, Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik and Sonu Nigam. This room is the songs of theirs that still turn a car stereo up.
Kumar Sanu · Udit Narayan · Alka Yagnik · Sonu Nigam · Nadeem-Shravan
Bewafa Bar
Hindi film music has a whole genre for being left, and this is it. Kumar Sanu built the canon across Aashiqui, Deewana and Sadak; the Bhatt camp kept it going through Zeher, Kalyug and Awarapan two decades later. Nothing here is gentle about it. These are the records people played on repeat at two in the morning, and the room is arranged so the worst of them come first.
Kumar Sanu · Aashiqui · Awarapan · K.K. · Nadeem-Shravan · Anu Malik
Lambi Drive
Built for the hours rather than for a subject. Hindi film music spent the 90s and 2000s making records that are better at eighty than they are sitting still - Chaiyya Chaiyya on top of a moving train, Dil Chahta Hai on the Bombay-Goa road, Rang De Basanti in an open jeep, Swades across a whole country, and Taal, Guru, Lagaan, Dhoom and Jab We Met behind them. This is that music with one rule applied to it: nothing anybody would reach past four hours in. No item numbers, no dirges, no heartbreak. Put it on when you leave and it is still right when you arrive.
A.R. Rahman · Dil Se · Dil Chahta Hai · Rang De Basanti · Swades · Taal
Forever KK
Twenty-six years of Hindi film music in one voice. KK arrived in 1996 on a line of Maachis, made Pal in 1999, an album nobody had commissioned that became the sound of every school farewell in the country, and then spent the 2000s being the singer a film reached for when a song had to be felt rather than performed. Tadap Tadap, Ajab Si, Zara Sa, Kya Mujhe Pyar Hai, Alvida, Labon Ko, Dil Ibaadat: half the records people remember from that decade are him, and most of them do not have his face on the poster. He died in Kolkata in May 2022, hours after a concert. This room is his whole Hindi catalogue in one place, and nothing that is not his.
Pal · Jannat · Woh Lamhe · Life in a Metro · Pritam · Yaaron
Daru Mehfil
The one room that opens before 1990, and it has to. The sharaabi canon IS the seventies and eighties: Sharaabi, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Namak Halaal, and the Pankaj Udhas mehfil ghazals that made a drink a subject worth singing about. Everything after it, up to Omkara, is written in that key. Late, warm, unhurried, and increasingly honest.
Sharaabi · Pankaj Udhas · Kishore Kumar · Omkara · Mohammed Rafi · Ghulam Ali
Nukkad Ki Chai
The decade Hindi pop happened outside the films. Cassettes with one great song and a video on Channel V: Yaaron, Dooba Dooba, Tanha Dil, Maaeri, Made In India, Sayonee. It is the only room whose records mostly have no film behind them, which is exactly why they are hard to find anywhere else. A catalogue files them under whatever compilation last re-issued them.
Lucky Ali · Silk Route · Euphoria · Shaan · Colonial Cousins · Alisha Chinai
Shaam-e-Ghazal
The only room here sorted by what a song IS rather than when it was made, because the ghazal never stopped being itself. Begum Akhtar in the fifties, Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali across the border, Jagjit and Chitra Singh making it a household form in the eighties, and the film ghazals that borrowed all of it. Harmonium, tabla, and a couplet given the time it needs.
Jagjit Singh · Begum Akhtar · Mehdi Hassan · Ghulam Ali · Chitra Singh · Pankaj Udhas
Lord Emraan
A filmography as a playlist. From Murder in 2004 through Zeher, Aashiq Banaya Aapne, Gangster, Awarapan and Jannat, one actor carried a decade of Hindi film music almost single-handedly, and the soundtracks outsold most of the films. The rule for this room is absolute: if it is not from an Emraan Hashmi film, it is not in here.
Murder · Gangster · Jannat · Awarapan · K.K. · Pritam
Mehfil-e-Altaf
One singer, and a room built for him because nowhere else files him properly. Tum To Thehre Pardesi sold in numbers most film soundtracks of 1997 did not, and almost none of what followed was ever in a film, which is why a catalogue scatters it across compilations with the wrong years on them. Collected here in one place, in order, the way the cassettes ran.
Altaf Raja · Tum To Thehre Pardesi · Jaa Bewafa Jaa · Qawwali