In order to take advantage of the promotional potential of the music video, the country music industry was forced to adapt a medium with conventions and aesthetic elements established by other musical genres – by pop and rock. And to reach its distinct market country music video also had to incorporate country's own established iconographic elements. This iconography is constructed and understood in two ways: through the traditional concerns of country music lyrics; and through the history of visual media based on and developed around the genre. Country music has, in fact, been associated with the screen since movies could first talk, from Jimmie Rodgers' 1929 movie short The Singing Brakeman through thousands of singing cowboy movies to the national television exposure that culminated in Hee Haw.

Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:

(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);

(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.

The ubiquitous songs in India's commercial feature films play a dual role in Indian society: they serve as both film songs and pop songs for India's 800 million people. India is the largest film-producing country in the world and one fifth of its current annual production of approximately 750 films is made in Hindi, each film having an average of five to six songs (Dharap 1985). As the major form of mass entertainment available on a national scale, rivalled only by the government-run television network, Hindi cinema plays a prominent and influential role in Indian society. Yet its songs, which represent India's most popular music in the twentieth century, are relatively little known to non-Indians, either to scholars or to the general public. Musicologists and anthropologists have for the most part focused their attention on Indian classical and folk traditions to the neglect of film song. To counteract this imbalance I propose here to examine one important aspect of Hindi film song – its peculiarly eclectic nature – which plays a major role in the nationwide appeal of this popular music. I look at some of the ways in which these film songs are eclectic and possible reasons why they are so. Such a study provides insights into the role of this popular music in Indian society and culture and can thereby contribute to an understanding of the role of popular music generally in non-Western and developing countries.

‘Budding ethno-musicologists, step this way. If you ever wanted a bit of everything on a record, this is it,’ wrote a reviewer in the Melody Maker for 18 April 1981. The record that covered ‘a baffling amount of ground’ was Revenge of the Mozabites by the Suns of Arqa on Rocksteady Records MICKLO1. Other reviewers were as puzzled, and in some cases, stimulated by the issue. To Johnny Black writing in London Trax they

sound as if they lost their front door key back in 1969 and have been trapped in the living room of 8 Higher Road, Urmston ever since, with only albums by the Incredible String Band, the Bauls of Bengal and Hapshash for company. From time to time they hear the John Peel prog, and have thus gleaned a passable understanding of dub. Towards the end of 1980 they were set free, had a shave and a haircut and trundled their acoustic guitars, castanets, tablas, fiddles and harmoniums to a portable recording studio in the back of a Morris 1000 Traveller where they recorded this album.

The dramatic development of popular music in India illustrates some of the complex and varied ways that South Asians have used art and entertainment as a means of adapting and relating to the social transitions accompanying modernisation. Indian popular music, nevertheless, has been all but ignored in scholarly literature, whether musicological or sociological; this article endeavours to provide a basis for future inquiries by providing a descriptive outline of the development of modern Indian commercial music in the twentieth century.