Miss Use
A Survey of Raunchy Bhojpuri Music Album Covers
3. From Illustration to Photographs
Towards the late 1990s, increasingly, photographs began to be used instead of illustrations on the album covers. Hence, in a late move, the amateurish look of illustrations was discarded for the professional look of photographic covers. The growing competition - as many small labels sprung up - and the increased income from an expanding market, in turns, necessitated and facilitated this move. The growing city markets also required the Bhojpuri media to match up to mainstream standards.
In these photographic cassette covers, the image almost veers towards soft-pornography. The photograph, instead of the illustration, made the image highly provocative as it rendered the sexual depiction very realistically. The suggestiveness of illustration became quite literal as a photograph.
As there was no ready photographic motif to which to relate this traditional musical genre, the imagery on most of these album covers has been borrowed from elsewhere. Most photographic cassette covers display women in western wear seemingly impersonating a vamp: a crude construction of a modern sexually liberal woman. It is an image borrowed from such fantasy portrayals in cinema and advertising. Thus with the introduction of photographic album covers, the “rural ideal” seems to have been given up: the new medium ushered in its “modern” associations. With this, Bhojpuri media now firmly stepped into its urban phase.
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#27. KAISE DABOON |
#28. APNA PARAYA KHANDAAN |
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# 27, 28: Note how the relative naïveté of the illustrated image of the voluptuous village belle compares to the photographic album covers.
# 29: This is a rare album cover in which the photographic image represents a rural woman. She is bathing herself with a tumbler – an equivalent of the ‘shower shot’ or ‘wet look’ in popular media.
# 30 – 32: In the stylized photographic image of the sexualized woman, she has been picturised as a westernized woman in a vamp-like get up.
# 33: This rare album cover picturises the taboo kissing image. The convention of the solo woman on the cover has also been broken.
A tag on the cover reads: ‘Bhojpuri Ukh,’ literally, ‘Bhojpuri Sugarcane’ – obliquely referring to the male phallus. |
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