This is a metal cover by The Minimalist Studios of a song that might sound familiar to you (though we won’t blame you if it doesn’t.)
Cut to:
An annoyed Delhi resident tweeted to the Delhi Traffic Police on Wednesday that a woman in his neighbourhood was driving a scooter without a helmet while “singing very loudly.” Immediate action was promised.
The woman in question is apparently the “cringe-pop” star Dhinchak Pooja.
She was, it appears, recording the video of her new song Dilon Ka Shoooter which has her riding around town on her red scooter, in a red top and red lip colour, her straight long hair pushed back by a pair of sunglasses. A knowing grin completes the picture and a line in her new song goes – “There is no one cuter than me”.
The track is decidedly so bad that it’s terrific – which is exactly her style. Like all her previous songs, including Selfie Maine Le Li Aaj and Swag Wali Topi, it has got a sizeable number of views – 4 million and counting.
All this drama around Dhinchak Pooja has prompted others in the business of music to bring out their own covers of her numbers, such as the video above.
Another maker of a Dhinchak Pooja cover, Siddharth Sharma, aka Dub Sharma, a music producer, told Scroll.in: “I think her tune is not that bad. I need to fix her beats.” He did the necessary “fixing” and released a remix or “refix” as he likes to call it, of her new song:
He claims that listening to her music stirred obsessive-compulsive behaviour in him and he felt compelled to do right by “music”. “I just fixed the beat and did some additional vocals. I’d like to fix all her songs. This one just had almost no elements at all, so I had enough space to work,” said Sharma.
What does he think about Dhinchak Pooja’s perplexing rise to social media fame? “I think Dhinchak Pooja is doing a great job at proving a point that the social media game is not about the music, really. It is about unavoidable sharable content – that is what she’s creating. It’s interesting how you can (with fresh beats) give a new perspective to something,” he said.
Mumbai’s True School of Music couldn’t resist doing a jazz rendition of her songs, where you can barely recognise the original tracks.
Experimental artist Brij Dalvi, under his moniker ZZZ, even did a synth, electronica remix of Swag Wali Topi, which actually made Dhinchak Pooja sound good.
A rock ‘n’ roll band called Astanaa did this catchy cover:
But as Sharma put it, “I have to say, original is original.”
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