Tamil film, 1997, musical director Deva.
By the way, the Wikipedia entry linked to Deva above isn’t so great in some ways. Its passing reference to Gaana doesn’t do the genre’s interesting history justice. This clip is far from Gaana, but it’s hard to find an example of Deva’s Gaana on YouTube. (I found one song, didn’t really feel like posting it.) I did some reading about Gaana some months ago, because there’s one song known to many of us that a lot of people say is basically a Gaana song, and it’s called “Bird Flu.” That’s a reason I was looking at Deva film clips a while back.
This clip reminds me a bit of stuff I posted previously from Ilaiyaraaja’s songs in Thalapathi. That kind of makes sense (some of the same people involved, in different capacities). There’s also a famous English-language tune in here somewhere. But that’s all OK.
One thing about this song that’s kind of different, at least to me, is the use of that hard beat – the way it’s mixed with softer elements and the way its synchronized with the dancing. Very nice…