One Song at a Time - 58. Kanasalu Neenu
(Rajan-Nagendra) External intervention is sometimes required to boost the sagging spirits. It happens in life and it also happens in film music. Like how Rahman's Tamil film songs gave a new direction to Hindi film music in later part of 90s, even before Rahman himself entered the fray in Hindi. The same thing happened to Telugu film music in the late 70s and early 80s. To me the Telugu film music of late 70s and early 80s was a bit stale. Giants like Rajeshwar Rao and Pendyala were slowly fading away and the music scene was dominated by Chakravarthy, whose music was mediocre, if I have to put it lightly. K V Mahadevan's music was bright in patches. The music was outstanding when he did movies with directors with an artistic bent of mind like K.Vishwanath and Bapu and had a tired feel when he had to do the normal 'masala' movies, where he had to compete with Chakravarthy. Ramesh Naidu and Sathyam came up with good tunes now and then but they were not 'c