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Inadvertent (?) Homosexual Love Songs


small mercy

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There is something about Indian poetry and music and it's the fact that there are so, so many men writing about men. And it's always been this way. This is especially prominent in the Punjabi language, and now that Punjabi culture is so trendy in the rest of north India, it's becoming increasingly prominent in Hindi-language music. 

If you look back at Indian poetry, in any language, men have written about their love for men, but, for the most part, they used feminine verb conjugations to refer to themselves. So, it's a man writing about love for a man, but from the point of view of a woman. This is extremely common and completely normalized. 

Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Hindi music in which men sing about men... but continue to use masculine verb conjugations in reference to themselves. So no one can "no homo" it away by saying it's from a woman's POV. It's a man singing about his male beloved. 

In some cases, it's pretty simple. It's considered extremely disrespectful in India to change the lyrics when you're covering a song. So that leads to women singing about women and men singing about men. 

For original songs, you could say something was lost in translation. For example, the Punjabi language is so popular now. Perhaps the singer doesn't realize "mahi" is a masculine form of "beloved" or that "sohneya" is not gender-neutral and literally means "beautiful boy." After all, in the music videos, the men are still crooning the songs to women. He's just calling that woman his "beautiful boy" in Punjabi. 

...Maybe it just rhymes better this way. 

 

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