KK
In 1992, a Delhi commerce graduate started paying his way singing advertising jingles — Usha fans, then Hero Honda, then Colgate — and phoning his aunt each evening to ask whether a music director had called. "Those days there were no mobiles," he remembered. Krishnakumar Kunnath, performing as KK, moved to Mumbai, sang an estimated 3,500 jingles, and reached film playback with a fragment of "Chhod Aaye Hum" in 1996 before "Tadap Tadap Ke Is Dil Se" made him inescapable in 1999. Entirely self-taught, he built a catalog across eleven languages on raw feeling rather than training — the director Mahesh Bhatt, who cast him repeatedly, said he "could be frivolous, romantic and anguished" in the same breath. KK sang until the night in 2022 he collapsed after a Kolkata concert, aged 53.
KK named his idol without hedging. "I later learned that Kishoreda had never learnt music, so I had even more reasons to not go to a music class," he said of Kishore Kumar, whose plainspoken, unschooled style became KK's own excuse never to sit for a lesson. After a Mangalore show, he recalled, a man in his sixties told him he had made the old man "miss Kishore a little less" — the highest compliment KK said he ever received, and proof of exactly the throat he had modeled his own on: untrained, ear-led, feeling first.
listen forCue Kishore Kumar's "Mere Naina Sawan Bhadon," from 1976's Mehbooba, against KK's breakout "Tadap Tadap Ke Is Dil Se," from Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999). Both singers let the voice go ragged exactly where a trained playback singer would smooth it — climbing into the highest notes cracked and open-throated instead of controlled, the grief sounding like physical strain rather than polish. It's the same untrained instinct KK credited to Kishore Kumar: sing what you feel, not what you were taught.
The case for R.D. Burman is thinner — no interview catches KK naming a specific record of his. But wire obituaries published at KK's death reported plainly that he "was greatly influenced by the singer Kishore Kumar and music director R.D. Burman," alongside a scatter of Western rock names like Led Zeppelin. Burman pushed Hindi film scores toward rougher, more Western-facing arrangements than the smoother playback tradition around him, and that same taste for a rougher, guitar-driven sound runs through KK's less orthodox tracks.
listen forBurman rarely sang his own compositions, but on "Mehbooba Mehbooba," from 1975's Sholay, he did — a raspy, chest-forward growl pushed hard against the beat rather than gliding over it. Set beside KK's "Tu Aashiqui Hai," from 2003's Jhankaar Beats, the kinship is in that same willingness to rough the voice up: KK drives the chorus with an urgency closer to rock performance than to the honeyed control most playback singing calls for.