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The late legendary singer Lata Mangeshkar has been named to Rolling Stone’s list of the 200 Best Singers of All Time. She is ranked 84th on the list, which also includes Jungkook from the popular South Korean band BTS, late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and South Korean singer-songwriter Lee Ji-eun.
Talking about Lata, the magazine wrote, “The crystalline, eternally girlish voice of ‘the Melody Queen’ is a cornerstone of Indian pop music, with a global influence spread via Bollywood films, whose golden era she defined. Lata was the empress of playback singers, the vocal magicians who perform songs for actors to lip-sync in lavish movie musicals, recording over 7,000 such songs, by some estimates.”
It further read, “Even Asha Bhosle, her younger sister and only true peer among playbackers, considered ‘Lata Didi’ her ‘favorite singer’ — and if Bhosle was more versatile and prolific, her elder sister remained the gold standard for the piercing brilliance of her tone. The Lata Mangeshkar songbook has informed songs far beyond Bollywood, from Britney Spears’ Toxic (which sampled the 1981 Lata duet Tere Mere Beech Mein) to electronic jams by Madlib and Four Tet (who made a section of Lata’s exquisite Main Teri Chhoti Bahna Hoon the centerpiece of his 2015 Morning Side.”
Aretha Franklin, the late American singer, topped the list, followed by Whitney Houston and Sam Cook. Billie Holiday, Mariah Carey, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, Otis Redding, and Al Green are among the artists who have filled the top ten positions.
For Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whose music remains immensely popular in India, the magazine wrote, “Watching archival performances of the late Pakistani vocal master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — an icon in the realm of Qawwali, a type of Sufi devotional song, whose family’s musical legacy stretched back hundreds of years — it’s easy to lose track of time, and to hear how his music easily reached global audiences in the Eighties when he began performing abroad and recording for Peter Gabriel’s Real World label. His many famous fans included Madonna, Eddie Vedder (who duetted with him on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack), and Jeff Buckley (who called the singer ‘my Elvis’ and studied Urdu in order to properly cover him.”
