Suresh Wadkar and Usha Mangeshkar – Goron Ki Na Kalon Ki

By all accounts, Disco Dancer is a terrible movie. The ’80s were a bad time for Bollywood, and making a low-budget movie about a guitar-wielding disco dancer (the title’s no lie, apparently) probably wasn’t the easiest way to buck the trend. Even some of the well-regarded movies from the era are bad – Silsila (Affair), for instance, has a couple of good songs and stars the ever-hot Amitabh Bachchan, but most of its reputation comes from the rumors, seemingly true, about how it’s more or less a true story about the affair he was having at the time, with all the participants playing themselves. But it’s a boring movie. Don’t see it, even though people will tell you it’s great.

But that has nothing to do with Disco Dancer. Really, I know nothing about the movie. The reviews I’ve read say it’s outlandishly cheesy, and not very enjoyable once you surf out the kitsch. Naturally, Bollywood movies are famous for their cheesiness, but there are so many that know they’re cheesy and ride with it that, if that’s what you’re in the market for it’s pointless to waste your time. See Don or Amar Akbar Anthony instead – both are terrific movies with great soundtracks.

OK, that still had nothing to do with “Goron Ki Na Kaalon Ki” (”Neither the Whites’ nor the Blacks’”). Usha was not as great as her sisters Asha Bhonsle and Lata Mangeshkar, but she still puts in a solid day’s work on this song. I’m not familiar with Suresh Wadkar or the composer, Bappi Lahiri, but I often get this song stuck in my head. It’s not a disco song at all, but just a ’70s-style Bollywood jammer with a sweet groove.

It doesn’t seem like you can find this on a CD anywhere, but Hamara CD (Our CD) will put it on a custom CD for you.

The lyrics are hard to find, so here they are. If people want, I can translate the rest, but the chorus means, “Neither the whites’ nor the blacks’, the world belongs to the passionate / We should live by laughing, die by laughing, just like the passionate.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Barbara Manning – Blood of Feeling
The 6ths – San Diego Zoo (featuring Barbara Manning)

Barbara Manning is cute, in an aunt-like way, and quiet, but she’s got brains and grit under her extremely red hair. Doing covers of a Tom Lehrer song (”The Irish Ballad,” renamed “Rickety-Tickety-Tin”) and of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” one of my favorite Beatles songs, helps endear her to me, too, more than just any singer-songwriter shmoe. “Blood of Feeling” comes from her excellent album 1212, which has a fun song cycle about fire, from the points of view of everyone involved, including the arsonist and the match. There’s another good version on Under One Roof, a pretty solid singles collection, too. She’s got a lot of albums, with a whole bunch of bands, with weird track overlaps, and a lot of her stuff is out of print, but it’s not too hard to find in used bins, and it’s all pretty good. She also collaborates a lot with other bands. “San Diego Zoo” is one of those songs, from the 6ths, one of Stephin Merritt’s millions of side projects when he’s not writing another thousand songs for the Magnetic Fields. Aside from this song, Wasps’ Nests has a couple others that are pretty good, but most of the album’s value is the title, whose whole point is that it’s unpronounceable. The other 6ths album, Hyacinths and Thistles, is barely easier to say. That Stephin Merritt. What a joker. For some reason, Barbara’s really popular in Germany, and plays there all the time, but she’s from Chico, CA, and plays in California sometimes. I saw her play a lovely show, too short, at the Mile High Club in Oakland a few months ago. The extra bonus at that club is that they have tater tots, which go pretty well with a Fat Tire.

I decided, more or less on a whim, that it would be fun to make an mp3 blog, so here we are. The last time I did any Internet music-type thing was Bollywood for the Skeptical, which was a mix CD with some explanation of Bollywood music, and that was fun; hopefully, this blog will give me a way to talk about music in a less structured way, or at any rate differently structured. I’ll be posting at least once a week, and probably more. Some songs might be new to me, and some won’t; some will be by well-known musicians, at least well-known to somebody, and maybe some won’t.

I’ll start off with three songs that, I hope, show more or less what I’m trying to get at.

Lata Mangeshkar – Yara Sili Sili
“Yara Sili Sili” comes from the 1990 Bollywood movie Lekin (However). I can’t find “yara” in my Hindi-English dictionary, but one site translates the title as “How Slowly the Tinders Smolder.” I haven’t seen the movie, but reportedly, Lata loved the music especially well. It’s understandable, too: she sang with her sister Asha Bhonsle on the soundtrack, which is unremarkable, since they’re both extremely prolific, and collaborated a lot when Asha was alive, but more unusually, their brother, Hridyanath, also wrote the music as well as sang. Also, Lata produced the movie. My iPod introduced this song to me on shuffle, while I was reading a great piece by Jonathan Lethem in a recent New Yorker. The piece had to do with music, like a lot of what Lethem writes, and for some reason, the combination of the song and the article, which was really about his mother’s death, really moved me. It might have had to do with being in the cathedral-like cages of the UC Berkeley microfilm room. Also, I think the song is pretty. You can get it on the Rough Guide to Lata Mangeshkar, which has some other good songs, too.

Billy’s Band – Оторвемся по-питерски (Atarvyomsya pa-piterski is my best match for his pronunciation)
As far as I can tell, this is Tom Waits, singing in Russian and backed by a klezmer band. I don’t really know anything about it, but a girl who lives in my co-op saw this band play in Russia. This is the title track of an EP with the same title; there are also two other versions of the same song, and two more songs.

Billy Childish and the Buff Medways – Troubled Mind
OK, here’s something in English, and another Billy. According to my friend John, and what the Internet has told me, this guy has more than a hundred albums with a lot of different bands. He’s English, and doesn’t consider himself a musician – he says he just likes to play music. I’m not sure I really buy the distinction. The song’s got a dirty groove and a cool jerk, like a more primitive, rockabilly-inflected version of The Strokes’ “Hard to Explain.” It’s an import (at least, in the US), but Steady the Buffs has this song.