If you’ve heard of Cab Calloway, you probably know his hit, “Minnie the Moocher.” You might not know, though, that there’s a terrific and bizarre cartoon of it, starring, incongruously, Betty Boop. Before I saw the video, I’d always assumed that Betty Boop was just a boring, ditzy character. Maybe she got stupid later on, but the awkwardly drawn girl in this cartoon is as far from bland as she is from conventionally erotic. Also, who knew Betty Boop was Jewish?

The actual story of this cartoon has little to do with what makes it worth watching. Betty Boop and her doggy friend Bimbo run away from home, and then the insanity begins. Their host to psychedelia is Cab Calloway, the walrus: he’s rotoscoped over the earliest known footage of Cab Calloway. Calloway, it seems, was a dance phenom, as well as the inventor of David Byrne’s big suit and the best-dressed man before Andre 3000. There’s a wonderful variety-show movie from 1943 called Stormy Weather that features some great dancing and singing from Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson (a.k.a. Mr. Bojangles), and a whole lot of other greats; it’s well worth checking out. You can download other Boop/Calloway collaboration, or get them on DVD. “Snow White” is especially strange and wonderful.

Outlook is the Indian equivalent of Time, more or less, although a little better written at the same time as it’s far snobbier. It’s usually one of the most worthwhile Indian magazines, along with Tehelka and a couple of others. This week, though, it’s extra-good, because it’s all about Bollywood! The magazine (and website) are filled with piles of lists, articles, etc., in which various luminaries complain about the state of filmi music today.

Normally, I don’t have too much patience for complaints that this or that art form is going down the tubes; I see no reason that the percentage of talented people would ever change. It’s just that sometimes good things are popular (as in ’60s American rock), and sometimes they aren’t as much (like ’70s American rock). Sometimes the hit of the year is “Hey Ya!” and sometimes it’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” In Bollywood music, though, I might concede the point, although maybe it changes things that a few musicians and composers can be so dominant that a single R.D. Burman can make an entire decade swing, where his modern descendants are often stuck with trying to look cool via lame rapping and bland synthesizers. Not that there aren’t still great songs coming out of Bombay, but it’s hard to compete with the golden days, when Mohd. Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh, Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar were all working with the greatest Bollywood composers.

The people who made Outlook’s top 20 list don’t seem to agree that there’s been more than one great song in the last 25 years (admittedly, the one they picked is a corker), but cantankerous juries is one thing that makes best-of lists sort of fun, even if they’re not particularly valuable or reliable. At least this one makes some sort of sense, even if it’s biased towards the distant past; that makes it stand out from the New York Times’s appalling, deathly conventional list of the best American novels published in the last quarter-century - that is, since Umrao Jaan was released. That’s a significant date because if that movie had never been made, we wouldn’t have this gorgeous ghazal by Asha Bhosle, “Dil Cheez Kya Hai,” and it would never have tied with 13 other songs for fourth place in the Outlook top 20. The movie is based on a famous 19th-century Urdu novel, Umrao Jan Ada, by Mirza Mohammad Hadi Ruswa, which describes the life of a tawa’if (courtesan) in Lucknow, in northern India, in the period before and after Lucknow’s tolerant, sophisticated culture was partly destroyed by the British following the 1857 Mutiny.

The music for Umrao Jaan was a bit of a departure for Asha Bhosle; she’d largely been pigeonholed in the ’60s and ’70s as a singer of sexy, rockin’ songs by her husband R.D. Burman, to be lip-synched by the vampy likes of Helen. The more respectable, classical-influenced songs mostly got assigned to Ashaji’s sister, Lata Mangeshkar. Although courtesans often carry associations of prostitution, they also carry a long tradition in India of culture and refinement; young noblemen often used to be bundled off to a courtesan to learn to write poetry, especially the ghazal form of this song, and appreciate music and dance. So the chance to sing the sophisticated ghazals written by composer Khayyam and lyricist Shahryar, on a soundtrack that would quickly become well-beloved, was a big deal for Asha.

“Dil cheez kya hai” means, “What thing is the heart?” You can read the rest of the lyrics on BollyWhat. Note that “cheez” is the Urdu (originally Persian) word for “thing,” and gave us the marvelous phrase “big cheese.” You can easily lay your hands on more Asha; I recommend The Rough Guide to Asha Bhosle, which includes this song. The Best of Asha Bhosle: The Golden Voice of Bollywood is equally good, and contains a different song from Umrao Jaan, “In Aankhon ki Masti.” I had the tremendous pleasure last year of hearing Ashaji sing with the Kronos Quartet on the tour for their collaboration album, You’ve Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman’s Bollywood. The album’s pretty good, and if you know the songs already, some of them can be fun to hear with the Kronos treatment. If you’re looking for a nice intro to Asha, though, I’d probably skip it in favor of the Rough Guide.

Asha Bhosle - Dil Cheez Kya Hai

Whoops, it seems I forgot to post this one when I wrote it almost 2 weeks ago. Sorry for the delay!

One of my favorite new bands of 2004 was the Ditty Bops, who are an adorable duo from my hometown, Los Angeles. My friend Rachel and I went to go see them at Slim’s, in San Francisco, last Saturday, in the midst of a weekend of art pileup - previously that day, I’d seen the superb 1983 PBS graffiti documentary Style Wars, then Nick Cave’s disappointing new Australian Western The Proposition for $3 at Oakland’s fabulous Parkway theater. After the Ditty Bops show, I met friends at the Cat Club for Club Gossip, the monthly 80s video dancefest. Aside from fishing around in a trash can for pieces of my broken glasses, the highlight was probably going to the 24-hour King Diner for chili cheese fries before running to barely make it onto the 3:20 BART train (open late for construction). The next day was calmer; the only major media stimulation was the Al Gore movie, which was fairly good despite the heavy layers of self-promotion. For a superb, and much shorter, movie about Al Gore, check out the sometimes frustrating and often excellent Wholphin DVD that came with the 18th issue of the usually frustrating and rarely excellent McSweeney’s.

OK, maybe I just wanted to talk about all the movies I saw last weekend. That’s not counting the tremendously boring, emotionally unengaging, but very beautifully shot The Weeping Meadow, which I saw on the premise that a three-hour Greek movie about decades in the life of a family would be as good as The Best of Youth, the amazingly great six-hour Italian epic about forty years of an Italian family. It’s also not counting the other movie I saw earlier in the week, Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (Don’t Cry About Salim the Cripple), which is a moving 1989 Hindi film (although not really Bollywood, since it was short, realistic and had no songs) about how it sucks to be Muslim, sucks to be a gangster, and really sucks to be a small-time Muslim gangster in Bombay.

You can tell that I like movies. I also really like old jazz, and I think it’s a shame that it largely only remains on record and in the performances of earnest bands who play at county fairs and folk-music clubs. The Ditty Bops are a lovely exception. They have the veneer of an indie rock band, and their fans are the same people you’d see in the crowd of one of the friendlier indie bands, like the Decemberists. But when you look at it, they actually turn out to be more of a ragtime and early jazz band. One of their best songs is even a cover of the Fats Waller song “Sister Kate,” and they played a catchy Boswell Sisters cover, too. Their own songs are much in the same idiom, although of course they aren’t just mindless imitators, mooching the glories of past virtuosi. “Wishful Thinking” is my favorite of their endearing original songs, and comes from their self-titled first album, which I prefer to the new one. Just to spice it up a little, this is a bootleg from a 2004 show in LA, a few days before I saw them at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco. If you’re in the US and east of California, you’ve got pretty good odds of being able to catch their delightful live show; since they’re biking across the country, it’s going to take them a while to work their way over to New York.

The Ditty Bops - Wishful Thinking