If you’ve got Bombay the Hard Way, Dan the Automator’s album of remixed songs by the classic ’70s Bollywood composers Kalyanji-Anandji, you might recognize the soundtrack of Bombay 405 Miles. Like their other work, it’s great, funky stuff, but something that confuses me is why Automator missed out on the best part of the soundtrack. From what I read about the movie, which I haven’t seen, Zeenat Aman, the hottest babe in ’70s Bollywood (and all Bollywood ever; incidentally, also the babe up on top of your screen), is distracting some bad guys by making them think she’s coming on to them. I mention this because otherwise you’d think this song was from a porn soundtrack. She (or Hemlata, the playback singer) sings (my translation):

No no no no no, what have you begun to do?
You’ve started to cross the borders.
Where have you brought me?
You made a promise of somewhere else,
But now you’ve brought me here.
Get out of here! Get out!
Leave me!
Oh, my heart’s begun to pound here.
The dream of love that I’ve seen -
Aren’t there thorns in it?
I’ve just seen a rose and nothing else,
For making love, there should be a parade of stars,
A serene night,
A bed of flowers.
Then - there could be something like this, right?
Right? Ohhh.
Hm! Oh, hmmm!
Let me go! Ha ha ha!
Don’t you… trust me?
My love is for you!
But… not right now.
When we’re tasting intimacy,
We’re both restless,
There’s fire on both sides of us.
Let me look at you.
Oh, stop it! Don’t! Ahhhh…
Oh, God! You’re very stubborn.
You want to step forward.
The body burns like an ember,
My breath is escaping me.
Leave me alone!
Don’t take relationships by force.
What about honor, the norms of society?
Don’t do it like this
Leave me, leave me, leave me, leeave me!
Ahh, ha ha ha, ohh, oh God!
Ha ha ha!
Naughty boy!
Ahh, ahh.

Hemlata - Na Na Na, Yeh Kya Karne Lage Ho

Hey, so I haven’t really updated this thing in an extremely long time. I’ve been in Lucknow, India, studying Urdu, and haven’t really had time to update. So I’m sorry about that. On the plus side, I’ve heard a bunch of great tunes in the last year or so since I posted, so I’ll try to get through some of them. I’m starting grad school at Berkeley (where I also did my undergrad) in a couple months, but I hope I’ll have the willpower required to force myself to play on the computer every so often.

Let’s see if I can play against type and not just post some Indian thing. My friend Alex, who follows all the phenomenal music that comes out of Scandinavia much more closely than I do, gave me this album called 8BP050, which is a chiptune compilation, basically dance music made with Gameboys and other low-fi beepy things. One of my favorite songs on the album is “Switchblade Squadron,” by Covox, who appears to be a Swede named Thomas Söderlund. I never had a Gameboy, or even any other kind of video game platform, making me probably the only American born in the ’80s who doesn’t know all the names of the different characters and bad guys in Mario Bros. Nor do I think of myself as someone who really likes electronic stuff all that much. Regardless, this is a hell of a catchy, upbeat, beepy little song, and a bunch of the other numbers on the album are pretty good, too. The whole thing is a great driving soundtrack, especially now it’s summer, and you can tool around with the windows down, thinking about how cool you are for listening to music that little 8×8 characters would dance to if they were at a little on-screen nightclub in 1989.

Covox - Switchblade Squadron