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

OK, I’ve had way too long a string of namby-pamby, nicely-nicely instrumental songs here recently. Here’s Nina Hagen, to change that with new wave beepy screechy (she belongs to the Neue Deutsche Welle, or German New Wave, but the name’s also a play on the German national radio station). According to my old German textbook and the German Wikipedia, she was born in 1955 to an actress and was partly raised by her composer stepfather, Wolf Biermann. She escaped from East to West Germany, via England, in 1976, when she was 21. She described herself as, “Nina Hagen, international punk star, UFO specialist, passionate mother, engaged protector of animals, dwelling: Berlin, Hamburg, Ibiza and the rest of the world.” You can hear the animal thing in “Don’t Kill the Animals,” a duet she did with Lene Lovich, who wrote “Lucky Number.”

Lucky for you, dear reader, Hagen’s cover of that song, “Wir Leben Immer…Noch” (”We Always Live… On”) doesn’t have lyrics like, “Animal testing is a dangerous game, / Our systems are different, we’re not the same.” Instead, it has crazy orgasmic screaming and possibly Lotte Lenya-inspired hammy vocal gymnastics.

Her children are named Cosma Shiva and Otis.

My German’s not so hot these days, but let’s see if I can give it a shot without risking an excessively accurate translation:

Wir wandern bloss und nackt in die Unendlichkeit,
We wander [something] and naked in the unendingness,
Wir schweben auf dem Pfade in die Ewigkeit,
We [something something] in eternity,
Wir glauben was wir wissen und wir fürchten uns,
We believe what we know and we fear ourselves,
Wohl weil wir sterben müssen das beängstigt uns,
It frightens us that we must die,
Wir sind die Lebenden,
We’re the living,
Nach Leben strebenden.
Striving after life.

Jeder neue Tag kann gut und böse sein,
Every new day can be good and bad,
Wir stellen unsere Viberationen selber ein,
We make our own vibrations,
Und wenn wir morgens früh an unser ende denken,
And when we think about our end in the early morning,
Dann kann uns dieses wissen durch die Tagzeit lenken,
Then we can [something] know this through the daytime,
Weil wir leben können,
Because we can live,
Und uns das Sterben gönnen.
And death [somethings] us.

Wir vegetieren und wir rasen durch die Lebenzeit,
We vegetate and and we [dunno] through our lifetimes,
Wir verblassen und verpassen die gelegenheit,
We [no idea],
Wir haben keine Zeit, tun uns selber leid,
We have no time, to say sorry,
Wir vegetieren und wir rasen durch die Lebenzeit.
We vegetate and we [something] through our lifetimes.

Wir verstecken unsere ängste in der Zwischenzeit,
We [mumble] our fears in the interim,
Wir zittern immer noch vor der Vergangenheit,
We always shiver before the past,
Wir entwickeln uns nicht weiter, weil Erwachsen sein,
We grow[?] broader, because we’re awake,
Uns einzwängt in die Zwänge der Gesellschaft,
[Something something] society,
Nein, so wollen wir nicht sein,
No, we don’t want to be like this,
Oh, nein dass muss nicht sein!
Oh no, it can’t be!

You want accuracy? Use Babelfish.

You can get the song as a bonus track on the bargain $10 ’80s bathhouse fave Nunsexmonkrock, or in its original context on the slightly more expensive Unbehagen.

Nina Hagen - Wir Leben Immer… Noch

This band was one of the first I learned about when I started working at the UC Berkeley radio station, KALX. I eventually left, mostly because a) the other people tended to conform to stereotypes to a horrifying degree and b) I was lazy. DJing is really fun, if also scary, but the thing I miss much more is the Alexandrian (or Congressine) library. They had everything, and you could read decade-long arguments scrawled all over the record jackets. Doolittle was hardly visible under the vitriol.

Anyway, this band, Os Novos Baianos, is one of the many reasons why MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) is going to eventually be recognized as the greatest genre of music ever, not counting power pop, New Wave, Bollywood oldies, klezmer and all the other ones that I like. MPB is sort of rockization of previous genres of Brazilian pop and folk music, and basically every Brazilian musician you and I have heard of plays it. I like the name because you never know if it just means Brazilian pop or something more specific, and when you’re lazy but have more or less catholic tastes, like me, that’s handy. I listened to almost nothing but Cuban music for the couple years in high school before I found out about “Dazed and Confused,” but that didn’t mean I ever actually figured out how to reliably tell the difference among son, guaracha and all the other genres. I’m not bragging about my ignorance - I’d love to know more than I do, but at the same time I’m more interested in just listening to music than learning terminology. Genre names in any country and idiom are like species, anyway: just because it looks different than its parents doesn’t mean the liger-bunny won’t turn out to be sterile. Actually, what I mean is that it’s just a convenient label, and there’s no point in using it if it hems you in.

That was all just a roundabout way of saying that I think this is a lovely song. I gather from this page that “Preta Pretinha” means “Black, Blackie.” I don’t know exactly how to take that, but since the band sounds like very nice people and that page is about multicultural dolls seemingly named after the song, I assume that it doesn’t have any racist connotations. I don’t pretend to be an expert, and I know that Brazilian racism is at least as widespread as in the rest of South America, but I’ve noticed that many Cuban songs mention “mulatas” and “negros” in tones that don’t seem to be derogatory. Whatever the title means, the song is great, like the rest of Acabou Chorare.

Os Novos Baianos - Preta Pretinha

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.”
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