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

Ever since I was a little kid, when I thought “Leader of the Pack” (vrrrm! vrrrrrrm!) was the greatest song in the world, I’ve loved girl groups. They never seem to get too much respect, probably because they didn’t write their own songs, and they were mostly just manufactured by their producers. So? When the producer was Lou Christie, who cares?

The Tammys were one of Christie’s first groups, and I guess he went all-out on them. As much as I love the Bangles’ hit “Walk Like an Egyptian,” nothing can stop the Tammys’ “Egyptian Shumba” from being the greatest ancient Egypt-themed pop song of all time. Don’t even talk to me about that Steve Martin song. “Egyptian Shumba” is so bizarre that it’s almost a parody. The first squeaks at the beginning of the song sound like some Austin Powers thing, but nope, it’s a legit, amazing girl-group song, replete with screams and sighs. Handclaps must not have been invented yet by 1963, because this is such a perfect song that if rhythmic handclaps had existed, they would have been all over this song.

I first heard this song on Girls Go Zonk!, a nice one-disc compilation, but you can also get a whole CD of just The Tammys, called Egyptian Shumba: The Singles and Rare Recordings 1962-1964. The best idea, though, is to invest in the mondo box set One Kiss Can Lead to Another. It’s packed with about 75,890,279,852 amazing, unknown girl-group songs, from favorites like the Shirelles and Petula Clark and unknowns, as well.

This has nothing to do with “Egyptian Shumba,” but I may be posting less often here. I’m about to leave for a year in India, studying Urdu in the northern city of Lucknow. I’ll have an Internet connection, so I’ll try to continue to post songs. I might also start writing about my travels, here or somewhere else. We’ll see.

The Tammys – Egyptian Shumba

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

Vieja Trova Santiaguera (Old Santiagoan Trova) is a quintet of spry old men, all from the eastern Cuban city of Santiago, an important city to Cuban music and the birthplace of trova, a genre that developed among poor, itinerant, self-taught troubadours (trovadores) in the late nineteenth century, growing out of cancion, urban music that grew out of the mixture of Cuban folk music, European popular song and influences from Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia.

Vieja Trova formed in 1994, naming itself in contrast to the politicized, eclectic “Nueva Trova” (new trova) movement that emerged after the 1959 Communist revolution. Though the members are apparently devout Communists, they didn’t have much truck with the innovations of their juniors. Although Buena Vista Social Club was still a few years in the future, Vieja Trova was founded on basically the same principle, of reviving the musical traditions of the past before all their practitioners died.

“El Tren” (”The Train”) is a whimsical song with wonderful vocal sound effects and onomatopoeia, from their self-titled album. The rest of the album is okay – there are a couple of nice standards (”Lagrimas Negras” (”Black Tears”) and “Son de la Loma” (”They’re From the Hills”) and a lovely song called “El Huerfanito” (”The Little Orphan”), but the rest is undistinguished. If you want to know more about trova and the whole history of Cuban music, I recommend The Rough Guide to Cuban Music.

Vieja Trova Santiaguera – El Tren

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

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

I just moved over all the old posts from this blog’s former incarnation. The format has changed a little bit, but it’s still the same idea: good music, and who cares where it’s from?

I originally picked up Ramsay Midwood’s Shoot Out at the OK Chinese Restaurant just because I thought the title was funny. He looks like a young dude, but his voice has a lovely old-man muddledness. I’m pretty sure his whole act is a put-on, like Creedence, but it’s not really important. “Esther” is a beautiful, slow ballad; almost a lullaby.

Ramsay Midwood – Esther