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

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

Kay Kay, Dominique and Chorus – Tadap Tadap

I saw Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (We Gave Our Hearts Secretly, Darling), the movie that this song comes from, about four months ago, and since then, I’ve had to listen to this song every few days, sometimes a few times a day. On its face, it’s glossy, ornate, and filled maybe past capacity with instruments and background singers. But these frills don’t weigh the song down at all. The main singer, Kay Kay (sometimes written K.K.), raises his voice however he wants above the percussionists, and they stay out of his way. For a lot of the time, he’s almost alone. The pace stays pretty fast, and it almost sounds like any snappy Bollywood pop song, but when Kay Kay gets up high, he turns mournful.

The sadness of the song is easier to hear when you know what the words mean, so it’s lucky that someone at BollyWhat translated it for us. In the movie, even more, the sadness builds up as the song is worked into the misplaced-love story and repeated, and it winds up being really moving, if you’re liable to get taken up in sad stories. The movie’s worth talking about for a minute. It’s directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, and, like his amazing movie Devdas, the music is by Ismail Darbar. It’s about Aishwarya Rai, the daughter of half-Italian Salman Khan’s demanding music teacher, who falls in love with him even though he’s sort of an oaf. She ends up having to marry Ajay Devgan, and is very unhappy about that. Then the second half starts, and a whole lot more stuff happens. Among other excitements, there’s a kite festival, a trip to Italy, played by Hungary, and a charming grandma, Zohra Sehgal, who’s the cute granny in every single Bollywood movie ever, even the ones made in the ’40s. Also Bend It Like Beckham. Salman Khan is way less annoying than usual, and gets pretty infectiously teary-eyed in parts, and Aishwarya is good, as she only is in Bhansali’s movies; like normal, Ajay Devgan is excellent. And the whole soundtrack is nice. Darbar’s music is all elaborate like this, and often as good, but he’s sort of stuck up.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.