Bollywood India Pakistan
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Bollywood
During the 1970s, R.D. Burman was the Bollywood dream factory's most popular composer of film songs. His music drew heavily on Western pop styles and so, on this compilation, we're treated to a healthy dose of fuzz guitars and echo chamber effects to complement the Bollywood strings and tablas. Here is the first song on the album, the classic 'Dum Maro Dum', from the 1971 movie 'Hare Rama Hare Krishna': If you watched the video, then it should come as no suprise that the title translates to something like 'Puff, take a puff'.
Okay, I've gone and done it. Given that I've got somewhere between 500-1,000 Bollywood soundtracks from the 1940s-1960s, it seems a shame not to share them all with you. So, in addition to this blog, I've started another: Bollyvault .
Introducing ... BOLLYVAULT
Selections from the Bollywood Archive
Here is a cabaret number from the frankly amazing 1967 film " An Evening In Paris ", which is probably my favorite Bollywood film ever. The pertinent memes in this movie have already been well explicated by Corey Creekmur here , but I have two particular topics I'd like to expand on: Sharmila Tagore, the main actress in this clip, occupies an interesting role for Bollywood - she is the heroine of the movie, which in earlier films would have meant that there would be no way she could perform these sexy nightclub numbers. In the past, this kind of moral standard paved the way for actresses like Helen to carve out a decent niche playing only the "bad girl" roles that the heroine actresses couldn't do. But this movie finds a clever loophole around the problem - Sharmila plays two characters, twin sisters Deepa and Suzy - one's a virtuous, well-behaved Indian girl, and the other has ended up as a cabaret dancer with mob ties.I consider the one album I have by Chitragupta to be fairly good, but he has never been a music director I've put much effort into pursuing. At least not until I saw a clip of Helen in 'Pyar Ka Sapna' and it became a matter of necessity to locate that film's soundtrack. The song in question, 'Night Is Lovely Lovely , is one of the tastiest, catchiest, best Bollywood pop songs ever made, end of story. I've yet to come across a sensible copy of the LP, but this EP does me nicely. An EP is in fact all there ever was from 'Apradh' [review] [2] ; for whatever reason the film wasn't afforded a full length album.
