When American style music jumps continents, weird things happen to it. Cultural references get lost or misinterpreted. One need only look at Japan and Korea to see the weird things that happened to American pop there (PSY being just one example).
This month's Weird World of Old Records is less about a record, and more about Bollywood. From North American eyes, Bollywood films have some of the trappings of what we know as movies, but it soon gets warped into a surreal direction. Actors break into song without an inkling they will. Dance numbers appear out of nowhere. Strange video filters are used. It's a fun trip, but often a disorienting one.
I was first exposed to Bollywood music, ironically, through an American cult film, Ghost World. Being a fan of Daniel Clowes, I saw Ghost World when it first hit theatres in 2001. This film opens with the dance sequence from a 1965 Indian film called Gumnaam. I've never seen the original film, so I don't have a context for the film, but I understand what Ghost World is about. I do know Gumnaam is a murder mystery, so it's even more strange that there's a huge rock and roll dance sequence in the film.
Ghost World follows Enid and Rebecca graduating from high school and trying to figure out what to do with their lives. They want to move into an apartment together, but only Rebecca strives to find a job to pay for it. Enid and Rebecca are both outsiders in their high school, and Enid takes this to an extreme after high-school, struggling to find a place in the world, and not fitting in anywhere she goes. Instead, she goes around annoying other people, eventually answering a personal ad, where she meets Seymour, a reclusive vintage record collector. By the time the movie ends, Enid has pretty much destroyed the life of everyone around her. Enid eventually leaves town on a bus, heading for somewhere unknown.
The opening sequence from the film finds Enid (played by Thora Birch, whom I've had a crush on since I first saw Ghost World) dancing around her room to the dance sequence from Gumnaam, featuring the song "Jaan Pehechaan Ho", sung by Mohammed Rafi. Rafi, incidentally, is not the singer in the film. That band is called Ted Lyons and His Cubs, who have been featured in several classic Bollywood films. The dance sequence features dancer Laxmi Chhaya, jerking around in a strange dance, reminiscent of 60s American dances, but filtered through the funhouse mirror of Bollywood. It has the trappings of what we'd know as 60s America, with the music and costumes, but none of the cultural touchstones. Instead, it becomes a surreal, psychedelic landscape, sung in a strange and alien language. Like Ghost World, this is a strange and absurd lens looking through at something that's almost familiar, but ultimately alien.
Dan Clowes discovered this song through Peter Holsapple, of the legendary 80s indy rock band, the dBs. The song was also used in a 2011 ad for Heineken.
After learning about this song, I also learned about the Sublime Frequencies record label, which specialized in oddball and archival releases of worldbeat music like this. "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" also appears on their compilation Bollywood Steel Guitar, where is takes another bizarre twist, Van Shipley covers the song on the compilation. For some reason, in Bollywood, steel guitar is used for easy listening songs. So, this instrumental cover comes of like a weird spaghetti western version set in India.
Yes, I do love music like this. Music taken out of a familiar context, twisted through some bizarre genre and culture bending, and coming out the other side looking like nothing we'd every think we'd ever see.
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