Introducing ... BOLLYVAULT

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.

Enjoy!

Kohinoor & Aan soundtracks | Naushad

Listen to Lata Mangeshkar sing "Aaj Mere Man Mein Sakhi" from "Aan"

Get it all here.

A friend recently told me he'd just seen Abigail Child's "Mirror World," a short experimental film that I collaborated on with Abby several years ago. You can watch it here. My contribution was limited to (a) choosing the source film (or several Bollywood films, from which, Abby chose Mehboob Kahn's epic early color film "Aan") and (b) supplying the language, which was all "found"--literally just subtitles from various other Bollywood films.

That reminded me that I hadn't posted many Bollywood soundtracks recently, so I decided to post the soundtrack to the film that serves as the basis for "Mirror World." Like most Bollywood soundtracks on CD, it comes with two soundtracks; in this case, that of a much later film, "Kohinoor." The great Naushad Ali composed the music for both. Singers include Mohammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar and the insanely underrated Shamshad Begum.

I was interviewed about a month or two ago by a brilliant Anthropology grad student, Portia Sedon, who is writing her Master's thesis on music blogs. She interviewed a number of music bloggers, wanting to get at our motivation for blogging and our general philosophy, if any, behind what we do. I confessed at the time that, while I love doing the hodge-podge that is Bodega Pop--it's really, to me, a blog as much about New York City and the immigrants who make their home here, as it is about fabulous music--part of me would like, someday, to do a more focused blog on Bollywood soundtracks.

I have hundreds of them, mostly from the 50s-60s, the "golden age" of Hindi film. Poking around online this evening, I couldn't really find anything out there now that focuses on this incredible treasure trove. So ... I'm thinking.

I won't abandon Bodega Pop. But I'm thinking I might launch a second blog, dedicated to this music. It seems like it would serve a genuine function, providing listeners and scholars (*cough*) alike with a vault of some of the most incredible pop music ever made. [Wipes tear-of-inspiration from eye.] In order to justify it, though, I feel like I'd have to include full track listings, composer(s) names, lyricist names, singers, etc., etc.--in other words, make it data heavy, and well-organized, so people could actually use it as a reference.

What do you think? Should I do it? Would it be too much like having a second job? I'm on the fence; it might be a lot of work but I can also see how it'd be enormously gratifying. Also, I kind of already came up with a sort of cool name for it. Ergh. Ack! Gawhd. Can't ... decide ...

Sezen Aksu | Allahaismarladik

Listen to the title song.

Get it all here.

I was never a big fan of Turkish superstar Sezen Aksu--not, at least, until I discovered this CD at Uludag Video in south Brooklyn. This particular CD is a reprint of her first album, Allahaismarladik ("Farewell") from 1977 along with a few bonus singles from 1976-79.

Enormously popular and influential, often referred to as the Queen of Turkish Pop, Aksu has sold more than 40 million albums worldwide. Listening to this powerful early work, it's not hard to understand how that happened.

Drew Gardner & Various Artists | Flarf Orchestra

Listen to K. Silem Mohammad reading "Utah!" and other pieces.


Listen to Sharon Mesmer reading "A Unicorn Boner for Humanity"

Buy a copy of this crazy-ass CD here.

Most readers of this blog probably don't know this, given that most of you are in Europe or Asia and probably don't read much American poetry, but back in late 2000 I began writing a bunch of crazy, somewhat offensive poems that I began to call "flarf." In the spring of 2001, a half-dozen friends and I launched the Flarf email list, which ultimately grew to about 30-40 participants.

You can read a short history of the movement here and an article about us that appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal here.

Over the course of a decade or so, my friends and I put on a number of performances--in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Washington DC, and elsewhere--and at a few of these performances, flarf poet and jazz musician Drew Gardner put together impromptu Flarf Orchestras, made up of both local professional and completely amateur (or altogether non-) musicians, who provided music for some of the readings.

This CD, just released by DC flarf poet Rod Smith's Edge Books, features 10 of those live performances. For those curious about this blog author's "other life," I should warn you that I'm not one of the featured readers, though I do play a plastic blow-into-it sort of "keyboard" on one of the tracks. That said, the music is solid, often fabulous and, as is the case with the sample tracks above, offers an occasionally transcendent mix of language and music, the likes of which I'm guessing you've probably never heard.

Cheb Mami | Douni El Bladi

Listen to the title track

Get it all here

This 1996 CD from early in the Prince of Rai's career completely blew my head off the first time I heard it after plucking it from the now-gone Princess Music electronics and Arabic music store on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge.

Shockingly, in 2009, the wildly popular singer was sentenced to five years in a French prison for allegedly forcing a former lover to undergo an abortion. (He was released on parole in March of this year.)

His last CD was released five years ago, in 2006; he says he plans to continue performing and recording, though I don't know whether he's begun to do so yet and/or how audiences will respond to him today.

Chicken Rice | Lucky 7

Listen to "Spider Man"

Get the whole 7-track CD here.

Japan's love-affair with rockabilly is, of course legendary. Taiwan's? Not so much. This solidly rockin' record was my first indication that anyone else in Asia beyond Japan even cared about the sub-genre.

Found in P-Tunes & Video, the ultra-fabo DVD/CD store on Chrystie Street in Manhattan's Chinatown featured in the header image of this blog. This is the only CD this band ever produced, which is disappointing, considering how much it doesn't suck.

Posting this largely in anticipation of seeing the 5.6.7.8's at the Mercury Lounge later this month.

Here's a vid:

Rimitti | Hina ou Hina

Listen to "Skerna And Amara"

Get the whole thing here.

I found this in one of many now-closed Arabic music places in Bayridge, Brooklyn, maybe three years ago or so. Each of those no-longer-existent places had a section of rai music, but for some reason, this was the only Rimitti I was ever able to find there.

Cheikha Rimitti is, of course, legendary. A bit about her here.

Uncreative Genius | Alt Japan

Listen to a mind-blowing remix of James Brown's "Super Bad"


Listen to a fabulous breakcore track


And if those two don't convince you, this will

Get all 50 songs here.

A collection of Japanese covers, remixes, pastiche, breakcore, retro and beyond, culled after reading Simon Reynolds' Retromania.

I was a huge fan of Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up And Start Again, a terrific critical and social history of British and American 80s post-punk. So when Retromania was published, I descended on a copy like the admitted culture vulture that I am.

It's a brilliant book. I think anyone interested in pop music, or more generally, in pop culture, should read it. But I didn't agree with all of it. And I definitely wasn't sympathetic to the book's almost non-existent coverage of non-Western pop. If you've read the book yourself, you can probably guess what chapter raised most of my hackles. That's right, Chapter 5: Turning Japanese: The Empire of Retro and the Hipster International. The one chapter that even acknowledges that other cultures produce pop--in this case, Japanese Shibuya-kei artists.

I'm hardly an expert on Japanese pop music. I've been there twice for very limited visits. I do have, however, a rather fabulous collection of CDs and MP3s of Japanese alt pop that, if nothing else, proves that this music is about something more than mere "consumer affluence." Also, it isn't particularly "Japanese" to mimic others in the creation of one's "own" pop culture. This is something the entire First World is adept at/reliant upon, especially the British, and especially 60s British pop artists.

I'm not going to launch a critique of the book--which you can (and should) read for yourself. Instead, I've put together a sonic riposte that, whether or not you've read Reynold's book, I'm pretty sure you'll love.

Sabahat Akkiraz | Türkü Hayattır

Listen to the first song on this CD

Get it all here.

Found at Uludag Video, 1922 Ave W, Brooklyn. Alas, they ceased selling imported CDs a couple of years ago, saying it cost more to import audio than they were able to make back. They're now (assuming they're still there) simply renting and selling pirated DVDs of Turkish movies.

A rather mind-blowing song by Akkiraz via YouTube:

Anthony Wong | badtaste ... but i smell good

Listen to the first track

Get it all here.

God, I love this CD. I bought it, for a dollar, in the bin outside the DVD/CD/VCD store at the corner of Bowery and Canal, one of the few of my favorite foreign-media haunts in NYC that is still in business. I bought it, to be totally honest, because I loved the title. I had no idea who the singer was, although he did look oddly familiar ...

It turns out the singer has long been one of my absolute favorite Hong Kong cinema actors. There is no equivalent for this sort of thing in U.S. culture. It's not like Harvey Keitel cut a CD and it happened not to suck. Or, as might be the case here, it sucked in ways previously unimaginable, and sucked so hard and so relentlessly, that it was actually, finally, totally great. (Did I mention how much I love this CD?) Because most Hong Kong actors, from the late Anita Mui to the insanely popular Andy Lau, have singing careers that are every bit as robust as their acting careers. It's just that most of them don't sound in any way, shape or form like this.

Many, possibly even all, of the songs are covers. Wong covers Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" (a super Xtreme crazy fucked up backwards alphabet poetry magnet gay & lesbian Islam double fupa rainbow high point), Nirvana's "All Apologies" and whatever the hell the song is that I don't know the name of in the sample song above. (Someone please let me know. I've been dying to know ... for years, now.) But these are not mere covers. These are Xtreme emu-on-sheep action covers. "Don't cry for me ... next door neighbor," the chorus exhorts in the sample song above. Where the hell did that come from? Where did any of this come from?

I love, love, love, love, love, love, love every moment of this monument to bad taste and good smell. If you get even 7% of the thrill I do listening to it, I'll have done a swell thing posting it here.