Journal: News & Comment

Get down in India

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

While I was unloading the car just now from our band gig tonight, I tuned iTunes to the Fistful of Soundtracks Internet radio station on Live365. There, I heard the most wondrous song—for the second time this week.

It's Mohammed Rafi's "Jaan Pehechaan Ho," originally from the 1965 Bollywood movie Gumnaam, but which apparently scored the opening sequence of the more recent film Ghost World. Normally I would never link to a website named after someone's cat (let alone a dead one), but this one has a perfect description of the song, which:

...sounds like a surf instrumental crossed with a James Bond theme song and the horns from a James Brown song with amazing Hindi vocals on top.

It has the sort of cross-cultural mishmash sound as Ricky Martin's "La Vida Loca"—but considerably better. Salon called "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" 2001's "Best Foreign-Language Frug Freakout to Appear on a Movie Soundtrack."

Rafi died decades ago, but of course there is a website dedicated to him and the 26,000 other songs he also recorded during his career.

 |