Friday, April 25, 2008

OST - Love Love Love (1989)



Amit, the son of a taxi driver, and Reema, a rich business man's daughter, fall in love. However Reema's father wants to marry her to Vicky, who's father is the biggest gangster in Mumbai. How will their love triumph?

This is the short summary for IMDB's entry on this 1989 Bollywood flick Love Love Love featuring tunes by Calcutta-born Music Director (that means composer to all you goras et. al out there who don't know what that means) Bappi Lahiri. (edit... you all should know that I 100% gora)



I actually discovered this wacky soundtrack thanks to a paper I marked for a course on Bollywood that I T.A. for at York University. The paper, about gujarati influence on Bollywood alluded to the stiff-yet-funky epic "Disco Dandia" from this soundtrack (pictured above) whose picturization and music appropriate elements of gujarati dance.

Being a sucker for the weird end of Bollywood, I fell in love with the peculiar soundworld of the song... Once you take out the instrumental interludes, all that remains is the almost Kraftwerkian drum-machine beat(complete with gated reverb!), adorned with deliciously goofy fills from black-hexagon-pad syntoms and 8-bit timbale samples. And then, on top of that there is just a bunch of monophonic melodies provided by booming voices (solo and in chorus). Only the merest of harmonies supports the voices provided by ambiguous are-they-real-or-are-they-fake strings, so overall the song is quite sparse and futuristic sounding. MIA even pays hommage to the track on "Boys" from Kala which also contains "Jimmy", practically a cover of another one of Bappi's Bollywood disco anthems "Jimmy Adja" from the 1982 movie Disco Dancer

The rest of the Love Love Love album is pretty insane too brimming with grimily psychedelic vocal productions layered atop clean, crisp and tight Eurodisco-informed drum machine, synth and string tracks. The more lush song "Hum To Hain Dil Ke Diwane" bubbles with Giorgio Moroder-style synths, and takes castanet clicks seemingly lifted from the Dinosaur (Aka Arthur Russell) classic "Kiss Me Again". The vocals are evocative of both the aloofness of Yoko Ono's "Walking On Thin Ice" and Asha Puthli's smooth, yet slightly nasal cooing.

According to the Wikipedia entry on the film the music was actually informed by Pet Shop Boys, Modern Talking and C.C. Catch and the sound of Italo Disco (which explains my observations!)

In short, with all but the 4th and 6th track, you'd never really think that this music was made in 1989... But alas it was! Funny how for some of the music I imagine dutch women in spandex circa 1981 as much as much as Bollywood musical scene.

Here are the tracks, courtesy of ChannelMasti
01 - Jeena Hai Pyar Mein Jeena
02 - We Are in Love
03 - Hum To Hain Dil Ke Diwane
04 - Ruko Ruko To (note the strangely IDM-esque programming of the castanets!)
05 - Disco Dandia
06 - Na Chithiyan Na Koi Sandesa

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