Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Beautiful Songs and Beautiful Women

...in movies I know NOTHING about. Welcome to my perpetual YouTube experience!

In between my lengthier posts (oh yeah, you know they're coming), I've been looking up songs based on the book Hindi Film Song: Music Beyond Boundaries, by Ashok Da. Ranade. Much of which is over my head when he talks about musical technique, but I love his enthusiastic use of exclamation points!

Today's videos are "Phool Gendwa Na Maro" from 1964's Dooj Ka Chand. I have no idea who these people are -- is that lovely girl Saroja Devi? -- but it's Manna Dey singing, and the music is by Roshan. Ranade describes it as "spoofing on a large scale -- caricaturing almost all ways of singing Hindustani 'classical' music!" (p. 266). The picturization is also quite humorous, and it even includes a snake!

The other is from the same chapter, because I started where I was when I sat down at the computer, so it's also a Roshan song: "Nigahein Milane Ko Jee Chahta" from Dil Hi To Hai (1963). At least I know this is Asha singing, and Nutan in the picturization.

Both these movies are only available on VCD. Nahin! Or maybe, thank God, since YouTube is an inexhaustible source of movies I've never heard of otherwise. If I could find all the DVDs, I might be crushed by a collapsing pile of unwatched DVDs.

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