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Bombay Disco: Disco Hits from Hindi Films 1979-1985. Cultures of Soul Records, COS 008-CD (1 CD).
Bombay Disco 2. Cultures of Soul Records, COS 011-CD (1 CD).
This two-part collection of Indian film songs, or filmi, covering the period 1979 through 1992 is the fruit of one collector's years of combing through record bins, mostly in Indian urban centers, for those most ephemeral of musical artifacts: soundtrack LPs to forgotten and forgettable films. Brother Cleve, the intrepid compiler behind Bombay Disco, is a DJ, producer and mixologist (filmi-inspired cocktail recipes are included in his liner notes), who might also add archaeologist to his resume for his work here. The disco era is by no means an antediluvian epoch, especially in India where the dance-oriented pop idiom persisted long after it fell out of fashion in the West in the early 1980s. Disco was a viable, popular aesthetic in Indian film music (and hence popular music) well into the 1990s and remains a strong influence today, if mostly as retro homage. (The 2012 reboot of Biddu's "Disco Deewani" in Karan Johar's Student of the Year and Vishal-Shekhar's "Bang Bang" from the 2014 hit film of the same name are two obvious examples.) Yet, with the steady profusion of films emanating from Indian film studios year after year, having typically six or seven songs per film, even moderate hits are soon supplanted by new tunes and quickly forgotten. This expendability renders the task of retrospective anthologizing a challenge for all but the most devoted collectors and connoisseurs. As American audiences have had to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of appreciating and consuming Indian cinema, Cleve's emphasis on documentation, "deep cuts" (as his fellow DJs might say), and appealing performances make Bombay Disco a valuable addition to a reissue market that had stagnated, caught in a circuit of regurgitating and repackaging only the most iconic and evergreen favorites.
The Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay)-centered film industry, known as Bollywood, is famous for its prodigious output of entertaining cinema of an all-embracing nature, often blending romance, action, melodrama, sci-fi, horror, comedy, and, most of all, music and dance, into the same three-hour film. The notion that "all Bollywood movies are musicals" is a misconception...