I think I mentioned I just came back from India. While I was there, the Bombay papers were reporting on the fact that Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan just signed Rain Man composer Hans Zimmer to do the score for his next flick, a sci-fi departure from the Bollywood formula called Ra.One. That is potentially pretty crazy but wouldn’t be Ghetto Palms material except for the fact that SRK already signed Akon to sing on the Ra.One soundtrack and just invited him back to Mumbai to do a second song for it. It’s not clear at all that HZ and Kon would even be working on the same pieces of music but just the fact that they are standing in the same sentence—let alone the same studio—unleashed a force=five Afrosynth bollyfunk shower of gold in my brain space.
DJ Massacre, “Comboio”
Damo Do Bling, “Danca do Mexe Remexe”
DJ Joice Gomes/DJ Revolution, “Choro de Corno”
Omar Souleyman, “Naffat Noura” Al Dabka (Sublime Frequencies)
DJ Znobia, “India, India”
A.R. Rahman, “Ringa, Ringa” Slumdog Millionaire OST
Within the same time period/stream of consciousness I checked out this Lisbon kuduro mix which Joao from Buraka Som Sistema put me up on, and copped this dancehall-ish track from Damo Do Bling, a blingy chick from Mozambique. Then, since I was in a Lusophone state of mind, I dug up some recent tarraxinha bangers from Angola. The great thing about the genre of kubass aka tarraxinha is that kuduro producers like Znobia will straight jack a Bollywood track or Arabic pop song, tap out some tin pan dancehall percussion over it, maybe throw in a weird synthesized baby-voice on top and call it “India, India” (see how everything cycles back?) or “Abibi” and bam: kubass.
Today I saw that NPR did a piece where they paid a guy to unearth a bunch of pre-war Lusophone funk from Angola—which is pretty ill—and El Guincho did a mix to promote his new video for the song called “Bombay.” That brings us 360 degrees back to the opening sentence, but the video is not much like the actual city of Bombay. I wouldn’t want you to go there expecting to find Baader-Meinhof chicks making out on the beach and molesting statues. But I like it anyway.
