018 - Key Notes No. 3: Bollywood Item Numbers
By the grace of Ganesha they got me jumpin' jumpin' (despite not having a clue what they're sayin' sayin')
Key Notes is a recurring series in which I write
about music I like
Dating sucks, am I right?
WRONG!
Personally speaking, dating rules. Maybe because it plays to my strengths: making conversation, eating dinner, paying for dinner. Call me crazy, but I genuinely enjoy meeting strangers and asking them questions. I interviewed hundreds of strangers between the two talk shows I produced and hosted from 2008 to 2019 (three, if you count the prank one I did in my apartment; four, if you count the one I sold to Seriously.TV / Go90 based off the one I did in my apartment), and I had fun with every one of them. Even Dustin Diamond.
What is a first date but a two-way interview, both parties taking turns — ideally, in equal measure — inquiring about the other’s past, present, and plans for the future, with a non-zero chance of making out at the end of the night? Sign me up!
Last week I went on my first date in three months, since ending things with the side-hustling therapist. In those three months I hadn’t so much as held a woman’s hand. Old “On to the Next” Scott would have dove headfirst back into the dating pool after a modest mourning period of, say two or three days. But New Scott had vastly more patience. New Scott was ok with the wait, because he was ok with being by himself, with himself. Much like George Costanza unlocking his full potential following a spell of forced abstinence — solving Rubik’s Cube and acing Jeopardy! (“What is Chicken Kiev?”) — I was feeling my intellective and artistic oats while deepening my understanding of the Self.
But then it got, like, really cold. And I started getting, like, a little horny. So as the weather dipped into the teens, I downloaded a dating app to test the waters of the suburban social scene. I came to this decision carefully and confidently, without expectations, knowing that ultimately I don’t need anyone or anything to make me feel whole and complete within myself, because I already am. At worst, I’d be getting out of the house and trying a new restaurant. At best, I’d encounter a stimulating conversationalist who shares my kink of being turned into a human heating pad.
Not only would I strike gold in my first swing of the dating axe, I would also discover something arguably better than sex…
I met Ananya at a mediterranean bistro aptly called Medi Bistro, romantically tucked into the lobby of a White Plains corporate office complex with no on-street parking options. We had matched mere hours before, and noting on her profile her response: “ARE SPONTANEOUS!!!” to the fill-in-the-blank prompt: “You should only date me if you…”, I messaged to ask if she wanted to grab dinner. It was Saturday night, neither of us had plans, and reasoning that we might only have another 1,000 or so Saturday nights in the primes of our lives, we agreed to a semi-reckless restaurant rendezvous.
Ananya was haute and baubled in a stylish burgundy pantsuit and a sparkling array of bracelets, rings (ear and finger), a single dangling lariat necklace and a Rolex watch timepiece for punctuation. I was immediately made self-conscious by the realization that I was wearing the same vintage sweater as seen in my featured profile pic, but laughing it off together, our banter flowed quickly and easily. Turned out we were both lifelong locals of Westchester County, having grown up five miles apart on opposite sides of the Hutchinson Parkway.
But despite our shared geography, we learned our cultural backgrounds were markedly different. She was born to Indian Hindu immigrants whose own parents had fled the Sindh province (in current-day Pakistan) following the 1947 partition, and in an odd twist, had graduated from Catholic school. I was born to American Jews who were born to American Jews, without a scintilla of neither Hindi nor Catholic education.
AND THIS IS PRECISELY WHY I LOVE TO DATE. How else could one become so intimately acquainted with the biography of a beautiful stranger? I can’t go around stopping random women on the street and asking them “How did your parents meet?” or “How many languages do you speak?” unless, I guess, I were making content. But then I’d have to do all that video editing, and add all the captions, and figure out the right hashtags… forget it. It’s easier to leave the cameras and release forms at home and just… go on a date.
Although I kinda wish the cameras were rolling later that night, back at Ananya’s apartment, when the two of us were bouncing the around the room to the “Beedi” music video playing on her questionably legal TV streaming system which seems to have jailbroken all paid streamer apps and somehow tapped into thousands of international broadcasts beaming in from nearly every country around the world. We switched from the Afghan evening news to a Jamaican cricket match before ultimately settling on a Hindi entertainment channel playing alllllll the hits.
Prior to this moment of ecstatic dancing with Ananya in her living room as her confused dog quietly observed from the couch, my lifetime exposure to Indian music could be summed up as Ravi Shankar in Monterey Pop and that one song Jay-Z did with Punjabi MC. I really liked them both! But what can I say, between the thousands of new (and new-to-me) jam band and indie rock and post-punk and freak folk and electropop and chillwave and neo-soul and funktronica and hip-hop artists that have come over the transom in my decades of musical discovery, I never thought to dig much deeper in the desi direction.
That all changed Saturday night. “Beedi” completely enraptured me, and I needed to hear more of its ilk, a genre Ananya elucidated for me as being a distinctly Bollywood phenomenon known as the item number.
Item numbers are special songs shoehorned into Bollywood films, characterized by bawdy lyrics and provocative dance sequences, that have no connection to the films’ plots and are purely used as marketing devices.
First of all, whaaaaaaat? You’re saying I could be watching a work of Indian cinema, and in the middle of the movie, just as I’m disentangling storylines and piecing together the narrative, it cuts away to a completely nonsequitor, hyper-sexualized song and dance routine? Now, would this bother me and negatively influence my experience of the film as a whole? Or would I not care because the song is just so dang catchy and the women are just so dang scantily clad?
It would be like if in the middle of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet — a movie I have not scene but whose Wikipedia page I just perused — right after The Protagonist travels back in time to Oslo to fight his past self, it jump cuts to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion slinking around a magical realist mansion trading verses about their vigorously lubricated vulvas.
Regardless, I was hooked. Ananya further explained “Beedi” originated in the 2006 Hindi-language adaptation of Othello called Omkara, which was an international critical and commercial success. Its official music video boasts 64 million views. The video for “Munni Badnaam” from the 2010 smash hit action comedy Dabangg has been viewed over 200 million times. Clearly, I was late to this party.
That’s ok, because the party rages on. I couldn’t tell you what these songs are about, or offer theory as to why they affect me on such a deeply soulful level in a way I haven’t felt since hearing Fela Kuti for the first time and falling in love with Afrobeat. But I feel equally instinctively drawn to the joyful rhythms of these Bolly Bangerz. They slap. They bop. They make me want to stop, drop, and open up shop on the dance floor. 10/10, can’t more highly recommend.
If I never see Ananya again for the rest of my life, she has already changed it forever by introducing me to this very fun music.
And that is why dating rules, am I right???