Category: Soundies

AKA “music videos”.

Cab Calloway’s 100th Birthday

[photo of Cab Calloway] Merry Christmas, everybody. I’m in Detroit eating lamb, but I needed to take some time out to commemorate a very important date. Were Cab Calloway still alive, he would be 100 today. So here are some Christmas presents for you all: a series of Cab videos, spanning 1932–1990.

harlem-jazz

And now, a special bonus for making it this far: the 1944 edition of Calloway’s The Hepster’s Dictionary, in HTML format.

Disco Killed the Radio Star

Recently there was a post on BoingBoing about a Bollywood video cover of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and it reminded me of one of my favorite Bollywood finds — a videotape that I got from an Indian grocery I lived near. The catchy “Disco Disco” label first caught my eye, but the contents turned out to be better than I could have imagined: a compilation of solidly 80’s era Bollywood music videos. No plot developments, no Hindi dialogue I can’t understand; nothing but wall-to-wall music videos with guys dressed like forgotten Jacksons brothers singing in front of giant light-up Rubik’s cubes. Yesssss!

Buried in this kitschy mess was the video below. It’s a cut from the movie Disco Dancer (the title clip of which starts out the tape) but they don’t give the title for this song, so I’m calling it “Disco Killed The Radio Star” since it’s basically a take on The Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star”. This is — well, not a cover, exactly — but the distinctive piano and “Oh-wah-oh” backup singing makes it the cheap, copyright-free “Hey, that reminds me of”—version of the song. And considering the root ersatzness of the Bollywood aesthetic, that make it even better.