Check out Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars and Sitars. It’s a DJ Shadow + Dan Nakamura album from ‘98 which redoes Kalyanji-Anandji. And as a bonus, the track names are great titles for your blog

• ‘Fear of a Brown Planet’
• ‘Punjabis, Pimps & Players’
• ‘Fist of Curry’
• ‘The Good, the Bad and the Chutney’
• ‘Ganges a Go-Go’
• ‘Swami Safari’ [Link]

The Salon review treated the catchy originals with condescension:

The Automator’s slick segueing makes for the first reasoned, Western response to the jarring anti-narratives of Hindi pop. The “Mission Impossible theme collapses into a snippet of raga performed by a staid string quartet on “Fear of a Brown Planet”; a bit of dialogue from a Bollywood movie (”Now let’s walk English style!”) introduces “Satchidananda,” driven by an electric bass mimicking the sound of a finger skipped across the head of a tabla drum…

The album doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the Indian originals, but that’s for the best. “Bombay the Hard Way” would be no more a purely Indian artifact if left in its ’70s form… In this spirit, the album tags its “new” Kalyanji and Anandji tracks with [new] names…

… [Bollywood] was making a transition from Busby Berkeley-style musical super-extravaganzas to low-budget James Bond-inspired thrillers… Apparently, Kalyanji and Anandji spent a lot of time locked in a room with nothing but the scores from “Dr. No,” “Shaft” and “S.W.A.T.,” a Casio keyboard and a sitar…

“Bombay the Hard Way” [is] a selection of Bollywood soundtrack music composed by Kalyanji and Anandji set to hip-hop beats… “Bombay the Hard Way’s” dozens of Bombay surf-rock and Parliament-by-way-of-Loony Toons interludes give way to longer, more grandiose cinematic material… [Link]

And here we are, nearly a decade later, winning Grammies by stealing from the ‘jis. Another review made a stronger link to blaxploitation flicks:

Bombay the Hard Way plays like the soundtrack to some imaginary 1970s B-films with names like Shaft’s Bad-Ass Pilgrimage To India or Ganges Ghetto Payback… this saffron-funk project is… a potent cross-pollination of Secret-Agent-Man guitar themes, Blaxploitation grooves, jazzy horn and flute riffs, hip-hop beats and loops, and traditional Indian instrumentation. While this East meets West mixture is incredibly funky, there are few innovations or surprises within… the album tends to value mood and groove over tunes… Like much of the album, these two songs are heavily spiced Indian approximations of the cinematic funk found on Blaxploitation soundtracks…

The album’s only song with lyrics, “Ganges A Go-Go,” features a sound straight out of the Indian quarter of London’s “swinging 60s” scene. Over a driving Go-Go beat and Eastern-flavored horn arrangements, a handful of male and female singers (with cute Indian accents) belt out the lines, “I got no time to think / Cuz’ I need somebody to love / Yeah! / Baby, I love you so / But you can’t love me more / Why don’t you hold me closer / And I’ll give you more / Yeah!” … Throughout the album, there are fun snatches of dialogue lifted straight out of vintage “brownsploitation” films. [Link]

Listen here.

The album spawned a sequel, Electric Vindaloo, with even funnier titles:

• ‘Sexy Mother Fakir’
• ‘Dil Street Blues’
• ‘T.J. Hookah’
• ‘Chakra Khan’
• ‘Basmati Beatdown’
• ‘Bollywood B-Boy Battle’ [Link]

You just know they were giggling their asses off as they brainstormed their titles. Listen here.

Related posts: What’s the samachar, yo?, Everyone recycles (updated)