Bollywood: Hip Hits

A simple request: Stick your hands in a couple cans of neon paint and then spread that mess like a madder-than-usual Jackson Pollock. Now you've got an exploding canvas of colors that look the way Bollywood pop sounds. Cuts like "Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe," "Ek Do Teen Char," and "Dus Bahane" seemingly burst from the screen, piling on hollow percussion patterns, wobbly sitar chords, and slithery synth lines. No wonder Bollywood composers are widely known as music directors. Our Next Steps keep the splatter paintings a-coming too.

Scan our Next Steps list and you'll start noticing some breakthrough Bollywood stars, such as Himesh Reshammiya and Shankar Mahadevan. The twist, however, is their "playback singer" status, which basically means they get little to no screen time while a film's star smiles and lip-syncs their songs. Strangely enough, this often makes playback singers more popular than actual actors, like the legendary Lata Mangeshkar, a p.s. who flexed her throat over thousands of Bollywood hits during a six-decade career. Want more wondrous wailing where that came from? Click on that Deep Cuts tab.

One more request before you shut that computer down: Mute the nearest television set and crank up the following Deep Cuts. Now imagine your favorite sitcom stars transported to the faraway lands these tracks suggest, including exotic, woofer-wrecking nightclubs ("Ishq Hai Jhootha," "Akhiyan Na Maar"); surf-scrapped, sandy shores ("Saanwariya Saanwariya," "Koi Tumsa Nahin"); and moonlit balconies ("Ajnabi Shehar Hai," "Tinka Tinka"). Stage sets of family rooms and office spaces suddenly aren't so interesting, are they?

Unlike the standard Hollywood model — where soundtracks don't necessarily make or break a film so much as enhance it — Bollywood features have always thrived on their glitter-glazed fusion of filmi music (Hindi for "of films") and dance routines so daring they deserve a standing ovation in the middle of your local multiplex. The former is actually so important to the Bollywood industry that directors typically rindielease their soundtracks well before the moving pictures they so graciously score. This way, audiences will anticipate a film's color wheel of songs with fervor typically reserved for the biggest of big-budget projects here in the States.