The Singles Jukebox

Make this 30 seconds longer and it’d be a lock for the Asiavision Song Contest, if it only existed.

[Video][Website]
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Jonathan Bogart: Let’s get this straight. The actual singer of this song is Sunidhi Chauhan; the actress who is dancing and lipsyncing to it (very well!) is Priyanka Chopra, and the fellow who stands around smirking in the video is John Abraham. (To add to the confusion, Chopra has sung on tracks; she just doesn’t here.) As a song, it’s great fun, a mariachi-disco confection with snaking ragariffic accents; that it was composed by the Simon Cowell figure of Indian Idol is maybe an interesting piece of trivia but doesn’t have much bearing on its quality. As a video, it’s a great example of the trend in Bollywood lately towards making the numbers self-contained music videos in a quasi-Western manner — get those YouTube views — but as a piece of advertising for the movie Shootout at Wadala, it’s not so hot. The song itself sates me; I don’t need more.
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Iain Mew: The vocals, the synth pulse and the epic cinematic horns exist in different genres, never mind songs, but they manage to work with each other. That the results of packing so much in is so fleeting a song seems implausible, but doesn’t lessen the enjoyment to be had.
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Anthony Easton: I never knew how much spaghetti western horns had in common with eurobosh, and how much that overlapping pleasure centers could focus on the best of Bollywood. 
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “Babil Badmaash” is a hyper-orchestrated piece stuffed to the brims with wink-wink horn sections and popping bass, the vocal performance kept PG-13 to paint sexual desire as naughty rather than explicitly carnal. It could go all night, its discoball-via-Bachchan spirit powering it through to the early hours, but the mix of vocal coyness and compositional craziness can’t sustain itself past two and a half truncated minutes. A theory: the cocaine it took for Anu Malik to compose this surely had to run out at some point, no?
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Alfred Soto: “Miami Vice” shred guitar, mariachi trumpets, congas — electronically greased and topped by a fierce vocal.
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Brad Shoup: Credit where Western credit is due, but also this credit: it’s a showdown song every bit the equal of HAM‘s. What other music industry would give us nu-rock chug with soured brass and idling Moroder spaceships?
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Edward Okulicz: It’s cool to hear snatches of the “I Feel Love” of bassline in a new context, but the disco spaceship ain’t going anywhere. “Babli Badmaash” is carrying too much weight; it’s disorientating how it seems to flit from one idea to another, indeed, enough goes on for two songs, and it’s barely the length of one! No doubt watching a skilfully-choreographed dance sequence set to this would be fantastic but that’s because while it’s got swagger, it’s also got too damn much else going on, so an extramusical distraction from all the musical distractions would be welcome.
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