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Do you know that over 90% of bands
that were formed in the 2000s had members who had a room of their own when they
grew up in the nineties? That over 80% of them owned a PC and a walkman? And that
over 70% of them had access to dial-up internet before the year 2000?
Apologies, the
numbers are made up. But the statistics are not. Just replace the percentage
figures with “most" and this will give us two insights- one, on how percentages
can be quoted to make an article sound well-researched and two, how the “Great
Indian Band Phenomenon” came to be.
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| The world's first portable mp3 player, The Audio Highway Listen Up. (Photo courtesy TIME magazine) |
What did you grow up listening to? If
you were a part of the average papa-mummy family unit of the nineties, it is
unlikely that you listened to music on the then state-of-the-art Audio Highway Listen Up (Not if you pocketed a 75000$ allowance, that is) My own narrow avenue to the world of music was a rickety-rackety
BPL two-in-one tape player. Being from a respectable middle class family, this piece of
sonic equipment was strictly vegetarian. It would play ghazals and ballads of the Sanu-Udit-Alka
musical triumvirate of the 90s with glee, while stubbornly refusing to play
Backstreet Boys or anything beyond. Any English songs’ cassette that went in was faithfully disembowelled and came
out with tangled ribbons of magnetic tape that had to be surgically unravelled and
then rolled back (a Nataraj pencil or Reynolds pen cap usually did the trick)
The prized possession back in the days was the walkman.
Personally, I think it was a wonderful gizmo and I rate it above both the tablet and the touch phone as a trend setting gadget, (and so does
TIME. See TIME's list of the most influential gadgets: Sony Walkman) for it spared mummies and daddies from listening to outrageous mentions
of love (of the other kind) and body-parts in lyrics of hip-hop and pop songs which could now thump directly in our ears. Still, our access to 'western' music was
limited to a few pop albums, mostly boy-band fare. Nirvana, Def Leppard,
Metallica and their pot-smoking, members of the '27 club' predecessors were still out of reach. Enter the
internet. Enter rock.
It was Elvis,the king, Presley who lit the rock’n’roll
torch in USA, it was Linkin Park who did the same in India. To some of us angst
laden teenagers, their songs carried true meaning. They were songs on how they
were betrayed in love and “in the end” lost the love of their lives. I didn’t
have one to start with, but I could nevertheless, relate to the music. At about
the same time, some kids listening to them were thinking, “Sounds like a jumble of bartan banging drums, screaming vocals and heavy
guitar riffs. Hey!! I can do this. Dad, buy me a guitar. Now!!”
“Pop music often tells you
everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can
change it.” (Bono, U2)
Once you understand the origins of popular rock music in India, you can
now understand why Indian rock sounds like a pastiche of sounds from
rock’n’roll music of bygone decades. Indian rock and Indian rockers did not
originate from any desire to give expression to resentment against the system (numero uno example, Credence Clearwater Revival) or to express any angst resulting from the growing pains and confused emotions
of youth (as in Placebo). They were merely a me-too phenomena that is so trademark of the
Indian populace. I believe the Pakistani rock scene did a brilliant
job in avoiding an as-it-is import by basing their rock primarily in Urdu. Junoon, Jal and Strings use lyrics that are based in
contemporary Pakistani society. In India, bands like Euphoria, Kailasa and
Indian Ocean write songs grounded in Indian roots. But they are few and far
between.
Rock need not always deal with issues and its lyrics need not always delve deep
into the recesses of human emotion. Its attraction lies in its rawness. How its lyrics is not manufactured by paid lyricists keeping “public-demand” in
mind. How the vocals don’t sound hokey and detached like those of filmy
playback singing. For me, however, a rock song truly comes alive when it
touches a chord within. Try as hard as I might, I cannot relate to songs
spewing venom on how useless our lives are (courtesy desi Gothic Rock. Bhayanak
Maut is a popular band of this genre) or how I sorely miss my
imaginary girlfriend. These are trivialities better left to Marilyn Manson,
Himesh Reshamiya and Baba Sehgal.