Wannabe Rock?

DEEPANJANA PAL asks when Indian rock’s much-hyped young people will give us a song that will turn our ears away from the West

HERE’S A lyric everyone recognises. “We don’t need no education.” And what about “Enter night, Exit light, Take my hand, we’ll rock to Never-never land!”? Admit it, you can almost hear the guitar pounding inside your skull. Now let’s try something newer. “My love for you may be a regretful state of mind but lightning never strikes in the same place twice.” Sound familiar? How about “I need a voice now, Come be my voice now, Find me a voice now”? These are excerpts from songs by Indian rock acts Superfuzz and Pentagram. You have a better chance of hearing Icelandic rockers Sigur Rós’ new album than of coming across Superfuzz or even Pentagram, whose most recent album, It’s OK It’s All Good, should be available in stores.

Rock’s mettle Indian rock bands perform at venues across the country

Back in the days of the cloistered socialist economy, everyone from Elvis Presley to Metallica managed their way to Indian ears. It took some time to reach us, though, and growing up in the 1980s was briefly disturbing because, for a while, my mum and I had the same musical gods. Over the 1960s and 1970s, rock charmed youth with its idealism and India was no exception. Whether it was a love song by the Beatles or a protest penned by Bob Dylan, the music articulated the tangled thoughts of India’s English-speaking youth. Our angst found their angst and it was indeed a small world after all, though perhaps not as Disney World imagined it.

Luckily, with newer musical champions like Queen, Pearl Jam and Pulp, whom the parents found just weird and loud, I reclaimed my youth. And it’s stayed with me since, because the 21st century has thrown up hits, not anthems. Abroad, rock has rediscovered 1980s electronica, which is just too happy to give out a protest vibe. At home, despite the buzz about Indian rock turning into a sonic boom, there hasn’t been a song to compete with Everybody Must Get Stoned.

Rock musicians, adored by the anti-establishment in the West, were heroes of the Indian elite. The fans would grow up to get MBAs, become bricks in the wall; but mention Woodstock or Led Zeppelin, and the reaction would be Pavlovian. Perhaps it was a colonial hangover, but rock was respectable here. It was in English, played largely by white people and, despite this, it was boldly liberal.

Since the 1970s, people have not only been listening to rock but also playing the music, often to far more enthusiastic-looking crowds than today’s. Kolkata-based Skinny Alley have been around since 1977, and their memories make those years sound utopic.

“There was no question of any selfrespecting college student listening to Bollywood,” says Skinny Alley vocalist Jayashree Singh. “Most kids across the country only listened to rock. We were much more passionate about it.” She remembers playing to more than 5,000 students, a feat Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters barely managed in Mumbai in 2007.

For the current crop of Indian rock bands, and that includes Skinny Alley who still tour, getting an audience of 1,000 is an achievement, as they compete with downloaded international music and Bollywood soundtracks. Clubs playing filmi-electronica turn into fire hazards because of gyrating hordes, but rock bands struggle to make a mid-sized bar look busy. Things have improved since the late 1980s, when bands had to do Gypsy King covers to survive, but the numbers Indian bands attract are paltry, rarely going above hundreds.

This is ironic because, unlike the bands of yore, today’s rock culture has attracted media attention. Rock, Indian ishtyle, is hot, and played by articulate young lads largely from the urban elite, as capable of giving good quotes as their predecessors whom no one cared about. Perhaps because people singing in English wasn’t what a young postcolonial nation celebrated. Today, English is an Indian language and our rockers are symbols of liberalised India — brown people proving they are modern by performing contemporary Western culture. So, whether or not you’ve heard the music of Thermal and a Quarter, Junkyard Groove and their peers, chances are you’ve heard of them because some magazine or media channel was overwhelmed with delight about Indian rock bands writing original music. The climax has been Rock On!!, according to NDTV a “shot in the arm” for the Indian rock scene.

How the film has managed this with its mediocre soundtrack and painfully inauthentic depiction of being a rock band was not explained. Considering how they hustle for concerts, bands who watched the film must be wondering if a headband and a couple of hours in the gym would get them gigs as easily as Magik. Perhaps the trick is to write singles like Socha Hai, which takes questions from Class VIII science exams and presents them with a little more flair than CBSE. Imagine how New Delhi’s Superfuzz felt — they won at Channel V’s Launchpad last year and are still waiting for their chance to perform at Hard Rock Café, New York. However, for all its flaws, at least the guys in Magik looked like they could be rock stars (who knew all you needed was a wig and Colombian drug peddler’s moustache to turn Arjun Rampal into Frank Zappa?).

If it intended to present Indian rock, it seems odd that Rock On!! didn’t use music by bands from the scene. It isn’t just them who appear sceptical. The haloed Rolling Stone declared itself open to covering Bollywood music when it launched earlier this year in India, giving only 30 per cent coverage to Indian content. For those who have been following the nascent Indian rock scene, these attitudes are lazy. Without support from radio or television, Indian rock has survived. There may not be a Pink Floyd, but we have Indian Ocean, Pentagram and others who have crusaded against filmi kitsch. A few venues across the country, and competitions like I-Rock and Launchpad, have helped upcoming acts like Pune-based Silver and Chennai’s Rainbow Bridge. Avial from Kerala drew a packed house in Mumbai earlier this year, and kept them entertained despite not having a single song in English or Hindi. Mumbai’s Shaa’ir and Func have enjoyed airplay on VH1, the only music channel in India to play non-filmi music. However nostalgic Skinny Alley may get about the past, it’s only now that rock acts are able to come out with professionally-produced albums, thanks to labels like Counter Culture and Phat Phish, which are promoted and distributed rather than circulated among friends.

All this sounds great on paper but the question is whether the music is good enough for a listener to put aside Pearl Jam. The answer is no. While many bands do have a few good songs, only a miniscule number have an album’s worth of quality music. Too often, Indian rock has a wannabe sound. Rainbow Bridge’s lead singer, for example, affects an unnatural American twang. Despite the many bands spawned, there is little variety in terms of sound. Bryan Adams taught us decades ago that distortion and pedals maketh not a rock star, but Indian rock uses the screeching guitar indiscriminately. Consequently, until the vocals kick in it’s difficult to tell one band from another. Sometimes, even then, they sound like tribute bands rather than originals.

LISTENING TO Indian rock is witnessing love’s labour lost. It’s hard being a rock act in India. Musical equipment is difficult to get and expensive. Gigs are numbered. Talented producers are few and far between. But, it is when one deciphers what is being sung that Indian rock goes from labour to pain. As a rock musician, you inherit a tradition of lyrics. The best-loved rock songs critique society and fling stones at middle-class values. They are crafted like poetry — tightly structured and using meticulously- chosen words. Indian lyrics lack adrenalin and sound unwieldy, bereft of rhythm. Anthems drip with saccharine earnestness. It’s particularly noticeable in English lyrics, but even bands like Indian Ocean and Fossils, who sing in Hindi and Bengali respectively, struggle to find tunes to match their lyrics’ natural rhythms. Whatever the language, Indian rock sounds effete and eager to conform to the idea of rock.

Rock has always had a bad-boy appeal. Can India, with its increasing obsession with respectability and propriety, actually throw up a good old-fashioned rebel? Do our bands actually care about what the music can do, and can they come up with something potently original? Equally importantly, if a band sings a song that gives a voice to this generation, will we turn our heads from the West and give them a listen? It hasn’t happened yet but, in the tradition of Martin Luther King and generations of starry-eyed musicians, Indian rock bands have a dream. Let’s hope it’s not just of bright lights, platinum records and crowdsurfing.

Deepanjana Pal is a writer with Time Out Mumbai. (Inputs from Morgan Harrington)