The Behenc******s.
Inspired by
thisClearly having such names is not good for marketing purposes. But perhaps in a perverse way, it is.
At any rate, I can use an expletive from a language other than English as the name of my band, and while staying true to my punk ethos can still be marketable. cool. The behenchutiyas it is.
Wanted to do a piece on rock music in India for some time. Might as well start off with
this.Much like everywhere else, rock music first find its place amongst alienated and disgruntled (yes, the favt. word of this blog) youth . In this case, the people from the Northeast.
When I was a strapping young lad during my undergrad days in Delhi, the biggest set of rock music fans were people from the northeastern states. If anything, if you were from the northeast, you had to be in with Pink Floyd, Metallica and black/death metal bands - that was considered the norm and anything else (like listening to Bollywood tunes) was an anomaly, an aberration.
And yes all of them strummed a guitar, even the birds. At that time I figured they were into rock music because the northeast was so far from Bollywood, and didn't have any representation in Bollywood, that they were in any case different and needed to find something to latch onto to create a common identity, and that 'something' was rock music and the entire rock culture.
But from the article that doesn't seem to be the case. They only want to be cool, thats all.
Went to a concert by
The Cure recently. It was bloody awesome, they played my favorite songs - Pictures of you, In between days, Just like heaven, Boys don't cry and Disintegration.
They played for 3 hours and Robert Smith's voice was terrific, as was the crowd.
But the proverbial fly in the ointment, the caterpillar in the salad as they say, was the fact that they did not play their biggest hit - 'Friday I'm in Love', which upset many a fan, obviously. While I love the song as much as anyone else, my reaction is - who cares? they played great songs anyway. Besides its a good opportunity to showcase all the other lesser known gems they have.
Someone I'm close to says - no way. This is a way of displaying the general pretentiousness and assholery, by deliberately not playing their biggest hit, when they know most of the audience paid good money to listen to that one song. Its even more inexcusable if the band played for over 3 hours.
I know Radiohead has a bad rep for this, for deliberately avoiding playing 'creep'. Even Nirvana apparently did not play "smells like.." all that often.
I guess it all boils down to the following - should one consider musicians as entertainers , in which case they should cater to their audience, or should one accord special status to them like one would to artists, and give them license to do whatever.
Zakir Hussain + this
article (who would have thought Denton of all places will evolve into Cools-ville USA?
Tracer Bullit is from Denton! Enuff said.. ) gives me some food for thought.
Why aren't classical musicians sufficiently indie? Should they be? What does it mean anyway?
As far as Indian classical musicians are concerned, most famous musicians today come from rich and storied musical families where playing music was and continues to be the main source of income. The child starts learning music at a young age and is expected to be a musician when he/she grows up. The same can be said about western classical musicians.
And what does it mean to be indie in the first place? Lot of people
mistake it for being some sort of art-for-art's-sake deal. Nothing can be
further from the truth. It means not attaching oneself with a corporate biggie, but rather maintaining
one's integrity and artistic control and still making money.
But there is a definite aspect of putting more onus on self-expression rather than on raking in moolah.
In this context, I'm not sure if one can have any classical indie artists.
Something else to brood about..
Went to a concert by the indescribable
Zakir Hussain yesterday. First the show was fantastic,
he brought along with him a coterie of accompanying artistes (from Niladri Kumar, to his brothers, to an awesome percussion troupe from Meghalaya). His centre piece with the accompanying sarangi and his brother on the other table was , well sublime.
So it was great.
But what I want to blog about today is the scourge called
Bobos . While the description itself is fairly apt ( one of my best buddies, nikos calls them cultural eunuchs), I can tell you that nothing beats actually seeing a bobo specimen in person.
And for a concert of this magnitude, there were bobos everywhere, crawling out of the woodwork like there is no tomorrow.
I would like to start characterizing these bobos in greater detail. To start with, what about desi bobos? Dobos? What will they look like?
Oh no. rediscovered the pixies. which means the next two weeks will consist only of doolittle and surfer rosa.
People who say Aerosmith is the best band to come out of Boston - folks, Aerosmith are good
but aint great. unlike the pixies. who rock.
