In its May 1 issue, Tehelka has published my counter-point on the Indian rock scene – you can read it here.
Excerpt:
As an insider I vouch for this: Indian bands are making prolific music (of variable quality) but they aren’t making money. But even the best music, by indie bands across the world, is produced under considerable financial strain and doesn’t fetch returns from online sales. So it’s important for bands to tour to break even.
There’s the rub. Brand managers and flaky promoters are tucking in while bands go penniless. Great Indian Rock and IRock, India’s oldest rock festivals, launch amateur bands every year. Enterprises like Mumbai’s Only Much Louder, the artist management concern behind Counter Culture Records, have been living off bands for eight years — nothing indie about their revenue model. They sign desperate bands to draw crowds for restaurateurs and event organisers. The hosts profit on food and beverage sales. In 15 years the paltry concert fee has hardly improved. Serious artists prefer to remain independent and unsigned. Sadly, bands, by undercutting each other, have only fattened the sharks.
My friends at Thermal And A Quarter and I read Inder Sidhu’s outcry against “the media’s hysterical coverage of Indian rock bands” (and before that, in 2008, Deepanjana Pal’s diatribe against Indian rock) in Tehelka with familiar feelings of resigned amusement and piquant regret. While Sidhu makes some pleasant noises and points available fingers at the usual suspects, he disappoints us by stating the obvious and therefore fails to offer us any fresh insight into what actually ails the rock scene. What ails the media we already know.
First off, Tehelka could have attempted to address the question: What is uniquely “Indian” about the Indian rock scene? You get really excited about Indian writers in English, so why can’t an electric guitar and English lyrics employed to express Indian themes excite you as much? Is the Indian rock “movement” — as some like to call it — merely about the explosion of rock band competitions and sponsored collegiate rock festivals? Is it only about the so-called mushrooming of venues for Indian rock? Is it about the legitimacy accorded to it by weak-willed Bollywood flicks such as Rock On? Is it more than a West-aping deluge of residual post-adolescent hormones? Or is it merely a vehicle for selling phallic fantasies associated with jeans, bikes, movies, or alcohol?
Why can’t the music scene you obsess about be the product of entrepreneurial activity or the struggle of independent artists to secure a platform for expression in a milieu notorious for the absence of infrastructure or patronage? Is it not also about artistic independence — and what is indie in an Indian context anyway? Is it not about the paucity of industry support for independent music (and just what is this “industry”?)? And why are we in such a hurry to pack it all up in one store shelf labelled ‘rock’ – what about Carnatic blues, or Indian jazz-rock, or Indian prog-rock, or Indian death metal, or Devotional jazz-rock, or Malayalam thrash metal, or Hindi country blues, or Kannada funk?
Which part bothers you the most: that the Indian media is writing about Indian rock music at all, or that it is covering rock without balls or brains? After all, we read your magazine because it tells us what we believe is closest to the truth. But never has it once offered lip service to this movement, apart from getting musicians to applaud their favourite bands at the back of the book. When it comes to the coverage of underground music acts in India Tehelka, too, is part of the “lazy press” you love to deride. Your dispirited coverage reinforces the fact that in this country we have no national newspapers or news-magazines — only parochial ones. When it comes to covering the independent music scene, even Tehelka cannot look beyond Delhi or Mumbai before your vision gets all blurry and your perspective degenerates to homogenising what you attempt to analyse. Isn’t it time you became free, fair and fearless in writing about this too?
Sidhu writes that the “vocabulary and context for rock criticism does not exist in India.” When was the last time you met an editor who condescended to carry a major story about any Westernised urban counterculture in India? When was the last time any self-respecting commentator (such as you, we hope) turned away from the clippings morgue and did some legwork to find out what’s really happening in India’s underground music scene?
For instance, how do Indian bands approach songwriting, where do they learn to play their instruments, where do they rehearse? How do they finance gear, studio time and production efforts? What level of initiative does it take for a band to bag concert dates at Hard Rock Cafe or Blue Frog, or plan a five-city tour? Or to cut an album and market it independently?
These realities offer story ideas for any journalist with a serious interest in writing about Indian rock. Perhaps Sidhu might want to consider exploring these areas instead of expending two thousand words on a subject he believes is not worth writing about. That’s laughable. Of course, we are aware these stories can’t be written within a week’s deadline but has any journalist cared to investigate the possibilities, or any editor dared to commission them?
We’d be happier if the media did not write about the “scene”, because clouding these half-cooked reports and analyses with poor reportage, bias and myopia is far worse. As some wise guy once said, “It’s better to shut up and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
Every “music journalist” wants to be the next big commentator on the Indian rock music scene. In 14 years of being associated with the independent rock music scene in India, we’ve seen these megalomaniacs crash and burn and we have outlived them all.
Frank Zappa said, “Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.” Thermal And A Quarter wrote a song about journalists like that – it’s called Paper Puli. And we have an annual award for music journalists who satisfy Zappa’s criteria. It’s called the Paper-Pulitzer. We might consider nominating Mr Sidhu.
(A version of this note was sent as a letter to the editors of Tehelka, and subsequently posted on Thermal And A Quarter’s Facebook page)
If you live in Bangalore, you probably know of One Small Love already.
Last year Thermal And A Quarter, the band I work with, responded to the turmoil, hate and suspicion in the world with the music video One Small Love, a brainchild of the Bangalore creative shop Happy. Its message, “One small breath, one small word, one small love can be everything in a tired world,” made it popular on YouTube, where it continues to be much-favorited. It is also a much-requested crowd favorite at concerts.
This year, One Small Love has gone public, reverberating with the collective voice of many concerned Bangaloreans — among them artists, musicians, theatre persons, actors, filmmakers, management thinkers, etc.
The ‘One Small Love – Bangalore for Mangalore’ concert on February 14, a red-letter day made infamous by Hallmark cards and various killjoy extremist groups, will bring together musicians Konarak Reddy, Ravi Kulur, Alwyn Fernandes, Gerard Machado, Karan Joseph, Gaurav Vaz and Swarathma along with Thermal And A Quarter.
The One Small Love page on Facebook has been receiving plenty of currency, adding over 550 fans from all over the world in its first 48 hours. Among the highlights of the page are videos of Bangaloreans lending voice to the cause.
I happened to be streaming Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of Strange Fruit when the news video of the policeman’s killing, which had been buffering, came alive. Both audio tracks played side by side and I was struck by the eerie similarity of their themes — it had a sort of roughhewn, impromptu resemblance to Simon & Garfunkel’s Silent Night-7 O’clock News.
The age of original heartfelt protest songs in jazz, pop or rock has passed unlamented ever since we started counting Madonna, MJ, Eminem, the Black-Eyed Peas and Amy Winehouse among protest singers. Insidiously, Protest has become a marketing label, a genre if you like — which adds up to a nice new varnished shelf in a large music store somewhere before Punk and after Gospel. Most artists have realized that they have little to protest about but their own inconspicuousness. And their acts of protest are in truth about having a go at the fifteen lucre-encrusted minutes of fame that their voices, if sufficiently loud, would bring them. . . . → Read More: Protest and the Strange Fruit of Mistaken Identity
A little bird tells me that Shashi Tharoor is a little out of chirp with the whole Twitter fiasco after he got a right royal yelling from his boss for singing his heart out.
I have always been intrigued by what makes good art great. And when artists judge artists the subject gets murkier. Choosing between art for art’s sake and art that moves is like calling for a tossup between the heavily melodramatic Bollywood denouement of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black and the cold, quiet finis of Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly. . . . → Read More: Kseniya Simonova – genius or pop star?
Indie band… I’m not a fan of the phrase myself because I think it is a label for styles of music that you can’t/ don’t want to stick a label on. I mulled over that blog title before I posted it but I kept the word in for a reason — to catch the eye of those who debate over what indie is. I don’t think an indie band need make money at all. But it must make original music even if it appeals to an audience of one. And it does not even have to publish or promote this music.
But then again, indie also refers to the endeavour to create music independently and make it available and accessible to an audience whether through performance or distribution. Derivatively, indie also refers to the infrastructure that must exist for indie musicians who want to make a living doing what they love and believe in.
Most important, I feel that indie needn’t be seen as some low-on-frills, preachy fringe movement but a sort of cooperative society for independent musicians that helps them feel confident about the worth and validity of their music. Of course, this feeling of self-worth and achievement should also put money in their pockets because they too need to feed their dogs, send their kids to college, and splurge on a vacation at Bora Bora. . . . → Read More: When Indie gets the blues
The “fascinating article” (by Arjun S Ravi on MTV Iggy) that Cicatrix speaks of in Sepia Mutiny reads like ‘The Best of RSJ (1992-1999), with Notable Exceptions’. It’s all been documented before with elan and sincerity by Amit Saigal. Today, it’s dated. Because it casually ignores a significant slice of Indian rock history — the independent music scene in Bangalore, which was where the really surprising stuff started to emerge from the mothballed closet in the late 1990s. In businesspeak, this era was when Indian rock music sought to “differentiate” itself. Not through marketing strategy (a la Parikrama et al which still have nothing to offer the discerning music fan) but through inventiveness, performance and startling creative energy. Ergo, I am not sure if Ravi’s omission stems from ignorance (which is unforgivable) or from personal bias (which is charlatan). . . . → Read More: Why MTV can never befriend Indian indie rock
“I have been driven to writing by sheer ineptitude. I wanted to write, of course, always. I did a certain amount of stuff but I couldn’t get anything published— it was too bad. I think writers today learn so much more quickly. I mean, I could no more write as well at their age than fly.”
- Lawrence Durrell to the Paris Review, April 23, 1959 . . . → Read More: Quotably
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