Musings From New York

Isn't It Time For A Revolution?

A musical revolution, that is ...

Allow me to explain ...

The 50's and 60's gave rise to blues, blues-rock, rock 'n' roll, and psychedelic ... which inspired (somewhat) the hard rock movement (via Cream & Led Zep), and Heavy Metal (via Black Sabbath). They, in turn, inspired arena rock and the whole "classic rock" period in the 70's.

On another front, the motown & R&B fads made more use of synthesized music in the 70's to ultimately create disco. The backlash to disco and arena rock was of course, the punk movement, which led to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. That in turn, led to thrash & speed metal, as well as glam, and hair metal in the 80's.

The world ultimately threw up against the excesses of glam & hair metal in the 90's by coming up with grunge, and alternative (for a brief period, there was Guns 'N' Roses, but they were but an aberrant blip on this timeline). Rappers found mainstream success with gangsta rap. By weird coincidence, the "diva" movement can be traced to the early-to-mid 90's. Pop culture, feeling a bit left out, came up with bubblegum-slut-pop, in the form of Britney & Christina. That whole morass of styles created and R&B explosion in the 00's, while grunge & alternative inspired a new legion of college, indie, and post-punk rock. Oh, and nu-metal too, I guess.

So basically what I'm trying to say is that in the last 7 or 8 years, there hasn't been (to my mind), a paradigm shift in musical innovation, as seen in previous decades. To quote a frog & a dog, "I hope that something better comes along" ... cos I'm bored!

And no, I have no interest in jazz. I equate it to somewhat better than elevator muzak.

A Musical Recommendation

Check out Rodrigo y Gabrielle. iTMS has a couple of albums for sale, featuring some excellent covers of Stairway to Heaven & Orion. I hope to see them on tour this year, and recommend any lover of good rock/ world music to do the same.

I should give credit where it's due ... Kartik showed me this artist's MySpace page back in March. I was totally blown away by the cover of Orion.

Update: More video goodness.

You know ...

I really am a total sop when it comes to underdog stories, but this story caught my attention especially given my nascent interest in opera. He was a guest on NBC's Today Show this morning, and I was lucky enough to catch the segment in between channel surfing for some news to watch.

The YouTube entry appears to be British, shot after the first round of the competition. He went on to win the competition.

Can you believe Paul Potts already has a Wikipedia entry?! And controversy?!

My first opera song

Now you all know by now that my earliest exposure ... indeed, my most frequent exposure, to classical and operatic works was through cartoons, especially Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes.

Well, this morning, I purchased my first opera track - La Donna e Mobile (literally, Can I have your phone number?) from Verdi's Rigoletto. And I must've listened to it at least 15 times today - seems to be one of those instances where I can't get a song unstuck!

I'd heard it while watching Analyze this last night at 2am, and somehow it made a more lasting impression than all the other times I'd heard it!

On the subject of music, and the classics ... June 1st was the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club. Yes, 40 years since pop, rock, and psychedelia were fused into what turned out to be the Western world's introduction to the sitar (yes I know, Harrison featured the sitar as early as Rubber Soul, but not to the extent that Sgt. Peppers did) ... outside of cheesy Indian restaurants that felt it necessary to put up a lone picture of the Taj Mahal.

Why certain other blogs chose not to write a critical piece on the album and it's impact, I'll never know ... instead, I had to trawl through sickeningly sycophantic (ooh, alliteration!) tributes in some newspapers I read.

Ah, Nostaliga

Writing about Iron Maiden sent my train of thought down a new set of tracks, towards a very happy memory from ... hmm, must've been my second year in Pilani.

Prashanth (Metal) and I had just had a rock-out Iron Maiden session, and we decided to "write" an Iron Maiden song. This from two guys who had no musical experience or education ... but what the heck, right? That's what real fandom is about! For whatever reason - perhaps mostly since Maiden wrote a lot about historical figures and events - we chose to base our song on the Luftwaffe bombing of London, and titled the song, Blitzkreig.

We tore out a clean sheet of paper from a notebook, and placed a pen next to it ... and for the next ten minutes looked at it and each other ... blankly (pun intended). Then, seized by a fit of inspiration, we grabbed the pen, leaned forward, and carefully wrote ... "Bruce Dickinson screams".

We then high-fived each other, and knocked off to the All Night Cafeteria for chai and samosas.

Ah, the good old days.

Songs That Rocked (My World) Pt. II.V

When I returned home after my first semester, I decided to buy whatever Maiden tapes I could find at my local HMV store (the one at the top of Brigade Road ... I wonder whether it's still around). I was the proud owner of copies of Fear of the Dark and Piece of Mind. I will admit, part of my pride stemmed from my teen rebellion mentality in having pictures of Eddie :-) Moreover, my tape deck automatically flipped sides, and so I essentially had continuous/ unlimited music.

It was sometime in my second semester that I was reading The Lord of The Rings to Piece of Mind ... and by some deliciously freakish coincidence the end of side A - Die With Your Boots On - played as I read "Ride of the Rohirrim". As I got caught up in the book, the tape deck flipped, and music and word infused into a heady mixture ... of The Trooper scoring "The Battle of Pelennor Fields".

Thirteen years on (ye Gods, has it been that long?), whenever I listen to The Trooper, I always remember that fleeting, perfect moment. And believe me, I've tried several times to recapture that experience, but history remains in the past.

Songs That Rocked (My World) Pt. II

The year was 1994. The place was Pilani, India. Cue to a musically disattisfied young man. A somewhat handsome young man whom everybody mistook for Akshay Khanna, but whose last name was Anand.

(That's me.)

Yes, although my love affair with Guns 'N' Roses was ongoing, I was on the lookout for fresher sonic pastures. The prowess of GNR seemed somewhat faded in The Spaghetti Incident? - lets face it, it was essentially a covers album. Try as one might to portray a different story, a cover album is a sure sign of flagging creativity unless one has had at least 6 or 7 albums under one's belt. Moreover, Axl's vocals were beginning to grate on my nerves, and the music didn't have the same punch as it did when I first discovered it.

I was then lent a mix tape that would forever alter the course of evolution ... of my musical tastes. A TDK 90 minute tape with a (just about legible) handwritten scrawl covering it. I went back to my room, slotted the tape in, hit play ... and was treated to Nicko's intro drum roll to ... Where Eagles Dare.

Where Eagles Dare was - and still is - one of the top Maiden songs in my book. The subject matter - an adaptation of the Alistair McClean book (or the movie, I suppose) - was perfectly captured in the music. The drums rolled in mimicry of airplane engines and machine gun fire; the guitars swooped and howled like the bitter winds on the Bavarian Alps; the galloping bass giving the story its intense urgency of purpose. And the story itself sung by the most awsome set of pipes on a Metal vocalist, bar none.

The song was my introduction to the world of melodic heavy metal. I associated most heavy metal - and still do - with the throaty screaming shred fests of most bands ... Pantera, Sepultura, Judas Priest (post-Painkiller), and so on. Iron Maiden was the first band that actually made the music sound good.

Songs That Rocked (My World) Pt. I

The idea for this post came from a recent "random" listen-to of my music collection. This "random" playlist threw up several songs in sequential order that for some reason had me skulking down Memory Lane and the realization that my dominant preference for music (hard rock, preferably from the 80's) is grounded in these songs. Hell, some of my memorable teenage behaviors were founded on these two songs.

First, a word on that most awesomest of hard rock bands, Guns 'N' (F-ing) Roses. Growing up in India in the early 90's, I didn't have ready access to hard rock ... especially since my only other cousin that had any sort of interest in Western music was 10 years older than me, and preferred 80's pop-rock, such as the lighter tracks by Europe ... and his sister was a big Wham fan. So my source for all things hard & heavy was MTV.

Now I don't know what MTV was like in the US in the 90's. The fact that it had Headbanger's Ball says a lot, in my book. In India, MTV was cool. I mean, seriously cool. They opened the fledgling Indian market to a whole aspect of TV ... music videos! Hot VJs! Cool, funny, anarchic bits in between ads! And so my first exposure to GNR was through their chartbusters - "Sweet Child of Mine", "November Rain" and " Don't Cry".

Based on that limited viewing, I thought GNR was this ultra-cool, ballad singing, axe-wielding group ... until I got hold of a copy of "Appetite for Destruction". Admittedly, I thought the cover was a bit odd for a crooner band, but I popped it in on Side A, rewound the tape, hit play ... and had every nerve in my body react in gleeful, primal fury to ... "Welcome To The Jungle". I can honestly say that while on the outside I appeared slightly slack-jawed and staring off into empty space (not too different from my regular appearance, I suppose), inside I was rioting in the streets, swinging at phantom enemies in frustrated fury, the screams of voice and guitar mirroring my own rages.

Dear Gods, I just broke out in a cold sweat recalling that moment.

I went on to become a huge Guns 'N' Roses fan. I even loved "The Spaghetti Incident?" ... I had posters on my walls in BITS, and went into severe mourning when they broke up in 1994. I've tried to listen to Slash's Snake Pit, and Velvet Revolver, in the hopes that I could recreate that sense of loyalty, but it's true what they say - the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

Daaaaaaamn!

I really like some the apps on my iMac. The last couple of days, I've been fooling around with GarageBand, the music creation software.

I haven't really spent too much time drilling down every command, function, loop and mix, but I put this mp3 together in 15 minutes, using the program's built-in guitar, bass, and drum "loops".

Groovy cool, eh? :-)

A sad note to today's festivities

RIP James Brown.