FIVE Reasons Why I Love Rock n’ Roll
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| Slipknot 9.0 Live |
Rock on out, the Joplin lady yelled. Graduated with a bang from the blues and jazz, country, gospel and neo-classical—rock n’ roll, for me, is the jack and master of all musical trades. In its ever transforming spaces, there has been also a Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On as the years pass rocking around the clock. Earlier I was fascinated with the sheer power of this form of music, listening to every genre I come across. Rock captured me in the same way Facebook has convinced us that it's cool to share online our social lives. Now I see reasons into rock. And when I say reason, I mean it in pure personal terms: it includes no nuance from Nietzsche, Camus, Hume, Plato and their ilk; and it is strictly abstain from the egg-headed, textbook approach.
1 Pulse
Believe it or not—as contrast to what we were taught in high school biology—I have a normal heartbeat of around 92 per second against any Tomba and Chaoba’s 72. Doctors say I have an unusual tachycardianom, an accelerated heart rate but which is no health issue. For this kind of stimulated heart, Judas Priest, Sepultura, Slayer, Sadus and their company offer the best rhythmic push as well as the daily physical cadence. So in a Daft Punkish way: the harder, the better, the faster, and the stronger any song is, play it for me. And so, like the Led Zep, Sabbath, Deep Purple and Co resuscitating music in the psychedelic 60s from the folksy, hippy-ist crooners, rock has been making me consciously alive.2 Hadda been playing on the jukebox
Rock n’ roll—from the epical concept albums of Pink Floyd to the laws of physics defying solos from Michael Angelo Batio—is poetry constructed on the lines of fiery human creativity. From the music arise the inspirational lyrics too. That’s why the cohort comprising RATM, the Clash, Kreator, U2 and the slow-paced group of Lenon, Dylan, Cohen, Baez, Guthrie, Seeger plus several others mean so much more than their mp3s on www.downloadthesongs.com. That’s also why Tapta and Sanaton are so popular back in my hometown. Our generation has found in rock the remedy against the contemporary social diseases that afflict us. A kind of abundant original literary works have I also found concealed delicately inside my Winamp-player.3 Bring it on home to me
Just for the heck of it, I love rock n’ roll! I feel at home, perhaps the English nursery rhymes had sown the seed. And the 80s glam metals in the initial years, which my cousins used to play so loud to everyone’s annoyance, had also signaled me to walk this way. Since then I have been humming I Got You, I Feel Good. Yes, there was once a samosa-time when we indulged in Doordarshan too, when we know every Jeetendra and Mithun’s movies, but not anymore. Their songs are lost in the trees they had danced around. Remember those superheroes wearing ridiculously glitzy attires and tickling their heroines’ navels? (Note: Please leave the pinky boy-bands in their girlfriends’ closets.) Grunge, baby, grunge.4 When love and hate collide
I have an aversion to the Roop-Raag-Bollywood-Hindustani-and-the-dholok-kind-of-music. I have a feeling that these forms are giving impetus to the sociopolitical identity crisis in my native place. And rock… MTV and the influence of the NWBHM, MUNK, the United States of Europe and America…? No, it is different. Rock can be highly individualised. More importantly, it gives us a global image, and not some pictures of impotent copycat monkeys. It has distinctive regional qualities according to the corner of the globe it fits in.5 Expression of vehemence
Just check the difference between the thrash music for the anime and cartoon videos in Japan with those numbers loaded with political overtones from the metalheads belonging to Scandinavian countries. That is called the Expression of Vehemence. (This phrase was invented while I was on the fourteenth sentence of this piece. It implies the articulation of all our emotion passionately. I have a belief that EV exists because those Vehemence you find in, say Kreator’s Violent Revolution or Sadus’ Certain Death, can never be captured in any other genre.) Call a spade a spade and blood as blood through the mere medium of music. That is rock n’ roll!
Footnote
If old Sinatra considered rock as the ugliest form of articulation, he is to be blamed himself for growing up on the wrong side of the clock. In the world of music, rock is a comparatively recent phenomenon that started around the 50s. It reached my hometown two decades later. That was when the movements for self-determination were gaining ground in the native place; out there, that was when psychotropic substances started pouring in from Myanmar and beyond. And I wish it’s true but Reason#1 is just owing to hallucination created by some doses of rock n’ roll that I took last night!Read:
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| By Ester (Wacken Open Air) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
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| Bob Geldof on stage at "Edinburgh 50,000: The Final Push" - the last live 8 gig. Live 8 Concert, Edinburgh. Image from Wikipedia by Ricjl (retrieved on Jan 29) |
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