Remembering the First Few Years of Rock n’ Roll: A Cover Version of ‘School’ by Nirvana

It was a looooong time ago when I was 11, when I bought my first cassette.

I had already got from my cousins with their lazy asses a couple of them—which they had hurled at me after I ran some errands for them.

The memorable second-hand tape, I bought it from a second cousin, who was also a classmate. He sold me the first Nirvana album, Bleach, for 10 bucks. I paid him five bucks first and another two the next day, and then I got the un-negotiated discount for three bucks in the end.

He died of suffocation while he was high on pills, some five years later, leaving me a hundred of years to explore the world of rock n’ roll. It was a different era. MTV was only music—and guitar riffs, you only learnt by rewinding and forwarding till the cassette became a junk. Even revolutionaries were like, you know, revolutionaries and not some bloody extortionists.

Then everything changes. Now I have even started considering rock as some sort of pop music, hardly different from the boy bands. That would make my years of being a pain in the ass of so many boy bands’ fans so redundant. But that’s not an issue anymore. I’d rather just listen to songs that are meaningful, poignant, and radical in thought and stuffs like that. The tragedy is that I find no substance in any song now: whether it is in English or Hindi or Burmese, or even in my native language, Manipuri.

I was surprised, then when a2z-lyrics-dot-coms were nonexistent, when someone told me that ‘School’ has just 15 words. A song with just 15 words! I did find it the hard way, but somehow easier than noting down the tabs.

Oh, those songbooks! For old time’s sake, here’s to our memory!