My Initiation Into Rock

Nowadays anybody who knows me personally has ample knowledge of my madness about a peculiar phenomenon usually known throughout the world as Rock Music. But yes, there was a day when I was completely ignorant about this whole business of rock, when Beatles and Elvis were merely some names that appeared here and there like thousands of other names. So how did Animesh the Ignorant became Animesh the Enlightened? Let's find out the answer.

My family was always into music, especially my dad. When I was young, he would almost sit daily with his harmonium and engage in another round of Rabindra Sangeet. But whether this really had any effect on me, I don't actually know, as until class 7 when I was about 12, I had almost no interest in music. As far as I can remember now, the virus of music began to infect me from class 8. The pioneer virus (as I would like to stylize it) was the music of the incomparable Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, composed by the great maestro Satyajit Ray himself (I intend to write something on this in the future). And that was the record which pulled the trick. I had all the songs in a single cassette (which was actually a legacy of my mother) and I remember playing it over and over again in that Sanyo cassette player. Well, 5 years down the line and it's still among my all time favourites.

In the same year I began exploring western pop songs (all from cassettes still) which included some Backstreet Boys, a little of the Beastie Boys and a sprinkling of Cliff Richards as well. The reader may note that at that time these names mattered very little (if indeed anything at all), and all that mattered was that I was listening to English songs!

Class 9 came and with it came my computer and it changed my whole life forever. Accessing music was no problem now (provided I stopped playing games on the comp). Classes 9 and 10 were spent drowned in the music of Backstreet Boys, Westlife, Michael Learns To Rock (MLTR) and some other pop groups. The only rockers in my life at that time were maybe Bryan Adams, Bon Jovi, and a peeping Linkin Park. But class 11 saw me leaving the false façade of pop and pop culture and embrace rock and its ethos, especially DIY. It was not only the musical aspect that precipitated this change, but the ideology associated with real rock (a little of which tallied with my own independent thinking).

By this time I was completely into Rock music. Slowly in a span of 2 years I discovered Aerosmith, Beatles, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Pink Floyd, Queen, R.E.M., Scorpions, The Police, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Bruce Springsteen, Guns N' Roses, Green Day, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Nirvana, Rolling Stones etc etc...

So that's my story. Maybe by western standards I am not that ardent rock fan, but by desi Indian standards indeed I am.

Hail Rock!!