Our desi Rockers

Wanted: some serious angst

No one wants to get arrested. Why, even the headbanging rockers are oh-so-politically correct. They hardly even use the Fuck word, let alone simulate the act on stage. We don’t have gigs where rockers dismember life-size replicas of their girlfriends or boyfriends, nor has anyone ever broken a guitar or smashed a drum, or set their hair on fire. Why can’t a gig have someone doing fellatio to the mike or take priapic digs at the politicians. Why hasn’t any one ever painted their buttocks with Kiss my arse, Mushie (Musharraf) and shown the hirsute black rear to the audiences?

Yet if you look at the clothes, the hairstyle, the tattoos of the audiences who flock these rockshows, you would think rebeldom still rocks. I remember one trendy teen at one of the out-of-tune rock concerts tell me without any aggression, “Man, we are the rebels; we rock.” At another, a not-yet-17 rock music fan told me and my friend, “Man its so good to see guys your age at these shows. Its really good. Thank you so much.” I was puzzled and aghast. Decades ago, when we saw oldish people at rock shows, we would scream, “Fuck off. If you can’t speak our lingo, get the fuck outta our lives.”

Music needs rebellion as fish need to swim upstream. Sure, the dimensions of rebellion will change constantly, as they should, but music – particularly rock music – without angst is like marriage without sex. We don’t need no education might be passe in today’s context, but Don’t Make Us Mug For Marks or Roll Over Study-by-Rote surely deserves anthemic status.

Or is it that we have nothing to rebel against. Global warming and clean up the streets are so establishment. Politics is something that doesn’t concern me. I won’t starve to death, so unemployment doesn’t bother me. Indians are global haute property now, so the skin colour discrimination that we still practise in our backyards can be swept under the carpet. We can not ridicule page 3 people as all of us want to be on that page. How come no one is spoofing the Breaking News syndrome on TV channels, or pricking the pomposity and/or double standards of older generations or celebrating the pockets of sunshine from all across the country in this new economic prosperity through rock ballads!

We don’t want Britney Spears kinda breakdown, nor do we want Michael Jackson kinda delusion, but yeah, allow sex, drugs and rock-n-roll to evolve out of its pathetic slogan value. Rock and roll first, in its true sense, sex and drugs will follow, if you’re indeed destined.

Rock-n-roll was a term coined during puritan days when pre-marital sex was a taboo. The contemporary music scene in India needs to punch holes in all the taboos and balloons that society creates. Maybe we need to go back to drugs that make you think, and not just ecstasy that pastes a beatific grin on your face and makes you dance robotically to the same rhythmic loop and a thumping beat. Maybe a few rockers need to get arrested first before we bring “pigs” back into our lexicon. Contemporary India has the content and the idiom, its music requires an attitude not seen before.