The Daily Chime

I love listening to music, my friends would know. Infact, most of our friends define being 'cool' to be directly related to the amout of music one listens to. Talking about my g-g-generation, the genre of metal and heavy metal are by far the most popular ones, anything else is way too kiddish. What I don't seem to understand is the fact that in the effort for being popular among the friends, many of us miss out on so many flavours of music. I should say with a heavy heart that, most of the 'pseud' people i know refuse to even explore the other genres of music. There is always an attitude against 'settling' for pop or rock. What happened to jazz, what happened to raggae, or country?

I live in the campus of iit madras, hostal zone is the most happening place around. As expected, one would find noises of all kind, no pun intended, through the corridors of the hostal. Among them are the rythm of handful songs which are echoed in almost every room. To name a few, 'for whom the bell tolls', 'nothing else matters', 'master of puppets' from metallica, 'parnoid' from ossy, 'trouper', fear of the dark' from maiden and finally 'november rain' and 'sweet child' from gnr. Though gnr is rock, it is still cool, no questions asked. Why doesn't our taste of music grow beyond this?

Our culfest, saarang, is the time when all the geeks of the institute just freak out. The rock show is the most 'looked forward to' event. I was among the crowd too. ;-) I was disheartened to observe that the 'fans' were interested only in metallica, iron maiden or megadeath. No doubt they are great bands, i like them too, but there are plenty of other good stuff that one can listen to. Why are we Indians so reluctant to accept any change? The change which i am refering to is not just with respect to music, but also, for instance, infuence of western culture.

I recall an avid music lover and a metallica fan telling me that the symphony orschestra actually screwed up the S &M concert. What??? I am under that opinion that symphony had made the music only richer. First time i heard the album, i was amazed at how a talented musician can blend two entirely different spectrums of music.

French band called matamatah performed a set of rock numbers during saarang. The songs were of the eagles kind. The crowd absolutely loved them. Yet again, i was shocked to hear 'chicken s**t' as a comment from one of the 'true' metal fans.

Several people have told me about their liking for one perticular group, floyd or maiden for example. They have gone on to say that they can't get enough of them, they listen "ONLY" to them. People, get a life!!!