Indie-pendence Daze

Indiecision contributing editor Amit Gurbaxani on the last decade (the noughties) in Indian independent music.
To understand just how far Indian rock has come in the last decade, one need only have attended Pentagram’s Bandra Festival gig at Carter Road on November 22. This was a band that knew how to work a crowd – a large portion of which comprised young slum dwellers who had just strolled in to see what the fuss was about. They lapped it up, going crazy with every driving beat, crunchy riff and aggressive exhortation by frontman Vishal Dadlani. They danced, they headbanged and invaded the stage displaying less inhibition than tanked-up metalheads at Razz. It was a punch in the face to anyone who ever said Indian rock was a genre with niche appeal.

But then the very next day, at a gig also organised as part of the Bandra Festival, we were starkly reminded of everything that was wrong with the genre. At 7.30pm at the Reclamation Promenade, Prayag, a Hindi rock band that was opening for Swarathma, still hadn’t soundchecked for a performance scheduled to start half-an-hour earlier. The band took nearly 45 minutes to soundcheck, drawing out the patience of even the most congenial aunties and uncles, who like us, were battling headaches brought on by having to repeatedly suffer through the pounding sounds of the drummer adjusting his kit. The worst part was how unapologetic the band, particularly the lead singer, was. When someone shouted that they should start already, he brushed it off saying something to the effect that “it was only their friends” who were getting angsty. Fortunately, their actual set was shorter than their soundcheck but just as painful. Pedestrian was the best way to describe their sub-standard sound but even worse was their act: the frontman presumed everybody loved him, at one point he picked up and kissed a toddler who was jumping dangerously close to the stage, and at another, he walked up to a man who had quite clearly wandered into the gig just to kill some time, and unsuccessfully tried to get him to sing along to one of their unmemorable songs.

Pentagram and Prayag did have one thing in common though. Both bands performed all-original sets (if you discount Pentagram’s gig-closing medley of ‘Killer’ and ‘Smack My Bitch Up’) at venues they were probably performing at for the first time, something that would have been optimistic to expect ten years ago. The widespread acceptance of acts playing their own music was, as everyone knows, the single-most significant shift in the Indian indie rock landscape this decade.

But it had more to do with technological and economic developments than with any sudden collective burst of creativity in its exponents. The availability and affordability of computer hardware and recording software, coupled with that wonderful thing called the internet, meant that it was now a whole lot easier for a band to make new music, release a CD and distribute it both online and at gigs. It has now come to a stage when a band is just not cool if they don’t have a couple of originals to their name. As the music editor at Time Out Mumbai magazine, a part of my job involves writing fortnightly gig listings. Whenever a new band’s performing, I call them up to find out what kind of music they play. About eighty per cent of the time, if the band’s members are still in college, their set list will comprise covers of classic and alternative rock (Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Pearl Jam, Coldplay and if they’re really ambitious Tool and Porcupine Tree) as well as “a couple of originals”. Going to YouTube or ReverbNation/MySpace and listening to these compositions is often a disheartening experience. Too many young bands are playing original tunes for the sake of it. The problem is that while most of the members can play their instruments fairly well, they’ve still to learn the craft of songwriting. It’s easy to write a song that sounds like all your influences, it’s far more challenging to use them to say something new, both lyrically and musically. Bands such as The Supersonics and The Mavyns, who are deeply influenced by the music of past eras yet manage to give it a contemporary twist, are few and far between.

On the other hand, we doubt either of these bands has a shot at winning Independence Rock, which is purportedly still the country’s rock competition. Audience response is one of the criteria with which to judge bands, and as a result, most of the bands to have won during the past three years have been metal acts. Metal was the great big beast that continued to confound the Indian indie scene in the noughties. Its popularity grew even further yet it got little support from venues. In Mumbai, this decade saw the shuttering of Razzberry Rhinoceros, long-standing band incubator and perhaps the only anything-goes venue we had. Yet the numbers for Iron Maiden when compared with those of Beyonce, 50 Cent or even Bryan Adams showed indisputably that metal is where the money is at, so much so that concert promoters have started flying down bands specialising in sub-genres to play outdoor gigs here.

As the recently concluded indie music conference Unconvention emphasised, all of us – from the music makers to the fans – who consider ourselves part of the scene will have to change our perspective a little. Without leaving our indie-ness aside, we have to realise that ideas and questions of outside support only arise when you choose to see your music as part of the music business. Even the members of the country’s biggest bands have other full- or part-time jobs. What’s happened in the noughties is that a lot of these musicians have been able to get jobs related to their field, be it in radio, TV, advertising or even working in Bollywood (albeit with composers with a contemporary sensibility), thereby limiting the amount of creative compromise.

When we sat down to draw up our list of the best songs and albums of the decade, like some of you, even we were surprised by the number of non-English acts on the surveys. Then again, it was just a reflection of the fact that the noughties was also the decade when Hindi music, often the bane of Indian rock musicians who are asked by music labels to record in the language, gained an indie sensibility. Acts such as Indian Ocean (who formed in 1984 but really broke through in 2000 with Kandisa), Rabbi, Raghu Dixit and Swarathma represented a new wave of Hindi and regional language artists – they sing in a particular tongue not because of commercial compulsions but because it is the one that most organically represents them.

We’ve only just started to see the forest for the trees. Yes, it’s true that there’s a big market for this music. After all, during the past ten years, colleges in even the small towns started organising rock shows as part of their annual cultural festivals. But if companies didn’t have products to plug to that lucrative youth market, the college festival would have no sponsors and without sponsors, there would be no (free) rock concert.

At the same time, Indian musicians have been quick to adapt to the changing ways of the industry, often as or perhaps even faster than the West, where predictably the artists that have had the most problems adjusting their business models have been the big names. Today, most Indian acts release CDs as a labour of love, to possess something tangible that represents the years of blood, sweat and tears they’ve put into the music. But you don’t just buy a Swarathma or Workshop CD for the music; you buy it for the fabulous artwork, or for the bonus DVD.

It would be silly to say that Indian indie rock is going to blow through the roof in the next decade. Because that would mean that indie would have gone mainstream and by then, the very definition of indie would have changed. It’s a bit of an oxymoron, this independent music business, but as long as there is an unrelenting thirst for fresh ideas, and an inherent inclination for the offbeat on the part of both musician and listener, the “tenties” are going to rock.

The Indiecision Decade In Review

(Pic: The #epic Shirley)