I’m going to retain these pages until I get tired of maintaining both blogs.

Thanks!

A friend at Maya Prajayatna has prepared a new leaflet for internal use (and therefore not shared here) that critiques the Act while seeking to examine and clarify its position on existing issues.

I have illustrated the booklet with my cartoons.

Here’s a sample.

Kickbackistan is Thermal And A Quarter’s response to the corruption surrounding the Commonwealth Games 2010. Sing along. And keep your palms greased for the funny money.

This is the spoof currency note that I created for the Kickbackistan campaign.

Kickbackistan Funny Money

In its September 12 edition, The Sunday Guardian (veteran journalist M J Akbar’s current media venture) wrote about TAAQ’s campaign and gave the funny money some currency.

TAAQ in 2000 with their first album, Thermalandaquarter.com

Even our most articulate culture commentators tolerate Indian rock music with exasperated indulgence, treating it as the fetish of cultural misfits who overstay in the waiting room between adolescence and oblivion. Having documented an independent rock band for nearly 15 years, I try to set the record straight on that immaculate misconception (thanks to a new friend for that phrase!).

Just as in Mumbai/Bombay (which languishes in its own cultural Truman Show) and Delhi (which appropriates culture as if its only representatives are those that camp in the capital), in Bangalore the underground pop/rock/jazz music movement began in nightclubs (like Boscos and Three Aces) where musicians were paid to perform covers of contemporary hits. When an overactive excise department (in collusion with the moral police) forced these joints to close shop, musicians were left with no stage.

The Music Strip (a brainchild of the late Sunbeam Motha) revived the movement somewhat in the early 1980s, launching bands like Human Bondage. Motha followed it up in the late 1990s with the Night Of the Long Guitar (where I watched the Sarjapur Blues Band for the first time) someplace in the backwoods of Bannerghatta. I was there — quite stoned as was customary then — so I don’t remember the coordinates.

That music movement preserved the exuberance of the Sixties and Seventies and distilled it into an expression of its own making. Refining that expression and beveling its edges into something rich and strange took time. Along the way, initiatives like Freedom Jam gave city bands a soapbox for their voice. But the money still wasn’t there. Organizers of college cultural festivals, which offered the best opportunity to draw crowds, favoured cover bands — mostly from Mumbai and Delhi. Local bands had it rough. The meagre prize money at semi-pro band competitions hosted by collegiate festivals such as Autumn Muse (St John’s Medical College) and Vibrations (Indian Institute of Science) offered incentive for new bands to strut their stuff. Even here, original music wasn’t the highlight. Crowds wanted Bon Jovi or Iron Maiden or Metallica, depending on how high they were, or how low they cared to stoop.

TAAQ and crew watch Ian Paice (Deep Purple's drummer) at soundcheck, April 2001

On April 1, 2001, Deep Purple performed in Bangalore. It was the first big appearance of a major Western rock band in Bangalore (Aside: When Roger Waters stopped by on his 2002 “In The Flesh” tour, one of the TAAQ boys got a chance to shake hands with guitarist Snowy White who asked him: “Deep Purple? Were they any good?”). For the first time, a local band — Thermal And A Quarter — was given a chance to open for the British legends. They played a complete set of originals that night, despite shortchanged sound, dimmed lights and no fee.

Two years earlier (in July 1999), TAAQ — then three years old — organized the Potatoe Junkie Concert at the amphitheatre behind Ravindra Kalakshetra. The gate collection went to a charity for soldiers martyred at Kargil. In November that year, the band organized Floodaid, a fundraiser for flood-affected villagers in Orissa. These events marked the first times that an independent band made money playing its own music at a completely self-organized gig.

A very wet Bruce Lee Mani narrowly escapes electrocution at FloodAid, November 1999. A spirited crowd cheered through the torrential rain and held up a sheet of tarpaulin over the band when things got too gusty.

Thermal And A Quarter’s music, to those who came in late, is a commentary on the angst of being Bangalorean in a city racked by change. And change — we know — is never completely desirable despite its inevitability.

My piece on the band’s music, published in today’s Mint Lounge, traces TAAQ’s relevance and rootedness to Bangalore’s cultural milieu, and argues that independent rock music can actually represent the sound of a city, if only one cares to listen.

Excerpt:

A thousand or so 30-something Bangaloreans might remember the date 24 July 1999. That day, Taaq performed at the Potatoe Junkie concert and hauled the city’s underground rock music movement to the surface. The theme song—its title inspired by former US vice-president Dan Quayle’s infamous spelling howler—sneered at the city’s growing obsession with cable television. The band played a 2-hour set consisting mostly of original songs and, after breaking even, donated Rs 15,000 to a relief fund for the families of soldiers martyred during the Kargil war.

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Separately, I am also quoted by the Times of India‘s Sandhya Soman in her article “Do Indian musicians make a mark abroad?” published today in the paper’s Crest edition.

Excerpt:

As an insider I vouch for this: Indian bands are making prolific music (of variable quality) but they aren’t making money. But even the best music, by indie bands across the world, is produced under considerable financial strain and doesn’t fetch returns from online sales. So it’s important for bands to tour to break even.

There’s the rub. Brand managers and flaky promoters are tucking in while bands go penniless. Great Indian Rock and IRock, India’s oldest rock festivals, launch amateur bands every year. Enterprises like Mumbai’s Only Much Louder, the artist management concern behind Counter Culture Records, have been living off bands for eight years — nothing indie about their revenue model. They sign desperate bands to draw crowds for restaurateurs and event organisers. The hosts profit on food and beverage sales. In 15 years the paltry concert fee has hardly improved. Serious artists prefer to remain independent and unsigned. Sadly, bands, by undercutting each other, have only fattened the sharks.

My friends at Thermal And A Quarter and I read Inder Sidhu’s outcry against “the media’s hysterical coverage of Indian rock bands” (and before that, in 2008, Deepanjana Pal’s diatribe against Indian rock) in Tehelka with familiar feelings of resigned amusement and piquant regret. While Sidhu makes some pleasant noises and points available fingers at the usual suspects, he disappoints us by stating the obvious and therefore fails to offer us any fresh insight into what actually ails the rock scene. What ails the media we already know.

First off, Tehelka could have attempted to address the question: What is uniquely “Indian” about the Indian rock scene? You get really excited about Indian writers in English, so why can’t an electric guitar and English lyrics employed to express Indian themes excite you as much? Is the Indian rock “movement” — as some like to call it — merely about the explosion of rock band competitions and sponsored collegiate rock festivals? Is it only about the so-called mushrooming of venues for Indian rock? Is it about the legitimacy accorded to it by weak-willed Bollywood flicks such as Rock On? Is it more than a West-aping deluge of residual post-adolescent hormones? Or is it merely a vehicle for selling phallic fantasies associated with jeans, bikes, movies, or alcohol?

Why can’t the music scene you obsess about be the product of entrepreneurial activity or the struggle of independent artists to secure a platform for expression in a milieu notorious for the absence of infrastructure or patronage? Is it not also about artistic independence — and what is indie in an Indian context anyway? Is it not about the paucity of industry support for independent music (and just what is this “industry”?)? And why are we in such a hurry to pack it all up in one store shelf labelled ‘rock’ – what about Carnatic blues, or Indian jazz-rock, or Indian prog-rock, or Indian death metal, or Devotional jazz-rock, or Malayalam thrash metal, or Hindi country blues, or Kannada funk?

Which part bothers you the most: that the Indian media is writing about Indian rock music at all, or that it is covering rock without balls or brains? After all, we read your magazine because it tells us what we believe is closest to the truth. But never has it once offered lip service to this movement, apart from getting musicians to applaud their favourite bands at the back of the book. When it comes to the coverage of underground music acts in India Tehelka, too, is part of the “lazy press” you love to deride. Your dispirited coverage reinforces the fact that in this country we have no national newspapers or news-magazines — only parochial ones. When it comes to covering the independent music scene, even Tehelka cannot look beyond Delhi or Mumbai before your vision gets all blurry and your perspective degenerates to homogenising what you attempt to analyse. Isn’t it time you became free, fair and fearless in writing about this too?

Sidhu writes that the “vocabulary and context for rock criticism does not exist in India.” When was the last time you met an editor who condescended to carry a major story about any Westernised urban counterculture in India? When was the last time any self-respecting commentator (such as you, we hope) turned away from the clippings morgue and did some legwork to find out what’s really happening in India’s underground music scene?

For instance, how do Indian bands approach songwriting, where do they learn to play their instruments, where do they rehearse? How do they finance gear, studio time and production efforts? What level of initiative does it take for a band to bag concert dates at Hard Rock Cafe or Blue Frog, or plan a five-city tour? Or to cut an album and market it independently?

These realities offer story ideas for any journalist with a serious interest in writing about Indian rock. Perhaps Sidhu might want to consider exploring these areas instead of expending two thousand words on a subject he believes is not worth writing about. That’s laughable. Of course, we are aware these stories can’t be written within a week’s deadline but has any journalist cared to investigate the possibilities, or any editor dared to commission them?

We’d be happier if the media did not write about the “scene”, because clouding these half-cooked reports and analyses with poor reportage, bias and myopia is far worse. As some wise guy once said, “It’s better to shut up and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Every “music journalist” wants to be the next big commentator on the Indian rock music scene. In 14 years of being associated with the independent rock music scene in India, we’ve seen these megalomaniacs crash and burn and we have outlived them all.

Frank Zappa said, “Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.” Thermal And A Quarter wrote a song about journalists like that – it’s called Paper Puli. And we have an annual award for music journalists who satisfy Zappa’s criteria. It’s called the Paper-Pulitzer. We might consider nominating Mr Sidhu.

(A version of this note was sent as a letter to the editors of Tehelka, and subsequently posted on Thermal And A Quarter’s Facebook page)

Last year Thermal And A Quarter, the band I work with, responded to the turmoil, hate and suspicion in the world with the music video One Small Love, a brainchild of the Bangalore creative shop Happy. Its message, “One small breath, one small word, one small love can be everything in a tired world,” made it popular on YouTube, where it continues to be much-favorited. It is also a much-requested crowd favorite at concerts.

This year, One Small Love has gone public, reverberating with the collective voice of many concerned Bangaloreans — among them artists, musicians, theatre persons, actors, filmmakers, management thinkers, etc.

The ‘One Small Love – Bangalore for Mangalore’ concert on February 14, a red-letter day made infamous by Hallmark cards and various killjoy extremist groups, will bring together musicians Konarak Reddy, Ravi Kulur, Alwyn Fernandes, Gerard Machado, Karan Joseph, Gaurav Vaz and Swarathma along with Thermal And A Quarter.

The One Small Love page on Facebook has been receiving plenty of currency, adding over 550 fans from all over the world in its first 48 hours. Among the highlights of the page are videos of Bangaloreans lending voice to the cause.

Here are a few. Watch this space for updates.

The cop was part of a motorcade escorting two Tamil Nadu ministers. His attackers were in fact targeting his colleague. The latter happened to be away on leave without their knowledge and the killers got the wrong man.

The politicians’ retinue contained a number of mediapersons and the incident — flush with blood and gore, a writhing policeman and ministers standing about scratching their nuts — provided live action and TRP-boosters to the TV crew. Too much to pass up. The cameras scarcely blinked. But everyone present did.

I do not watch TV but I do surf news online. And when I read anything particularly depressing that is badly written to boot (which is nearly always), I keep some music playing in the background. Just to soothe my fraying 35-plus nerves. And when I found myself hanging about the TIMES NOW website, I was careful to have aural salve ready in the form of NPR’s media player lined up with a long playlist containing, among other things, the weekly jazz show Take Five.

‘Strange Fruit – Evolution of a Song’ features five artists’ interpretations of Strange Fruit, schoolteacher Abel Meeropol’s anguished reaction to the lynching of two black men, Thomas Shipp and Abraham Smith, in Marion, Indiana in 1930. Meeropol saw the famous photograph of the bodies hanging from a tree (taken by Lawrence Beitler) and published the poem Bitter Fruit in 1936 (under the name Lewis Allan). Along with his wife and a black vocalist, Meeropol performed the song at a protest rally. It was introduced eventually to Billie Holiday who first performed it in 1939 and elevated it to lasting fame. In 2002, filmmaker Joel Katz made an award-winning documentary of the same title inspired by the song. Interestingly, the comments on the NPR page include one each from Katz and Meeropol’s elder son Michael.

Back to NPR’s Take Five. I happened to be streaming Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of the song when the news video, which had been buffering, came alive. Both audio tracks played side by side and I was struck by the eerie similarity of their themes — it had a sort of roughhewn, impromptu resemblance to Simon & Garfunkel’s Silent Night-7 O’clock News.

Here’s a rough scratch recording of that moment:

The age of original heartfelt protest songs in jazz, pop or rock has passed unlamented ever since we started counting Madonna, MJ, Eminem, the Black-Eyed Peas and Amy Winehouse among protest singers. Insidiously, Protest has become a marketing label, a genre if you like — which adds up to a nice new varnished shelf in a large music store somewhere before Punk and after Gospel. Most artists have realized that they have little to protest about but their own inconspicuousness. And their acts of protest are in truth about having a go at the fifteen lucre-encrusted minutes of fame that their voices, if sufficiently loud, would bring them.

Will anybody write a protest song about what happened in Tamil Nadu? We can’t be sure. Most likely that someone is right now watching the news to dream up a new potboiler screenplay.

Here is Strange Fruit, for us to unforget what protest means.

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Trick or tweet?

On that cheery note, Happy 2010! I’m off on vacation and back next year, hopefully sunburned to a crisp.

That said, I have always been intrigued by what makes good art great. And when artists judge artists the subject gets murkier. Choosing between art for art’s sake and art that moves is like calling for a tossup between the heavily melodramatic Bollywood denouement of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black and the cold, quiet finis of Bergman’s Through A Glass Darkly. I have had people, who can otherwise be counted upon for their sane and balanced opinion, argue in favour of the former.

So watch Kseniya Simonova at work and judge for yourself. All of 24, this Ukrainian sand animator is an Internet phenomenon.

Is she a genius or a pop star?