Friday, February 13, 2009

music & me - Part 1

i'm a 90's child. but unlike most 90's suburban mumbai kids, i almost never heard any hindi/bollywood music as a child. thanks to musically evolved cousins who stayed across the road, i grew up on a healthy diet of pop, rock, grunge and when MTV hit it was 'alternative' courtesy 'alternative nation' a show with jerky camera movements and a dark almost dingy set, hosted by VJ sophia who brought her very special brand of cool to the entire experience. (or was it danny? , there were two of them alternative nation and over the edge)


phase 1: Sunday Mornings with the Fab four.



This was me at maybe 5? or 6? something like that. My folks had this record player and every sunday morning the Beatles LPs' would rock our house. those days we were in no hurry to switch on tubelights so the perfect sunday morning was spent with the fab four singing 'hard day's night' and all four of us dancing and goofing around in the little bits of sunshine. ( i think thats where i got my fascination for sunrise trance from)


phase 2: Bowing down to 80's royalty



mid 80's. it started with watching madonna's like a virgin video and feeling creeped out, excited, and longing all at once. my first crush i think she was. i was too young to understand the references but i knew it was soemthing dangerously cool. Cut to me watching her performances on pirated VHS tapes goggle eyed , cut to lame mimicking of jackson's thriller moves cut to humming prince's purple rain cut to speech bubble inside my brain going 'this guy looks kinda weird, but damn this music is strangely beautiful'

apparently also somewhere in the middle of all of this was an arrogant 10 year old girl who thought peter gabriel was god and snootily snubbed everyone who didnt know who the hell he was. (god knows when this happened, but one of the snubbed friends confirms this)

Phase 3: Going Radio Ga Ga


Now to say i am a bit embarassed by this part of the music history is an understatement. Radio came into my life at this point. and so did pop music. not the madonna kind. more like the ace of base/amy grant one hit wonders kind.

so here i was in my early teens, when i decided radio and pop music was fun. No more 'borrowed tastes' i'm going to discover my own music without having to go across the road. so i started stealing No 1's from the weekly top 10's off the radio and by the end of it i had a drawer full of - you guessed it - mixed tapes. of course then i took it all too seriously and promptly rejected the entire movement because
'the lyrics dont mean anything' and 'my life is more complicated than silly love songs'. Of course what was complicating my life at 13 , ill never know.


coming up: phase 4: in search of the 'alternative', phase 5: trip hop & indie
phase 6: electronica takes over.
and then the forever top 10