Thursday, March 26, 2009

music & me - final part 2

ok due to popular demand by the few nice people who read my blog im back for the final installment of music & me.
The pop phase went on till i think i was 14 /15. Yeah it didnt last too long due to the aforementioned 'search for depth'. Thats when MTV happened. Not the lame ass nonsense that is MTV now, but i like to think of my childhood MTV as a real education.

Course 1: How to rebel without a cause and look really cool while doing it - taught by kurt cobain, Chris cornell & eddie vedder

Course 2: Lateral thinking: the coolest ever channel Id graphics. MTV taught me the basics of how to say one thing in the most number of superbly cool ways

Course 3: how to hallucinate and elevate without being drugged - the one and only TORI AMOS , lifelong friend and secret lover

and so continuing on..

Phase 4: teeteering 'over the edge'



My earliest memory of watching MTV was afternoons once i got back from school and noone was home. Sneakily watching MTV when i was supposed to be doing homework or something and one day catching a video set in a grungy basement filled with teenage kids head banging in slow motion to one man's pain stricken voice. I remember very clearly being struck by the orange yellow dusty feel of the video and the 'anti' cheerleaders in black dresses. it smelled like teen spirit and it was heady. then on began the grunge obsession, accompanied by spells of bad poetry scribbled behind red line notebooks apparently an expression of my 'angst'

i still have those notebooks.

Phase 5: my first brush with hallucinations


in the middle of all those brown & grey boys with voices that sounded like paper tearing, a girl with flaming red hair wearing a red tulle dress stepping in and out of windows making love to a mystical piano entered my life. she's still in it , she's still making my hair stand up and showing me 'peices of things ive never seen'
tori amos , sometimes absurd, mostly kind of pretentious when she isnt singing, but always intense and cripplingly beautiful when she is, walked in and took me over. suddenly it seemed like some secret world existed with a secret language and now i was permanent resident of a dark fairytale wonderland.

suddenly am reminded of raggity and the cloud. i miss that book :(

Phase 6: 'adult alternative & mehfil -e -electronica


ok all grown up by now, the grunge/alternative/tori phase defining most of my teens and early 20's i landed up at my first 'advertising job'. discovered a lost cousin from my mom's side - mihir living in boston. thanks to the web we started chatting and realised we were like music twins or something. the newest, coolest music came to me direct from amrica courtesy mihir , here i was with silly smile on my face zoning out on death cab for cutie, phish and the like. Till of course, i heard psychedelic trance. extremely sceptical but pushed by the urge to at least try it, i did. it started with 'this is great work music' (the earlier commercial shit) to 'hmm there seems to be something here' (morning) to 'this is incredibly visual and strangely moving' (parasense).

Am somewhere still there now except with the brilliant addition of IDM (intelligent dance music) and trip hop fellows like rum pistol , prefuse courtesy the BASAK - art partner and grphic artist. between our secret language (which noone else at work seems to understand) are the scratchy, twisted sounds of IDM making the work seem sort of more than what it is. here's to that and to music. for making my world spin.
:)