Rock B‘r’ands
As I write this a Bengali Rock band called ‘Fossils’ blasts away my headphones & a lot more will follow suit. Another one of those unknown bands which will get lost after some time. Another one of those bands who do a few hundred gigs, whom the people love performing but still will get lost and settle in their alternative professions.
Why exactly does this happen? Are they not making good music? I don’t think so. Quite a few of these bands make music of international quality. The guitar leads, the riffs are amazing. Does
Well there are a lot of factors to this, lets start with the successes to see where we are going wrong.
When we talk about a particular band being successful it’s more of a brand than a band at that time. Metallica’s last album was totally crap but it sold, it sold millions because it’s “Metallica”. Look at U2 and Pearl Jam experimenting of late, they can do that because they are sure they will sell. That’s what being a brand is all about.
Let’s talk local; everybody in
It’s pretty simple: Thou shalt give the masses what they want and thou will rock the world.
But in the process one has to be smart enough to see how you shape your career.
Doing covers is not something new but it has to stop somewhere. A lot of bands keep on singing covers which the crowd encourages them to do too but the band loses it’s own identity in the whole process. That’s not how they should be doing it. They have to give the crowd a mix of both and not lose their originality in the process.
“Strange Brew” a famous band in Pune has suffered a similar fate. They are a bunch of very talented and very polished musicians but last year they brought out an album of their own priced Rs 50 and the sales still are pretty countable.
Why did this happen to people who are so talented that they can play a song to perfection on stage with no rehearsal at all? These people play ‘Classic Rock’ and they played covers in their genre for more than a decade and that’s where they lost their originality. They used to put in some of their originals once in a while but mostly their covers got all the attention. Today they are either into teaching music or their alternative professions and perform only in the after-hours. Though they still are very popular among the local crowd, they lost out on all the fame and recognition they could have got.
Though it is not as bad as it looks, the Bengali rock band I talked about in the beginning sings in ‘Bengali’, their own language and is immensely popular among Bengali circles. We have similar examples of bands from kerala. ‘Mother Jane’ another band from down south insists on singing only originals and supposedly is the most well paid. And of late there are bands playing every genre which were untouched earlier in
~-Keep rockinG-~
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