Diabolus in Musica: Or How I Started to Listen to Music and Didn’t Stop

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A couple of months back, I was asked to contribute to a fashion magazine.

WTF! Come again? I asked incredulously. Had the person who was asking me to come on board the writing team not noticed my God-given ability to constantly stay out of touch with fashion trends? Fashion advice from moi would involve acquiring a t-shirt from a band of my choice (right now I am badly in need of Opeth, Tool, Rudra and Wolves in the Throne Room tees), one of them faded jeans and a pair of rubber slippers from Bata. “Well of course I am not asking you to write on fashion, you bugger!”, the man said exasperated. Phew. It turned out that he wanted me to write on music and perhaps a few book reviews. I agreed.

That magazine is the recently launched FNQ Magazine which can be found in most bookstores in Colombo, and the following is one of the articles that I wrote. I am usually wary about reading my published articles; the time between the writing of the article and it appearing on print is enough for me to think that I could have, perhaps, approached the article from a different perspective.

Fortunately, that is not the case here. Read and tell me what you think.

Diabolus in Musica: Or How I Started to Listen to Music and Didn’t Stop

By: Theena Kumaragurunathan

As I begin this piece, I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of my best friends. He was a music fan; I, then, a movie buff. Marlon Brando held more appeal to me than Jimi Hendrix did. We made an agreement: I would stock up a library of movies and he would a library of music. We would then exchange based on interest, fancies, and recommendations. All simple really. The logic of eighteen year olds.

Six years have passed since then and much has changed. I, for one, have a bigger music collection than he does although I am in no doubt that he would contest this fact. Let me rephrase then: I have a larger, more diverse music collection than he does. My days begin with checking an internet forum for news on my favourite musicians. It finishes with me downloading an album by a band or artist that I’ve never heard of until then. In between, I log into Wikipedia or All Music Guide and click on links with gay abandon, excited at the prospect of hearing something new. The weekends will then be spent listening to the new music – or, as I like to call it, new noise. The following is an attempt to explain why I love music as much.

I am trying to pinpoint the moment music became the overriding passion in my life. It was probably this: Aged 18 and with a music listening habit that didn’t stretch beyond Guns N Roses’ biggest singles, I was asked by the aforementioned friend to listen to Nirvana’s seminal Nevermind. I remember inserting the CD into my player, hearing Kurt Cobain’s riff, Dave Grohl’s thundering drum and little else. It was the most addictive, primal and gloriously liberating music that I had in my short life. For better or worse, life changed.

But here’s the funny thing: Nirvana was never merely about music. Let me rephrase; Nirvana was never solely about their music. Unlike any band I had come across then and possibly unlike any band since, Nirvana loved their roots and made sure their fans got a taste of it as well. In itself, this is hardly remarkable. But with Nirvana, it is not merely the influences they cite, but the sheer diversity of it.

Be it the underground post-punk of the then relatively unheard of Sonic Youth, the seemingly timeless pop melodies of Beatles, the alternative pop of The Pixies, the proto heavy metal of Led Zeppelin or even the haunting folk blues of a depression era ex-con in Lead Belly, Nirvana sometimes spent more time talking of their influences more than their own music. As a new fan then, I loved them for that quality.

From Nirvana, I went to The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Listening to the former reminds us what mainstream pop is missing these days: vision, artistic freedom and the balls to try something different in every album. I find myself asking if any contemporary pop act could do something similar to A Day in the Life. As I write this, last year’s winner of American Idol, performing in this year’s finale of the hit show, starts singing A Day in the Life. He sings it as though it was a ballad. A sodding ballad! So there is my answer: no. Led Zeppelin may not be the greatest band that walked the planet, but they might very well be one of the coolest. Booze, orgies and John Bonham and Dazed and Confused – what’s not to like?

Soundgarden came next. The great thing about Soundgarden isn’t merely because they were probably the best band from the grunge era, but because they transcended the era unlike Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees and Alice in Chains. At times they were Black Sabbath, at times Led Zeppelin, at times The Beatles; they could be metal at it’s most machismo, they could make punk at it’s most liberating, they could make pop music at it’s catchiest– at their best they mixed all these elements and came out with music that post-grunge rock bands of today could only dream of composing. Jesus Christ Pose, the epic track from the band’s Badmotorfinger album was, musically, the zenith of the grunge era.

When my love affair with Soundgarden began to fade, I fell madly in love with the music of Nick Drake. The singer-songwriter niche is one where things are overwhelmingly black and white– most are incredibly horrible musicians dabbling in the clichéd, while a few are worth a listen or two. Bob Dylan is revered as the greatest of this rare breed of musicians – a masterful lyricist who, at his best, was emotionally, socially and politically the most pertinent. John Lennon came close several times to dethroning Dylan, but his post-Beatles output was mixed at best, often plummeting to childish songs making fun of Paul McCartney.

To everyone who harks on about Dylan and Lennon, I bring up Nick Drake, suggesting that Drake was better. Were his life not tragically cut short at the age of 27, Drake’s music might have become more popular although I doubt that. At it stands now, we have three albums a handful of outtakes to listen to that suggest an artist far ahead of his time. His final album, Pink Moon, has, in it’s mere 34 minutes running time, song writing at it’s starkest and most sincere. The album is timeless and has remained my favourite for the past three years. I do not see that changing.

Jazz and metal struck my fancy next. Miles Davis and John McLaughlin were followed by Tool, Ulver, Agalloch, Death, Cynic and Rudra. Davis’ vision in fusing the free form of jazz and the volume of rock gave the world jazz fusion. His protégé, John McLaughlin is my favourite guitarist. Classic rockers say that Hendrix’s guitar was an extension of his soul. When McLaughlin played guitar – from his time under Davis to his own bands, The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Shakti – the instrument becomes a bridge to another world; a dimension where the unique dialects of jazz, rock, Western Classical, flamenco and Indian classical fuse seamlessly. If music is a universal language then I am yet to see a more fluent speaker than McLaughlin. His Mahavishnu Orchestra is the greatest band to have walked the planet followed by his acoustic, Indian classical troupe Shakti.

Tool brings together the volume and sheer presence of Led Zeppelin with the high-brow concepts of Pink Floyd. Here’s a question: If they follow in the footsteps of Iron Maiden and decide to play a show in India, guess who’ll be the first to buy a plane ticket to Bangalore?

Ulver is so gloriously unpredictable that I can’t help but love them to death – starting out as a black metal band, they released a choral, acoustic album (Kveldssanger) to follow their incredible debut (Bergtatt - Et Eeventyr i 5 Capitler), before (apparently) going into a forest with cheap equipment and recording their harrowing third album (Nattens Madrigal - Aatte Hymne til Ulven i Manden). Their most recent albums have been almost exclusively electronic music.

It’ll be an injustice to end this piece without mentioning Giuseppe Tartini’s Violin Sonata in G minor – better known as the ‘Devil’s Trill Sonata’; Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor – the Lacrimosa movement, I can safely say, is the only piece of music that can reduce me to tears consistently no matter how many times I listen to it; Death’s The Sound of Perseverance and Human – albums that have given me hours of head banging pleasure; Rudra’s Brahmavidya: Primordial I – Indian carnatic music fused with thrash and death metal; and Negură Bunget’s OM – a recent acquisition which is great when listened to sober and downright amazing when listened to under the influence of <insert as appropriate>.

Along the way, I’ve been asked: Why? What’s the point? Music, I’ve been told, should be like in the movies – background music, the soundtrack to complement the drama of life, not the plot itself – unless you are dancing. I disagree and it is not because I can’t dance to save my life.

Beethoven once said, “Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.” I disagree because I am one of the drunkards.

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