Rocking Life

After a long long time I recently heard a fantastic rock number and it brought back some memories . First english music album which I bought was Dark side of the Moon. That was long time back and I didn't like it at all. I found the lyrics intriguing and music sounded jarring to me. It gathered dust in my room for next couple of years untill I was to rediscover it and along with it the fantastic group called Pink Floyd. In that period I heard many bands and liked many of them, mostly the rock and hard metal bands. Iron Maiden is one of my favourites and I can never get enough of the way they use guitar in Hallowed be thy name. I got hooked to Metallica after I started frequenting Purple Haze, that nice, little pub in Bangalore during my college days. I must have heard King of Nothing a hundred times. Def Leppard had such a unique style and sound to their music and I think Hysteria was thier best album ever. Deep Purple was amazing and they have lots of good numbers in addition to most popular Smoke on Water. I had heard them live in Bangalore and it was magic. Nothing can beat a live rock show, the kind of energy it has is mind blowing. Black Sabbath was the band I liked a lot with lyrics which talked about occult and black magic, appealed to me at a stage of my life. Paranoid, Heaven and hell are some of best tracks by them. They were the guys who started metal genre. Ozzy Osbourne with his acts on stage symbolized the darkness of thier music. Led Zeppelin and thier Stairway to heaven is amazing. Such layered music. I mean not only lyrically but in terms of sound also.

Pulse by Pink Floyd is one of most amazing live video albums of their 1994's concert tour. Nothing else captures their aural and visual magic the way Pulse does. We spent countless evenings listening to their phychedelic music. Remember Diggu!! We almost thought Syd Barret, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain were geniuses. Ah those days!!

Some say that Rock is dead but hardly so. Rock was never meant to be mainstream and would never be . Hard Rock is about youth, rebellion and nihilism. Hard metal can be dark and decadent. Rock is nothing without sex and drugs and long hair and a certain life style. But like everything else in life, you grow out of it. Give me that blaring elctric guitar sound anytime and I am hooked.