Roll Out the Jangle – The F-16′s, 8/3/13

It takes a lot of doing, and the stars and the gods aren’t usually in favour, but there is still such a thing as a good night out – a genuinely good night out, I mean, not one of those where you have to grit your teeth and force yourself to believe that yelling yourself hoarse over an oblivious crowd drunk to idiocy is somehow more genuinely fun than just staying in and wanking to cam sites, listening to the Heebie Jeebies’ Greatest Hits – and, no, not even the broken, ill-lit ugliness of this city, nor the deadening conviction that the little happiness you squeeze from it is provisional and frail, can take that away.

Who Pays Indeed. And, Importantly, who Doesn’t.

This is India, which is a very polite way of saying this is totally screwed-up. The popscene, such as there is a popscene, is basically a bunch of big-shots pulling seniority to bully their way into headlining slots at events: if you’re a little band trying to carve out a little working niche for yourself, you’re stuffed, and all the skill and vision in the world won’t save you. As the business stands, it’s the deep-pocketed movers-and-shakers of the coffee-table alt-culture set paying to book a weekend’s worth of entertainment. You’re the dancing monkey. Suck it up.

Spin-Doctoring the Subcontinent

India’s hasn’t any street-cred. Bring up Jamaica, that dinky, crime-ridden, no-account island state, and people think of groove, dreadlocks, and weed: everyone secretly wishes they were Jamaican, and they wish for it because it’s cool. India isn’t cool.

Barking up the Popscene’s Skirts

Okay, you nasty, evil-smelling dickheads, I bet you all thought old Uncle Moop were a-dead-and-goner, didn’t you? Bet you all partied out on your Thermal-in-a-Quandary EPs all over Smoochie-Woochie-Let’s-all-Send-Silly-Messages-to-One-Another-on-Facebook-so-we-can-Pretend-we-Have-a-Life-Day this St. Valentine’s Day; well here’s bringing back good taste and an urgently needed sense of proportion to your lives. As it happens, nobody’s dud-and-gum, I still inhabit the Land of the Living, and I still worry myself to death over the awful, close-minded, backslapping bunch of inbreds who move ‘n’ shake the Indian popscene; worst of all, I worry about the poor souls who have to make a living selling their music here, in the third-world, which is plagued by so many troubles that, by the time you’re done figuring out where you stand on the BT brinjal and infant mortality, you’ve no space left in your head to work out if a pop record is any good or not.

Weekending

The smartest thing the minds behind the Bacardi NH7 Weekender do is to cut the festival up into bite-sized pieces: instead of a single, vast, dust-ridden field, you get six manageable, more or less isolated gigs running all at once. This works for a number of reasons. When the programmers at NH7 book their acts, they do it from across the board: you have everything from acoustic balladry to dancehall, from indie to novelty fusion. Separating it by theme is not only a bit of clever space management, it also weeds the neo-hippies from the scrappy indie kids, the EDM bum-wigglers from the weepy folk-music waifs, and the metalheads from everybody else. As a punter, you get to make up your own listing as you go along. As a performer, you aren’t burdened with having to pull a whole stadium’s worth of crowd. The fact of it is, few of bands the bands on the roll have any particularly sizeable following: the Weekender turns this marvellously to its advantage, and gives you six cosy, tidily done festivals for the price of one.

Unzip my Body

Give the crazy old girl her due. Roisin Murphy has walked the thin line between weird and saleable with astonishing skill for nigh on twenty years now, and if she’s decided that squeaky-clean floor-fillers are her thing, at this point she can be forgiven.

Back Down, Michael, She’s Not as Horny as You Are, so Learn to Live with it.

Okay, this is the perfect song. It’s the best song ever written, and the best take on it ever done, and you lot can’t see it because you’re such a bunch of sad-faced dullards, whining and moaning all the time about how nothing works etc. etc.; the fact of it is, none of you recognise class when you see it, which is why you’ll always be unlaid and miserable.

Stepping Back from the Weekender

This is a photograph from last Friday night. The occasion is a “pre-party” event for the NH7 Weekender, which happens in Bangalore this coming weekend. The four people you see on stage are Adam & the Fish-Eyed Poets, who are responsible for one of the best albums I’ve heard this year. The three others are the crowd.

The Joke’s on You, NME

I knew this would be bad; as it happens, it’s worse. Half a year ago, groups and their managers, self-appointed local music pundits, and all manner of alt-culture hangers-on swooned in grateful joy as that pillar of the international music press, the NME, washed up on these shores to start an Indian website. A perfect match, you’d think: a scene full of insecure dickheads dying to have their existence acknowledged, and a brand that’s willing to sell what credibility it has left down the river to stay in business. The presence of a name magazine does wonders to preserve the cosy delusion that Indian pop is “thriving”, never mind that no one in the outside world has taken that magazine seriously in the last twenty years: the NME knows what you don’t, that the natives are desperate, and any crumb will do.

Moop City, Schmoop City – The Greatest Hits

Right, everyone: it’s time for all your secrets to be aired. I’ve spent an entire year slaving my arse off to keep you lot on your toes, but Slayer’s recent show still sold out, and the metropolitan phonies in Bangalore continue to grow goatees at the ends of their chins, so all this has obviously not been a thumping success. But – in the spirit of lighting a little candle – I intend to go on trying to hammer the correct way of thinking into your unreceptive skulls, even if cool of any kind seems terminally beyond you.