Another Concert, and another Rant March 10, 2008

I promise I have a better article in the works, but since I’m trying to keep regular with posts I’ve got to push out something… Another weekend, another concert. Arguably this is college life; going to second rate concerts to try and glean off some musical taste, establish contacts, and then form an army to take over the world (with music and harmony). But this concert was particularly bad. So bad that we walked out half way through.

Snippets:

Rewinding a bit, I had gone to a friend’s room (Lollipop) to try and learn how to play the bass for my hostel’s band. There was an I.P. (notice) of a concert “Lever Fever” put up somewhere in campus, and it so happened that Lollipop and Co. had a plan to go. I was generally interested (in fact I had planned to cycle there alone and plod around in my loneliness) and was assimilated into the somewhat large group. Unfortunately, we were in a hurry, and I had to leave in my sweat pants.

Granted I really don’t care about my public appearance, but going to a more or less posh area of town in what are essentially jammies is a bit discomforting. The fact that the group consisted entirely of seniors who I didn’t really know didn’t help. We discover that this thing is being held in a plot on the beach side; the giveaway: a man standing in a suit painted like a thermometer (and a lungi :-D). The concert was apparently held to spread awareness that Fair and Lovely contains mercury and that’s poisoning the environment. This point was driven home by a number of really bad skits acted out miserably. The troupe called themselves the “Corny Brigade” or something. Evidently they knew they were corny, but I don’t think they quite understood the magnitude.

The first band we caught (which was not the first band to play) had a good keyboardist/vocalist… and nothing else. They played some nice Beatles/Lennon covers. The second band was more fun, playing some Aerosmith. I don’t generally like classic rock (gets dry after a while), but “Walk this Way” has got a beautiful main riff that I love (yes they covered this song). They also covered -Sweet Mona- Sweet Emotions, and played a couple of own-comps (which I regret to say weren’t very good). The last band ‘Buzz Theory’ was rumoured to be good by virtue of the fact that they qualified for Saarang’s Decibels (to the null set of readers who are not from IITM, Saarang is IITM’s cultural fest). I didn’t like them.

We left after that, and ate something near the beach. The ambience was pretty good; I can’t quite do justice to the location, but let’s say it was a large open auditorium dressed up as a roof-less room with sand as tiles. And we all were barefoot. All in all the concert sucked, meh-quality music, corny hosts, bad foot odour and me-wearing-jammies-in-public. The only good word I can put in here is that my specs were not horrendously mutilated here.

Rant

The way I’ve raped the concert, you’d think that it was my rant. Well, my actual rant isn’t so flame-broiled. I just wanted to make a humble request to anyone out there posting articles/blogging/doing anything on the web, please-oh-please capitalise your sentences, use full-stops and try to break it up into paras. There is nothing quite as daunting as looking at a humoungous blob of contiguous single-cased text, especially if you decide that it might be interesting.