The Gin Soaked Boys

It is a place where even Time stops to party. Talk of hedonistic appeal and it is brimming with it. Ganesha is prominent, so is Mahakali and I think I can discriminate the ‘Nine Inch Nails’ in the backdrop digging into the boisterous mirth. It’s a place replete with our own home grown backyard rockers, our beloved noisemakers and boss viziers of the sleaze-o-rama precincts of the rockers club. Where transients slide into cheap rooms and get awakened in the middle of the night by yelling neighbors, they are the presiding booze-hound laureates. On the proscenium stands Monish - my friend and schoolmate, we’ve known each other for years now. Monish isn’t much of a celebrity. You could meet him on the street and not feel inclined to give him a second glance. The demure looking boy who had trouble appearing for his Infosys campus interview, in his den today he’s the cynosure of every vagabond pupil, every vacant mind. They cheer as he strikes the chord on his guitar. Reminisces of Jimmy Hendrix and Joe Satriani come fleeting past. The very image of his celebrated kisser—the tattooed skull, the pierced eyebrows and the 666 t-shirt—has been enough to consign him to the bohemian backwaters of rock culture.

What is rock culture all about I wonder? It’s not the women, not even the booze, no not the drugs, definitely not money and don’t give me that shit about expression and symbolic meaning. Somehow I am inclined not to buy all that. There is something deeper and more profound to it. There has to be. For nothing superficial can drive people to such insanity, such obsession, such confusion, and such illusions – a life of no comprehension and resurrection.

Rock beat is not intrinsically sexual or evil, or maybe it is. Works of art, including musical art, seldom convey a direct or explicit moral message. For this reason, the morality of art is extremely hard to discuss. Various kinds of art may have a tendency to stimulate us, to portray evil in a positive light, or to communicate an alternative understanding of reality. But because the message is almost never as clear and direct as an argument, different people can receive music in different ways, and precise lines are difficult to draw. Even among those with similar values, problems with works of art often induce consensus only at the extremes.

Rock groups consistently convey a false or otherwise evil message in their lyrics, their gestures i.e. smashing of guitars evil depicting signs loudness of music and distortion of human voice what we call growling etc. While this is by no means universal in rock music, it is probably characteristic of a larger and the more famous portion of rock than of most other genres. It is common to encounter rock lyrics obsessed with narcissism, anger, and rejection of authority, despair, destruction, sex, drugs, paganism, and Satanism.

It is clear that “rock culture” is a manifestation of the evil, which is incorporated into the public personae of many groups (whether for deliberate moral or merely business reasons). Young people, who are necessarily impressionable, are more likely to perceive rock culture in which ugliness and evil are so often “popular”, “awesome”, “honest”, and even “profound”. Objectivity can wait for the next morning; at present it is the ‘Rockers’ who rule, the evil who plays the fool and ‘Gin Soaked Boys’ who drool. Ain't it cool?