Forming a band is like a cakewalk these days or it’s better
to say forming a band is considered as a cakewalk these days. Now you don’t
have to give advertisement in newspaper like Lars Ulrich and wait for a legend
like James Hatfield to respond. Thanks to the online platform which has made
everything easy, but because of the ease of things, things have become approachable
for even those people who still need a lot of time to get involved in to certain
things. Let us take the example of book publishing, which is almost similar to
forming band these days in terms of online platform. The traditional method of
publishing involved sending a hardcopy of your manuscript through a post office,
after which you have to wait for 7-8 months for the reply from the publishing
house. But with the help of self-publishing through online medium, you just
have to pay a certain amount of money and without any rejection you get
published in 4-5 months. Isn’t that great? Yes, but due to the overcrowded
authors, anyone I mean anyone is publishing books these days due to which some
of the masterpiece self-published book gets overcasted.
Now let’s talk about the Indian scenario of forming bands.
Most of the bands in India are formed in colleges because college widens your
area of options and allows you to meet with different kind of people who have a
different mindset and skills. This is the time when we are free from any
obligation and get ample amount of time to spread our wings of innovation. That’s
why there is so much involvement in fests and other extracurricular activities
in college. Spreading your wings of innovation and passion is a good thing, but
the thing which matters the most is how high you can fly with those wings.
Let us take an example of a first year college student who
has just started learning guitar and during the first fest of the college, he saw
some awesome performances in a Rock show (the most used name for band’s competition).
Now he is motivated to form a band and instead of improving his skills on
guitar, he starts searching for band members and as usual, he gets them with
the help of few posts and friends. Now, as we know, a mature musician will
never work with a learner in a band, so the guitarist in our example must have
got band members of his level only. They will start jamming, and will be having
fun, but there are maximum chances that none of them will be having any information
about sound, song structure, stage act, and many other things which are
required for a band. At the end, they
will get into a competition, perform (which will not be good) and return home.
These types of bands contribute to a major section of bands that
are limited to their college only because they don’t see music as their life. They
just want to perform, post pictures on FB, get 500 likes, love being called as
Rockstar by friends, love buying costly kits. Even if such kinds of band
improve with the advancement of time but still after the end of the college,
they will join the corporate world and will post old memories on FB of live
performance with a caption “miss those days”. I mean, come on, it’s your life,
you make decisions in your life. The way in which you decided to do MBA, the
way in which you decided to join the sector of your choice, you could have
decided to continue your band, but band was the thing which got girls for you,
got likes on FB, made you unique from the crowd and that’s all you wanted.
Now the above mentioned case was of an amateur musician, but
there are many great college bands in India who perform very well, win many gigs,
are very mature musicians, but still after the completion of college, the band
is queued in the waiting section of to do list. Do you know why such situation
arises with even good bands? This is because continuing a band in India is not lucrative
passion at all. It doesn’t give you a 6 digit salary at the start of every
month, it doesn’t give you respect among relatives, it doesn’t keep the
expectation level of your parents up to the mark. I have a massive respect for
those people who continue their band even after college because it needs lots
of dedication and hard work. You keep on performing, recording OCs, Jamming,
travelling from one city to another for many years and that too without being
paid enough. But that’s the way it is.
In my own college only, there was a time when there were
almost 24 bands, but now only 2-3 active bands today and the other 20 bands
adjusted themselves to the expectation of society and family. That’s what
happens to those people who consider music as a part time course which gets completed
with the end of college but all the musicians need to understand that music is
life time course which continues in the heart of listeners even after your
death.
No comments:
Post a Comment