Homecoming

post oh-one for year oh-nine...
haven't been blogging for a while since i have been taking to heart something a friend of mine once asked, "u write when u are all cranky...u never write nice things"...
so i figured i will wait until i find something nice to write about for once. the counter-argument was always on that if i did write something nice, it probably would not be true.

counter-counter-argument now is that no body really cares if i write cranky stuff or not...at least not the readers of this blog (who can be counted on the fingers of a man with a hand that is missing some fingers...)

intellectual arguments soon devolve to ineffectual arguments for me. so i will not counter the counter-counter one...(hey you coders out there, does blogger have a counter that validates the counts of my args? don't get upset all u syntax and code gurus...its just me blabbering again!)

so yeah...having rambled on a good while...lemme see if i can somehow reach the meat of what i am trying to say...

of late life has been boring to a horrifying degree...life had nothing to look forward to...nothing to look back and reminisce nostalgically (not entirely true since the past is always beautiful even if it was every bit as ugly then as the present is now...rose tinted one way glasses if you can call it that)...

so here i sit with seven novels that i intend to read (actually have begun three and suspended them animatedly)...
also am idling with two dvds from netflix as yet unseen and thrity-two more in queue...not to forget the nine that are on instant queue (again begun three and suspended animatedly)
i look at my collection of nearly five thousand six hundred songs every now and then and listen to one, two or three songs at a time that grab my fancy...

music is the one place i have found something to interest me these days. having discovered on online radio station thanks to my buddy who sent me the link, i have been discovering music and i am seeing a lot of links between bands, i read them up on wikipedia, vicariously live out their lives and listen to their songs as they occurred in points of their lives. its heady at times...

one of the direct consequences of the slacker revolution has been my immersion into grunge, alternative metal, speed metal, thrash metal and death metal in that approximate order.

so in what is the first of, something i hope to be my series of posts over the next uncertain days, months or (hopefully not) years, is my discussion to myself about grunge.

grunge/alternative metal are used interchangeably and mostly point to the sound of the seattle four who began it in the late 80s to the early 90s. before getting into the details of the seattle four (i came up with this imaginative term...the wiki-able term would probably be seattle sound), lets look at what led to the grunge movement in music.

the late 70s to early 80s of contemporary music devolved into glam rock and glam metal bands who were more concerned with their make-up eye-shadow and glitter than a modern day katy perry/britney spears...and these are men we are talking about...and the less that is said about their lyrical content the better...glorified by such masterpieces as "iiiiii...wanna rock n roll all night.....paaarty every dayyyy" over and over about 100 times in a 4 minute song overloaded with six guitars, a heavy drum kit, two to three vocalists and an insufferable keyboard player (personally no metal band should ever have a keyboard player no matter how cool avial sounds...)

needless to say some people had enough of these preening corporate puppets who churned out mindless album after album. the mid 80s saw the rise of a seattle based band known as soundgarden with a radically distorted guitar played by kim thayil (yep expat mallu in the works...) and furious four octave vocalist chris cornell. soundgarden had several abstract songs and music arrangements that had not been heard of back in the day and the fans who were looking for an iota of feeling in their music gravitated towards this seattle sound.

soundgarden lay a platform upon which a phenomenal new band stood and shone brighter than any other...nirvana...led by a tragic hero in the lines of jim morrison of the doors, kurt cobain was the god of grunge. his strangled vocals trapped the angst of a generation as he sang about love and loss. to this day i get goosebumps when i hear his voice on the radio.

close on the heels of nirvana followed anothe seattle band pearl jam with eddie vedder providing his own howling crazy vocals to back his angst ridden lyrics. there was even a trash talking war were kurt dismissed eddie and jam as being grunge rip-offs feeding of the nirvana success.

pearl jam however has remained alive for the longest and is the one band that still has potential to churn out an album in this century.

the last of the seattle four to burst on the music scene was alice in chains...and to my uninformed mind, this band shone brightest and for the shortest time. led by another lovely singer layne staley, the trauma of their songs is fresh to anyone who has felt alive and thus has felt pain at some time in their lives...

its of layne and curt that i will speak the most here simply because i wiki'd them the most and they are the only ones who are dead now...eddie and chris continue to make music in some form or shape to this day...even if soundgarden is long defunct and pearl jam is almost irrelevant...

both layne and kurt were born in sixty-seven, with kurt being the older. both had troubled childhoods with separated parents and traumatized school lives...both spiraled into drug addictions that played its part in their demise...both were uncomfortable in their own celebrity which may or may not have driven them deeper into their addictions...kurt blew his brains out on april fifth ninteen-ninety-four at a scary young age of twenty-seven...layne dropped out of limelight and public sight soon after kurt's death and eight years to the day, was found in his apartment dead from an overdose of cocaine and heroin on april fifth two-thousand-two...

eerie similarities apart, to me layne's addiction and devolution was more painful to even read about since the man clearly understood what it was doing to him and was powerless to stop it...whereas kurt seems to have depended on his addiction to release his pain from the real world.

its easy to dismiss both people as having taken the easy way out and not faced life. and we can even take some pride in ourselves not resorting to any debilitating addictions to handle our own messed up lives...but i feel we ought to acknowledge their struggle and take some inspiration from their pain and handle ourselves in the best way we can which does not hurt us or the ones we care about....friends, family and well wishers...

if i am not really making much sense, just go on and listen to a few songs by nirvana and alice in chains...make up your own mind about how you feel about them...and how you feel about me...

for now i am just soaking in music as i let life glide along its unhindered path...
nirvana - come as you are
nirvana - the man who sold the world
nirvana - where did you sleep last night
nirvana - all apologies
nirvana - basically grab the mtv unplugged album for nirvana...solid gold

alice in chains - rotten apple
alice in chains - nutshell (my personal favourite...very dear to me)
alice in chains - man in the box
alice in chains - angry chair
alice in chains - same rule as for nirvana...grab the mtv unplugged album...gold.

p.s - some of you dear readers do not like this kind of music...and that's fine....i still love you all...