That thump called ROCK

For Rabbi Shergill, The Joshua Tree by U2 is the original alternative album
This album, with Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA, laid the foundation of whatever it was that I was to going to become later. This album has layers that I’ve been exfoliating for 19 years and still I’m nowhere near done. I could write a thesis on the various aspects of this album—the production of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, the superlative guitar playing of The Edge, Bono’s lyric writing that mixes doggerel, gospel and that endearing self-importance, his unapologetic Irish accent, the band’s alternative-ness much before Kurt Cobain ever held a guitar in his hand, not to mention the absolutely top-notch musicianship of Adam and Larry. But overall it just rolls up into this thing called rock music with all its multifarious implications —self-expression, rebellion, intense passion and the loud thump of a hyper-alive human heart permeating the air.

The song that I first fell in love with was Red Hill Mining Town. Bono seemed a messiah leading his trampled people into paradise, his searing voice cutting like a scythe through the bush. I wanted to be that hero. I wanted trampled people of my own to lead. Now that I look back, I find it a wee bit precocious but I think I made the subtle appreciation that he was not compromising his Irish-ness but rather turning it into the centrepiece of his art. He was local and global all at once. This appreciation would later be my saviour in the crazy years of the onset of my youth. When the vampire-world of globalised, homogenised environs of Delhi University, my band, MBA institute and beautiful lost girls would beckon me to join it. I’d join them for a while but always return to the familiarity of the sweat and grime of daarji’s and my dadi–bhabhi’s peasant world. I became aware that magic was happening right here and now.

And what can I possibly add to the reams already written about the importance and brilliance of the first three tracks on this album —Where The Streets Have No Name, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, With Or Without You? Suffice to say I’ve poached them and skinned them, draped ’em on my shoulders and hung ’em on my wall. Then there’s the haunting Running To Stand Still. I didn’t know what was Bono banging on about then and don’t know now! All I know is it grabs me by my prostate every time! In the end, it seems to me to be a living monument to the exaggerated self-importance that is rock music. The ballast with which modernity and its detritus, anonymity, balances itself.