Do I Even Like Rock Anymore?!

Rock and roll is why I play music today. It’s that simple. I got introduced to music in general in 2007/2008 from my middle school best friend Jason. He grew up with classic rock in the house (Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Rush, Guns N Roses, the usual suspects) and introduced me to a lot of it. At the time, his favorite Zeppelin tune was Kashmir, but that could change on any given day. Due to my Indian background, I grew up hearing Carnatic and 70’s and 80’s Indian film music at the time. I hardly heard American music, despite growing in America my entire life. Hearing rock and roll was so fascinating to me and I started listening to it more parallel to the music I’d heard at the time on the radio (T-Pain’s “Buy U A Drank”, Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat” and Flo Rida’s “Low”… ’07 was a time okay).

I got a Sansa Sandisk music player that only had 128MBor 512MB and I hit the usually citrus based downloaders to get songs. At this time, I also got into Rock Band and started hearing music from bands like The Strokes, The Killers, Coheed and Cambria, and Soundgarden. All of this was a massive revelation for me and it drove me to asking my parents to buy me a drumset so I could be just like Jason, who also had taken lessons for maybe 2-3 months at the time. After being promptly told no, Jason mentioned guitar, and I blindly picked it up, took lessons, and here we are. Throughout that 14 year time span, I’ve learned so much about music, and a lot about Rock music.

About 3 weeks ago, I got a chance to see one of the bands that molded my guitar playing style, Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was really excited to see them, especially with Frusciante back in the band. But I remember standing there thinking “Do I even like Rock music?” It was an interesting question to ask because I’ve always defined myself by my rock knowledge, and music knowledge in general. As do my friends. I tried relistening to artists that I loved when I was younger and artists that are out now and nothing…hits me? Nothing is capturing that feeling of awe and amazement that I had hearing Boston’s Peace of Mind for the first time, or Yes’s “Heart of the Sunrise” on vinyl and hearing that bass run that Chris Squire does.

As I’ve written this post, I’ve been listening to Muse’s new album “Will of the People” and while it sounds fresh, I just don’t feel compelled to write or talk about it. One thing I noticed is that once I graduated college in 2016, I started getting into Singer Songwriter music more through the guitar. As a result, I found that I use my guitar more as a tool to accomplish a task vs “this instrument is meant for rock music”. It sounds silly, because of course it’s a tool to play music of any genre. Jim Root, Julien Baker, Keith Richards, Tom Morello and john 5 all play Telecaster guitars, but all play vastly different genres of music. I digress.

I do also wonder if rock music doesn’t appeal to me so much because I find that I’m not hearing artists being raw or pushing the genre or the lack of collaborations. From 2016 onwards, I really dug into hip hop music and one of the greatest things about hip hop is the concept of collaboration. Whether it’s Nas working with Outkast or El-P working with Killer Mike. The act of hip hop being a community really appealed to me and I really enjoyed the camaraderie I was seeing. This is the beginning. I’m going to review and examine these classic rock albums and see what they make me feel. I’m specifically going to be looking at albums I haven’t heard of or listened to yet because I found quite a few gaps in my classic rock knowledge, despite covering and playing plenty of songs. We’ll see how this goes!