Friday, July 30, 2010

Heavy Metal at IIT Madras

Before coming to IIT Madras, i saw 'Saarang' advertisement in VH1 and i said ...there is more to IIT Madras than just academics. I found from my cousins and others, there is a lot of metal culture here... and a lot of hip hop too ! Hip hop and RnB apart from some numbers suck, because they literally demean women in most of their videos( but that is not what I wanna talk about, they can do what they want).
When I was in first year, there was only one shredder who ruled,that was JDK ...and there has never been anyone like him since then. He ripped Satriani on his guitar ... had underground jamming sessions and i liked it. 7x was also good ( my wm coord in first year) but he liked liter side of music... he could play Slash.Since then there was no one ... all Hendrix, Deep Purple like musicians... NO metal what so ever. I couldn't find any gas in "smoke on the water" what many people just loved, to be frank. Metal was dead in our IIT.
I missed what I wanted. I wanted something so evil and satanic that only few can stand it. I wanted people to appreciate something which talks about everything from politics to death to love to everything else. No one played likes of Iron Maiden, Anthrax ,Slayer, Pantera ,Megadeth, Metallica,Testament and that was so pissing, though all head banged in Saarang.
Till last semester there wasn't much buzz on metal. Then I played "Slayer" this Saarang. The response at WM Group was amazing and I loved.
I loved it because it was totally metal. We played Sabbath,Metallica,Alice in Chains... Pony played SOAD,Metallica...Sapola played Opeth and rest added too.
It wasn't about winning WM for me ... (thankfully one metal performance was amongst the top 3) ...Its about moshing together, its about sending a message of 'brotherhood', its something sublime.
Last night playing Motorhead, GnR (etc) and seeing mates headbanging, was Nirvana for me. There are breed of second/third year metalheads, who are mad about Megadeth, Cannibal Corpse, Meshuggah and it pacifies me to the core to see this love for metal in these teenagers.
Once visited by a '74 alumnus while jamming one of Pantera song for WM, he said,"We loved Zepelin , Sabbath,Floyd in those days... and people used to play it !". Then we had couple of toast to music and ourselves.I feel METAL is back and hopefully will rule Insti for years to come.
Metal Rules
I wish bands like Judas Priest,Slayer, Sabbath, Megadeth be played in IIT \m/.
-metalhead