The Attack of the MTV Generation: The Alternate 90s

Imagine yellow and brown chequered sofas, vintage TV sets, maybe a transistor kept nearby. MTV’s 120 minutes, a cult programme back in the days, announces in an end of the year special feature that 1992 is the year of alternative rock. Dave Kendall the then host and creator of 120 Minutes declares, “I have 21 words for you. Nirvana, Chilli Poppers, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Status Quo, Morrissey, Sonic Youth, The Ministry, REM… REM is one word in case you were counting…”

India was hooked on and listening. For gone were the days where Western music (as Western goods) were exorbitantly prices or smuggled into the country. The world had gone liberal and was at their finger-tips as far as it was concerned and India had got its share of MTV. Like the rest of the world, the pulse of the nation was caught somewhere in Robyn Hitchcock’s words from that very 120 Minutes episode, “Every generation needs a bigger noise to bludgeon it, to feel something…”

India’s metal scene was growing from non-existent to a throbbing, pulsating community consuming most of the indie bands of that time, right from when Millennium the granddaddy of metal in India, came out with their full length album, for the first time in India, in 1986. Bands were mostly still playing covers of the rising greats of the Western world, many of them from Kendall’s list above. This album became a major step forward for the indie music scene for it opened up the possibility of composing, playing and recording original music. Chennai was going through a thrash metal phase with bands like Blasphemy, Bone Saw, and this continued till the latter half of the 90s and early 2000s with bands such as Kryptos and Slain ruling the roost. Things came to a peak with Amit Saigal, musician, curator of rock who brought the first major rock festival  for the public, the Indian Rock Festival which started in 1997 along with the launch of Rock Street Journal.

TV spearheaded a lot of new music collection for the 90s teen, with end of the year dance music compilation cassettes and later CDs being a must-have for Christmas/ New Year parties. While psychedelic rock and ‘disco’ cult was slowly tapering into oblivion, we had larger influences which grew into the mainstream fold. These were the suburban metal blues bands, bands from the college circuit like Prashant Nair and Oliver Pinto’s Axecalibre, Easy Meat from Pune, Holocaust, Morgue, Dorian Platonic from Assam, Grassroots Revival, Postmark, The Cannibals, Phoenix, Phynyx and Drixian Empire/Dark Crusader from Manipur.

Pentagram, the original bad boys

The mid-90s had also led to the formation of major metal bands like Pentagram and Motherjane which were to herald in a new age and a new aesthetic to the independent music culture. Metal gods from Manipur, Postmark reminisce about how the crowds would perform the ‘thabal chongba’ literally translating to ‘dancing in the moonlight’ to their metal ballads, a blend of indigenous Manipuri folk elements and metal as the world knows it. Known as the Metallica of Manipur, they opened for Metallica after a reunion in 2011, post a lot of cajoling from fans. Festivals, organised in major college campuses like the Strawberry Fields in National Law School Bangalore, led to the rise of bands like Thrienody.

Meanwhile, rock was at its theatrical best and the idea of rock had a hold on the country like never before, so much so that for a lot of us, performing in a band might still inevitably translate to ‘rock band’ for our parents. This might not necessarily have led to actual cd sales, with top bands such as Pentagram and Zero only having managed a sale of about 10000 CDs each. Indie pop was suffering a similar fate with independent artists having to shift to Bollywood due to a lack of sponsors and major record labels backing them. Of course, Sunita Rao had descended on the scene with songs like Paree Hoon Mai, Kesariya Hai Roop Maaro, and these were often accompanied with what might seem corny but were great hits of the current generation’s childhood, with crazy costumes – silver jazz pants and ornate Rajasthani folk costumes, a preoccupation of a lot of music video costumes and mise en scene in that period. (It can be agreed that it culminated to the iconic setting and costume of Malaika’s Chhaiyya Chhaiyya, so no one’s complaining.) Then there was Lucky Ali with his O Sanam, Sonu Nigam with Deewana, Silk Route with Dooba Dooba and Sabse Peeche Hum Khade, Anamika, Shaan, Falguni Pathak, Raageshwari, Vikas Bhalla, Anamika among our other burgeoning pop stars. Euphoria hit the scene around the mid-nineties with their debut album Dhoom.

Rabbi Shergill, the Indian indie sound

Remixes were a direct descendant of pop videos, with  Bally Sagoo, Biddu, Rabbi Shergill and Daler Mehendi  ruling the roost from weddings to pop music charts on television. Popular Bollywood songs were remixed to sometimes astonishing and at other times horrifying outcomes.

It was a time of experiment, a time of venturing out to try new things and the 90s remained a period of change, from the jaded rock scene of the past decades. The sound was new, the format was new, and thanks to the amount of screen time pop stars got on television through music channels and otherwise they became celebrities in their own right. This even begot the hugely popular television show Popstars, one of the first reality shows on TV which gave birth to the all-girl band Viva.

The 90s might often be written off as a period which gave a lot of importance to music that was commercially viable at the expense of independent music, but the fact remains that the boom in the independent scene that we witness currently was a result of the foundational experiments conducted by the then independent artists and ‘popstars’.