Music on vnykmshr

Tangled Up in Blue

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Dylan does something with perspective that nobody else has figured out. First person becomes third person mid-verse. The timeline folds. You’re never sure who’s talking, and it doesn’t matter, because the feeling is consistent even when the narrator isn’t.

He said it himself – he was trying to deal with the concept of time, and the way characters shift between first and third person. “But as you look at the whole thing it really doesn’t matter.” That’s the line that made me pay attention differently. Most songwriters build a story. Dylan builds a space and lets you wander through it.

Naagin

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The problem with most Indian rock is that it’s rock that happens to be played by Indians. Western structures, Western tone, maybe a tabla dropped in for colour. Fusion as a costume.

Decibel’s “Naagin” is something else. It sounds like it grew out of this soil. The Lady Cobra – pulled straight from mythology, not as decoration but as the spine of the song. The riff has weight. The vocal has bite. It doesn’t ask permission to be Indian and it doesn’t perform Indian-ness for a Western ear. It just is.

Fast Car

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“Fast Car” landed on me this week, and it won’t leave.

I’d heard it before – everyone has. But there’s a difference between hearing it and having it land. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing concrete has changed. But the song has been playing in my head for days, and its sentence keeps finding me: you gotta make a decision, you leave tonight or you live and die this way. I don’t have a decision to make. Not yet. The song knows something I don’t.