A New Culture of
Dissent against Counterculture.
A recent Saturday supplement of a leading English daily had a write-up on a Delhi based band
Antariksh formed by three young members
who had given up their well paid corporate jobs to take to music as their profession.
This is more common in the South where well qualified engineers, software
professionals and even doctors have taken to Carnatic music as their preferred
vocation. The famous violin maestro
L.Subramaniam who studied for medicine switched to music to create compositions
in orchestral fusion which is a blend of Carnatic and Western music. Antariksh band is the first among Rock bands whose
three members, with an overriding passion for music have switched over from the
corporate world to the creative world of performing arts. The band, according to one of its members, attempts
to produce modern, edgy and eclectic sounds which would resonate both with themselves
as well as with the masses. The themes of their compositions are about emotions
that we encounter in our daily lives- ‘emotions such as hope, greed, identity
crisis, confusion – emotions that anyone in contemporary times can identify with.
The band seeks to present a new sub genre to Hindi music, produced for, of and by
modern generation. Coming from the corporate world, the trio turns up in formal
dress as they believe it enhances their personality and stage presence and
makes people take them seriously.
It is this idea of formal
dressing that distinguishes these young men from other music bands with their
casual, rugged appearance which has almost become a signifier for anything
modern. This fashion started in the ‘50s
and the ‘60s of the last century heralding
the arrival of hippies who represented
liberal counterculture in US and in UK and which later spread to Europe and
other countries of the world. The hippie movement opposed all traditional mores
of behavior, dressing, music and dance and preferred a return to back-to- nature life style, vehemently
denouncing all formal and established
values and advocating a culture of dissent that coincided with the early 20th
century movement of “Make Everything New”. Hippie fashion and values had a
major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film,
literature, and the arts. Since the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have
been assimilated by mainstream society and one of them is adopting a rugged,
casual look that is a mockery of everything associated with elegance and being
prim and proper in manners, dress and expression. To be free and not be stifled
with social decorum and moral codes has been at the root of Hippyism. Hippies of the post-‘50s
of the 20th Century perceived the then prevalent culture as a corrupt,
domineering entity that exercised undue power over their lives, and championed freedom
and liberation from it. Hippie
movement was basically a youth movement characterized by
unconventional dress and behavior, opposition
to war, advocating peace
and love, and having liberal
attitudes towards sexuality, the use
of marijuana and psychedelic
drugs- in short rebellion against any code or value in the name of tradition, which can be best summed up as one of cultural
dissent.
The hippie movement has declined
in the last few decades though its
legacy is seen in social protests such as the gay movement, the feminist
movement, its adoption of live-in culture as opposed to marriage as a
sanctified institution etc. The vestiges of the hippie movement can be seen
today in clothing and accessories, in personal
appearance that distinctly oppose the well groomed types. All music bands today play to frenzied crowds
of young people, rock and psychedelic music, that has evolved into new musical
genres such as heavy metal and rap music. The singers and composers on stage have
rugged and shaggy appearances, dressed in informal and casual attires. Today there is no sense of formal dressing (with
the exception of corporate employees). We see students in colleges and
universities seeking a distinct generational identity by putting on weird and
bizarre clothes and sporting an unkempt look. As early as 1975, as a student in
UK, I was shocked to see professors dressed most casually in shorts and
unironed jeans and shirtsleeves and there was not much difference between the
teacher and the taught in matters sartorial. Aping the West is a part of our
genotype and I am not surprised to see the new sartorial get up of college
teachers in faded and worn out jeans and unwashed wrap-ons, indistinguishable
from that of the students. In many ways, it has eroded respect for the teachers
as they are not taken seriously. Shakespeare’s line “the apparel oft proclaims the
man” which in modern times is expressed as “the cloth makes the man” is truer today than ever before. Teachers want to look young and modern and
prefer to merge with the young crowd with no distinct identity of their own. As
a result, teachers have not been able to enforcestudents’ compliance to
academic work and institutional regulations. They have become indistinct as one
among a faceless crowd. Group coherence
is the blight of modernity.
A recent Harvard Study calls the approach to casualness as the
red-sneaker effect practiced by a few who wear informality on the skin and
violate the office dress code as one way of standing out among the conservative
conformists to express their self-confidence, power and status. The Harvard study cites the examples of Mark
Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as successful tie-droppers who carried their
intentional casualness with aplomb and self assurance. But the important
question is how many Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates do we find among the casual dressers
and how many are there who go beyond casual
wear and make casualness the pivot of achievement? The shaggy haired, unkempt
looks in a bizarre outfit cannot make them Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, as
their style does not make any impactful statement. You cannot climb up the social
and professional ladder only by casual wear. Substance can make the style, but
not style, the substance.
Antariksh band is a revolution among music bands who have understood
that too much of casualness in appearance trivializes serious import of any
kind. The band in its formal elegance seems to go counter to the counter
revolutionary culture that has now slowly waning to become a period fad. The consumer
society is adding its might to beckon young men and women to splurge in elegant
wear, well groomed looks, neat and tidy appearances and hopefullythis will bring back a little more beauty and order
in a world that had forgotten what it is to live life gracefully and
tastefully. Nostalgic? Maybe true, but
therein lies the spark for change.
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