Hariharasudhan’s Reviews > If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai: A Conducted Tour of India > Status Update

"If a band could play something exactly as it was on tape, the consensus was that they must be good. But after a period of proving themselves this way, most bands became a little more ambitious, and a day would come when they’d go up on stage during a college festival and introduce a song with the dreaded words, ‘This is an original composition.’ Almost always, these originals were listless pastiches of the covers the band played, the lyrics apparently not about anything at all. These were skilled musicians, but their chosen form seemed to preclude any real engagement with their own lives or the lives of their audience. This was most evident in the Death Metal bands, where you might have a good Hindu boy growling menacingly about his affinity for Satan. This was a cargo-cult, a mimicking of someone else’s rebellion."