REBELLION NEVER SOUNDED SO GROOVY
Courtesy: Ishaan Suri
This band is taking on everything from Modi to misogyny with a trendy beat as the soundtrack.
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Stefan Kaye, founder and keyboardist of The Ska Vengers
I moved to India simply because the weather was nice. I was fed up with the grey skies at home in the UK and wanted something more challenging. I wanted to go to a place I had never been before and see what would happen. When I first arrived in Delhi in 2006, I didn’t know anyone. I met drummer Nikhil Vasudevan soon after and we decided to start a band because we were disappointed with the state of music at the time. Most bands were doing covers and there was not a lot of originality. We eventually put together a band featuring Delhi Sultanate (whom I spotted reading poetry on TV), leader singer Begum X (I watched her in a musical production), Tony Guinard from France, and Chaz.
We were Emperor Minge for quite some time before we became The Ska Vengers. The music we were performing was quite complex and required intense rehearsals. As light relief, we would just jam on a ska beat and we ended up including one of those songs in a set. At some point, we figured we should probably start a ska band because that kind of music didn’t really exist anymore and very few people had heard of it.
Apart from changing the guitarist, we were the same musicians from the old band. At one of our first gigs as The Ska Vengers, we initially played as Emperor Minge in white pyjamas, went off stage, changed into our suits, and returned to the stage as a completely different band.
Courtesy: Ishaan Suri
Courtesy: The Ska Vengers Facebook page
We’ve named ourselves The Ska Vengers but I wouldn’t say we’re a ska band. We like to be different, while taking inspiration from different genres that we’ve been exposed to. These are as diverse as reggae, Latin, hip-hop, punk and jazz. There is no one word describes our genre apart from the fact that it is dance-based music.
Our first album, which was self-titled, released in 2012. Our first music video featured the track ‘Rough and Mean’, which dealt with misogyny in society. Delhi Sultanate writes our lyrics. He’s a social activist of sorts, so most of his lyrics are informed by what many consider to be injustice. Delhi Sultanate brought that sensibility to our music, which was nice because it took me back to post-punk era which questioned the system.
Our music is aimed at enabling people to think and question, and not accept everything the state-sponsored media tell us. It’s good to get people to question the status quo and do it with a trendy beat. We like the idea of doing dance-friendly music that’s also fun to watch. We love to put on a show, and we wanted to do something in English which would have international appeal while addressing issues on a larger scale.
“She want it rough, she want it mean
She want it rough, she want it mean
She don’t want it soft, she want it extreme
Plus, she never cook, she never clean”
Two years before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, we reworked the classic 60s Ska song ‘A Message To You, Rudy’ into ‘Modi, A Message To You’. In the video, we asked the animation artists to model Modi like a caricature. Instead of what people would expect, we made him look cute. I thought that actually made him look more sinister, but it actually shows you how you can manipulate people by coming across as this kindly uncle. The video shows him with a grin on his face while wreaking havoc, running away from reporters and not being answerable.
We first performed the song at an event in Delhi to mark the tenth anniversary of the 2002 Godhra riots. It was a benefit for the victims of the tragedy and the reaction was heartening. The audience didn’t understand the words but caught the chorus and knew we were on their side. People were happy what we were not afraid to sing about an event that had done irreparable damage to their lives.
“Stop your fooling around
Messing up our future
Time to straighten right out
You should have wound up in jail
Modi, A message to you.”
In 2011, I spent three weeks in Delhi’s Tihar Jail in connection with a visa technicality. My stint there deeply affected me and made me reevaluate my thinking. I sincerely believe that a lot of people who were imprisoned didn’t deserve to be there, and yet their lives were destroyed. They were people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, people who were branded Maoists despite negligible evidence.
Before leaving, I made a request to return and perform for the inmates in the same ward where I was imprisoned. We held a concert where the in-house band performed as well, and we raised Rs 2 lakh to buy musical instruments for the inmates. I believe that if people are able to express themselves through art or a similar medium, they are less likely to turn violent. We utimately want to develop a proper musical tuition programme at the jail.
Courtesy: The Ska Vengers Facebook page
“But all my people – now this is a warning
Things cannot go on like this because they sell out life and things are not going right
So whether you want to dance to the government lies
Or wake up, tune in and switch off your TV
and vare idiot business them a promote – people this is Ska Vengers”
We later took on the establishment again in ‘Badda’, which was our take on media propaganda and on how the government and corporates are hand-in-glove. We took topics that were in the news and put a different spin by exaggerating it a bit in the news ticker, with headlines such ‘Bumper crop in Maharashtra; 12 farmers die of mirth’. The video also had footage of people being brutalised by security forces and of houses being burned down for mining companies to plunder the land. We wanted to address these issues through satire. When we did not get censor board approval, we decided to put it up on YouTube instead.
Our next video ‘Frank Brazil’ had the right-wingers confused, because we, the anti-national foreign scum, paid homage to one of their heroes. The story of Udham Singh, the revolutionary who assassinated a British official who had endorsed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, intrigued us and we wanted to write a murder ballad while exploring the themes of urban dissatisfaction and dissent. If Udham Singh was alive today, he would be an enemy of this state in which there isn’t much space for free thinkers. Instead, he’s been appropriated by right-wing elements. We find it very strange that such figures are admired by the very people who might have repressed them in another age.
“Shot him with my 6 chamber
Zetland by his side
Stood there looking at him
While he wallowed down and died
Now I’m on my journey to a Brixton prison cell
Tell the judge and jury that I did my time well
Judge, judge, lordy judge
Send me to the ‘lectric chair”
In countries where freedom of speech was under siege, musicians used to resort to metaphors to show their dissent. In India, a lot of artists are afraid of speaking out for fear of reprisals. We wanted to put the message out that if we can do it, then so can you. We’re still here; we haven’t been gagged. No one’s been able to shut us up. We feel that the message we put out is for the good of the nation. We’re anti-nationalist, not anti-national.
We have received death threats but we don’t worry about them. Arundhati Roy once invited us to perform at her book launch and the event was ransacked by Kashmiri Pandits who tried to destroy our equipment and we were bundled off stage. Despite what many people claim, we love the country. We just don’t like the government.
I think it’s ironic in some way that we dress conservatively in suits on stage while challenging conservative notions. But we think it works well for us, even though a lot of people think it looks like we arrived straight from work and didn’t want to change clothes before the gig.
AS TOLD TO SIDDESH SHETTY
Courtesy: Zacharie Rabehi