Let's Rock n' Roll

In this past week, something has awakened the old rocker in me. It might have been that I had to restore my laptop and download my music to iTunes again, that was when I decided that my cluttered library is preventing me from actually listening to music. I forced myself to fill it with only five albums and put in more only once I have listened to them enough times, the choice was difficult!

I decided after contemplating for a couple of hours (yes I seem to have a lot of time on my hands) on a list that included:

AC/DC: Back in Black

B.B. King and Eric Clapton: Riding with the King

The Beatles: Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band

Bob Dylan: Greatest Hits

Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand

Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin I

Metallica: The Black Album

The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street

You will have noticed that I have cheated, it was like picking your favourite child, and I have left many of my children abandoned in a lonely hard disk drive. Those abandoned included my extensive collection of jazz, all the blues, and more rock and roll. When I finally gazed at my music for the coming days, I could not help but wonder what made me include only rock and metal on my iPod!

I haven’t always been a big fan of rock, actually, coming from Syria and growing up in the nineties, Arabic pop music was all we listened to with the odd old English song on the second Syrian TV channel with Lionel Richie or Madonna in a 10 years old music video. I was only introduced to rock when I was in university by Fateh and his gang.

Fateh was one of the more eccentric students in the school of medicine in Damascus. He had long hair, wore rock bands t-shirts, and talked about nothing but Slayer, Metallica, and Sepultura; to add to the wackiness, he was an two metres tall Goliath with a baby face you just couldn’t take seriously when he was trying to act like a bad ass.

He became a good friend, we knew that there is no way we could reconcile our differences in almost anything, let alone music; but he made me listen to a large dose to my taste of heavy metal. I told him that I did not like the aggression and pessimism of the music, he told me that I did not understand it.

Only years later, I read the lyrics of Master of Puppets and it blew me away. They were talking about drugs, and not in a fond way either. The song is a chilling image of how drugs take over a person’s life and turns him into a slave, and it is probably the most effective and original anti-drug message I know of. I wish more health messages we create can be as popular as this one.

This lead me to listen to much more rock beyond my old time beloved Beatles, and threw me in a sea of great music. Now, I run to Guns N’ Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle and Paradise City, keep awake on long drives with AC/DC live album, and even relax with Nirvana.

Rania told me today when I tried to force her to listen to Led Zeppelin’s album that she actually liked the music but hated that they shouted all the time; she preferred less screeching and more singing. She is right normally, but I think that some things have to be screamed out loud and that St. Anger has to find an outlet in our lives that uses headphones rather than fists, but that is only me.

Thank you Fateh, you’re the man.

And here are your (more than) 500 words for today.

Discotheque

If eternal judgement turns to be anything but a myth, I can see how it goes with me. God, in his infinite wisdom, would ask me what good have I done with my life, frown, and whisper something to an angel on his left side who will hand me a key with a number. I would walk an endless corridor and open the door with the matching number only to see my own custom-made hell, a nightclub.

 Laterna used to be a bar in the heart of Damascus where disillusioned leftist politicos would sit down, drink a beer, and contemplate what they could have done better to change the world; a shabby place that could not be closer to Orwell’s Chestnut Tree Café.

Things have changed in Damascus since, the Laterna doesn’t exist anymore and the little space before it is now a valet parking for our new society. I went there tonight on my last night in town for a fun evening out in what is now known by the velvet society of Damascus as the Chillo nightclub.

I sipped my Red Bull vodka and looked around the scarcely lit hall that used to listen to political discussions and ambitious unrealistic plans only to see the nouveaux riches of the city dancing to unimaginably horrid remixed fast-paced music. I sat there under the tuned-to-Siberia air-conditioner while my internal organs received the shock waves of the amplified beats and my brain cells died of the over stimulation of the sound and light thinking that if those men had such enthusiasm going to a gym they wouldn’t be that fat.

What made the evening even more comical, and disturbing, is that it was held by a charity that used the alcohol money to ‘buy clothes for the poor’ as I was told. Which means that good deeds needed to go through the barman to make sense and that all the fat cats there were getting drunk in the middle of the week for a good reason. All is OK then.

All that aside, I still cannot see the point behind going to a night-club! What makes people actually believe that the hellish, dark, noisy, crowded dungeon is entertainment worth paying for? The dancing of the drunk, the music that is only worthy of torture chambers, or the overpriced alcohol? I am not sure I am in the right, or any, mental state to attempt an answer.

People who need that much fuss to believe they are entertained have simply not been introduced to a good book, a worthy movie, or an interesting conversation. To be in a place with other people you like and not be able to exchange two sentences because of the noise is simply a waste of time, even after four vodkas. Why do people do it then, I am not sure. If anyone knows, please enlighten me.

In the meanwhile, do not go to the Chillo, or any nightclub for that matter, you have been warned!

And here are your 500 words for today.