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.