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Fossils – Digging Up Dirt

Almost ten years after it was formed, Fossils remains one of the hardest-hitting – and most popular – Bangla rock bands

Sep 09, 2008

It’s been racy all along. Introducing a stylised Bengali diction, a trait that has won him as many points for being distinctly original as criticisms garnered for ‘Anglicising’ the language, in their debut album Islam’s lyrics have nibbled at the dark crannies of the mind, tackling issues of urban isolation, dejection and a sense of loss and longing. A comparatively milder and sociable album compared to their followup, Fossils relied on ballady moments, heavy riffing and rousing choruses of songs like ‘Nemesis’, ‘Hasnuhana’ and ‘Millennium.’ The biggest hit though was ”˜Ekla Ghar’ (This Lonely Room), a bleak and introspective ode to a shunned and companion-less life, the melody structure of which, nevertheless, loosely bears shades of the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California.’ On our way to a concert, we pass a hoarding of a commercial product that has used a couple of lines from the song (“This lonely room suits me fine/In isolation I’m addicted”) and I ask Islam about the ‘Hotel California’ connection. He owns up. “It’s no longer a song I feel proud of,” Islam adds.

With Fossils 2, released in 2004, the music got louder, the lyrics thicker and more abstraction-coated. The complex nature of the writing is apparent in a song like ‘Harano Padok’ (The Missing Medal), which begins with the kind of chordal progression made famous by American band Green Day.  Taking off from the incident of the theft in 2004 of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize winning medal, Islam adds his reading of a story by Bengali novelist Humayun Ahmed where the male character kills his wife, but later falls in love with her ghost. “It seemed to me that we realised Tagore’s greatness only after the medal got stolen, as if the medal was bigger than the man,” states Islam.

In ‘Bicycle Chor’ (Bicycle Thief), influenced by Rupam’s reading of the Luigi Bartolini novel that was later adapted on screen by Italian neo-realist filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, the lyrics delves on a similar feeling of displacement. Using words like ‘beshya’ (whore), ‘jounnotya’ (unabashed sexuality) and ‘satittyo’ (chastity), which have been little heard in Bengali mainstream music (“My mother and sister have become whores/I’m a bicycle thief”¦ On my stolen bicycle I can take you for a ride/Give you my sexuality for free/If you don’t want chastity in return”). ‘Bicycle Thief’ came across as Islam’s take on a certain moral barrenness running through modern lives.

With a seemingly dissident undercurrent, the lyrics have not entirely been favourably reviewed. For instance, ‘Acid,’ arguably the fiercest hard rock song written in Bengali, was scornfully reviewed in a leading English daily where the reviewer mentioned that throwing acid at others is the band’s prescription for cleansing a corrupt society. It was one of those occasions when his allegory about cleansing the self missed the mark, Islam rues.

It is to test their social acceptability factor that on a rain-drenched evening I decide to go down to hear Fossils perform at South Club – a tennis club known as much as for its association with the likes of Akhtar Ali, Naresh Kumar, Jaidip Mukherjea and Leander Paes as for its uppity air. The date too is significant for April 14 is Poila Boisakh, the beginning of the Bengali New Year and a day earmarked for everything Bengali and traditional.

The band is at obvious unease, and Islam too is fidgety. Dainty ladies, moving around with wine glasses held delicately at their stems, and men in dinner jackets and suspenders – the swish set of Kolkata and an unlikely audience for ‘Acid.’ Requests too have come in for the band to play some danceable music. The start is slow with Islam trying out an acoustic number and club members sitting around dinner tables. Till – bang! – with a sharp burst of lights the band launches into a fierce attack of unmitigated rock. Islam tries to manoeuvre the mood, but gets only a couple of children to come forward to the stage (he managed to hurt his arm while hitting it on the wooden floor of the stage, the audience is unmoved). Nobody moves away either; the crowd, it seemed, was browbeaten into submission. When the band plays ‘Bicycle Thief,’ I wait for the whore-ish moment. It comes. And it goes. Islam sings the line “My mother and sister have become ”¦” alright, but mumbles through the errant word. Later, when asked, he fumbles for an answer. The answer possibly lies in an increasing appeal, a pressure, as Islam slackly alludes, to kowtow.

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