Rock music is quite big in India - but it mostly just replaces all the intricacies of Indian rhythms and Indian melody with lumpen rock drumming and power chords.
The most inspiring drummer for me is Stewart Copeland from The Police. The Police are the first band I can remember really liking, and Copeland is a guy who was playing in sort of a rock band, or a rock-pop band, but he didn't want to do the traditional kind of rock drumbeat. He was doing all these kind of reggae rhythms, and the reggae style is almost an exact opposite of the rock mold of drumming.
Be proud that thou art an Indian, and proudly proclaim, "I am an Indian, every Indian is my brother." Say, "The ignorant Indian, the poor and destitute Indian, the Brahmin Indian, the Pariah Indian, is my brother."
We weren't straight-A students. We didn't start playing until we were teenagers, and we started playing rock and roll and punk rock - power chords - before we ever thought we would play folk music. So virtuosity was just never in my reach.
In the early '70s [the late] Ras Shorty and I took Indian dholak drumming [from chutney music, another Indo-Trinidadian creation], fused it with calypso's African rhythms, and soca was born against the wishes of the purists.
I love all kinds of Indian music, and Indian food as well. If the chance arises for me to play in India, I'm there.
Bollywood music is definitely a big part of Indian music and can be a great way to introduce people to the sound. But I hope to continue to incorporate other types of Indian music into my work.
I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.
Blues, rock, and soul are part of the music I make, but there are Indian influences, too.
I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that whether it's Indian or it's Western. But in India, I think it's limited to filler music unfortunately. That's one thing I want to push in India where we have the infrastructure of an orchestra where you play Indian melodies with an orchestra and something different for a universal audience. It requires a lot of work from me.
Well I listened to mostly rock music, and I felt like hip hop was like an extension of rock music when it was done well. So energetically, again I felt like it was in line with punk rock and maybe hard rock, more than it was in line with R&B, which I never really liked.
Indian music is brilliant and for me, anyway, (this is only personal) it's got everything in it. I still like electronics and all sorts of music if it's good but Indian music is just... an untouchable you can't say what it is, because it just is.
There is nothing else is India which is as popular as Bollywood. Look at Indian classical music, how big and how respected it is in the West, but here in India, no one is interested.
When I went to Standing Rock, it opened my mind, as did going to Indian reservations and speaking to kids about music and arts.
I have absolutely no interest in rock and roll. I'm just being David Bowie. Mick Jagger is rock and roll. I mean, I go out and my music is roughly the format of rock and roll, I use the chord changes of rock and roll, but I don't feel I'm a rock and roll artist. I'd be a terrible rock artist, absolutely ghastly.
The music is at this weird intersection of dance music and indie music. It's not quite dancey enough to do a full-blown DJ set, and it wasn't quite rock enough for a rock band. But I guess it's what makes us unique - drawing from a lot of different influences.
I want to get rid of the Indian problem. [...] Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian Question and no Indian Department.