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I am not a rock music fan, but the band ‘Eagles’ has always been a kind of inspiration in popular western music for me. Their immense popularity in the late seventies have so much ‘anthologized’ them as a reference to a class of music that you even get termed something as a ‘purist’ today when you listen to them ! Leaving aside all these artificial distinctions, the band seems to me worth listening to, for, apart from their popularity, they seem to have a fine music sense that is an enriching experience.
I used to play “Hotel California” in local bands when I was in college. That song was immensely popular in India and was, in fact, a good song. But I first realized that this band could be much more creative when I heard the acoustic guitar version of the same song. Man, I still lose myself when I hear the fine prelude of that song in acoustic guitar that is much more creative leading so naturally to the sequence of the tune in the song. I realized that this group was not just another rock band, but one who could experiment with a musical experience and improvise it to a greater listening pleasure. The more I started listening to them the more I could identify a distinct sad feeling in most of their songs. Their sense of creativity in music was given shape by that feeling, a feeling that mostly had a subtle sense of the pathos of life. You could see it so well in their songs like “Love will keep us alive”, “Desperado” and “Lyin Eyes. You distinctly feel the sense of loneliness, of isolation, a kind of frustration, which is bitter but positive, in being unable to get into the common stream of madness and hypocrisy around. All these songs are so straight forward ; the first one just follows a simple plucking pattern, but still creates a haunting sense by the richness of the feeling invoked. Music becomes an experience when it has a content and a rich feeling. Classical Music expresses them at its best but occasionally popular music too expresses a few shades of it as this band exemplifies. It seems to me that most modern rock bands don’t have the base of such a feeling to work on and express themselves by building on it as ‘Eagles’ did. I have also observed, whenever I listen to ‘Eagles’, that music need not be complex and noisy at all to express subtle feelings.
Appreciating ‘Eagles’ could be a natural response of a person who is not just a casual lover of music but one who could sense the difference between good music and organized sound that is called music today…
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