The Groovebox guests his impression of the Rock On!! dilemma.

According to the Sunday Times of India, Rock On!! is being “touted as the first authentic Hindi film on the Indian rock scene”. They don’t specify who is doing the touting but I suspect he or she categorises their Britney Spears albums as rock in their iTunes.

To anyone who has the seen the promos, leave alone the film, it is glaringly obvious that Rock On!! doesn’t make any great claims to be about the life and times of an actual Indian rock band. It’s just another example of Bollywood’s canny co-option of an urban musical trend. Disco Dancer anyone? What about Shammi Kapoor as Rocky the rock n’ roll star in Teesri Manzil? Rock On!!, the film’s director Abhishek Kapoor has said, “is a film about people. Rock is just the backdrop.”

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If Kapoor had any aspirations of realism, Magik, the film’s fictitious band would not be singing in Hindi but in English, like the majority of rock bands in this country, and on a far more basic note, would have included a bassist.

Rock On!! has reignited a discussion about the state of Indian rock, and what the film means for the lives of musicians. But rock music is not the same as dyslexia. Taare Zameen Par may have controversial parentage but it has spread awareness about a condition that has been misunderstood for years. Rock On!! doesn’t aim to clear any clichés or clarify any misconceptions. On the contrary, it rides on stereotypical depictions of rock musicians as long-haired, pot smoking hot heads, whose lifestyle comes with a certain cache of cool. It also suggests, far more innocuously, that former rockers will have to deny the existence of their dark pasts if they want to turn into successful investment bankers. At the end of the film, we’re told that two of the members form a record label to promote new talent. We can only presume that they kept their day jobs.

On some level, it really is a bit sad that Rock On!! is getting such a raw deal (anyone who has paid even a fleeting visit to a rock website forum will notice that your average metalhead could easily out-bitch the bitchiest of girls on Splitsvilla). In a year of some real stinkers, it is a relatively decent if not particularly novel Hindi film (Replace the slap in Dil Chahta Hai with the video shoot punch-up in Rock On!! and you’ve got two strikingly similar storylines).

Even the soundtrack is not bad as far as average Hindi film soundtracks go. The music is original and is a sort-of return-to-form for Shankar, Ehsaan and Loy who have spent the last two years regurgitating the same sound for assorted Yash Raj Films productions. Rock On!!’s music is the rock of Def Leppard or Bon Jovi on a good day. In the 1980s, it was rock; today, we call it pop. Maybe they should have called it Pop On!! But that just isn’t quite as cool, now is it?