Saturday, January 08, 2005

Should we judge the book or its cover or both?

For the last couple of weeks --- sometime in Dec 2004, there was a performance by The Slank, an Indon rock group over the Astro Prima. The Slank or The Slack? or whatever it was --- at first, I thought it was a 'slack and chokia' type of band as the boys looked haggard, oily faces and dressed in small tiny tight shirts and jeans.

Within that 30 minutes, the performance seemed to be entertaining and enjoyable one until my lil' Dia Nadia noticed and walked all the way up to the studio room and joined me for the show. Once in a while I saw she banged her head while enjoying the music and of course, her bottle of milk.


The lead vocalist was good in communicating with the audiences, energetic and has a good huskier voice as well as the band boys who backed him up melodically. They played rock ballad and blues genres with some mixtures of traditional musical sounds as additions to spices the ears of the audiences.


Obviously, the music was unique and the sound was far good than ours. The band has so far produced more than 10 albums and I assumed that it was among the best bands ever in Indonesia in recent years despite SO7, ADA, Gigi, Cokelat, Padi, Nasik Goreng Kampong, Rojak Mamak etc.

Anyway, this is not a cheap advertisement for the Slank but merely a lesson for our local bands. What can we learn from here? Don’t let us loose interest and expectation towards our local talents. Perhaps it won’t be like what had happened to our team in the ‘Tiger with beer in a Cup’ tournament recently.