Bossa-nova Dubzone

I purchased a 1GB memory stick for my phone recently. The first few albums that I have loaded are not only awesome, but two of them are also pretty special to me. Special because these albums gave me the first feel of what actual campus bootleg music circulation was all about. They are:

Asian Dub Foundation- Fact and Fictions (1995)
Asian Dub Foundation- Rafi’s Revenge (1998) - without a doubt one of the best albums of the last decade

The year (1998) in which I entered Delhi University was also the time when the so-called Asian Underground scene had just hit mainstream in UK. However, I had no clue about the particular genre then. Grunge, Britpop, Classic rock and the usual Death Metal sound dominated the North Campus music scene.

DU (especially the North campus) has this huge population of public school kids living in various college hostels. And the biggest advantage of passing out of a public school is that you have loads of your schoolmates around. So you generally don’t have trouble meeting other public school kids.

So after a couple of months of joining college, I met this guy from Woodstock through a batch mate. I first heard ADF’s Fact and Fictions in his room. Man, it was just awesome (I had heard RATM, but these guys were way, way better). To be honest, I hardly knew anyone who had heard of this band in the campus then. The next thing I did was to get the album copied. And by the time of Rafi’s Revenge release in November, at least two-dozen people around the campus had copied F&F. After the winter break he got Rafi’s Revenge and the process started once again.

Sadly, by mid-1999, even the Kamla Nagar Archie’s gallery had Rafi’s Revenge among the new arrivals.