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BookWorm: Muhammad 'Gugun' Gunawan: Rare words and sentence frames
Besides reading up about musicians and their life stories, blues boss Muhammad âGugunâ Gunawan loves spending his time reading poetry
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esides reading up about musicians and their life stories, blues boss Muhammad 'Gugun' Gunawan loves spending his time reading poetry.
'Poems have sentences that you do not hear in daily life. It makes sense for me to read poems to help me write lyrics,' said the vocalist and guitarist of genre-straddling blues band Gugun Blues Shelter.
The 39-year-old musician, whose guitar skill is reminiscent of legends such as Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi Hendrix and Lenny Kravitz, said that he reads both English and Indonesian poetry.
'I read an equal number of English and Indonesian poems. Through English poems, I can see how sentences are used differently,' said Gugun, who with bassist Jonathan 'Jono' Armstrong and drummer Adityo 'Bowie' Wibowo have brought their band on tours spanning the globe.
Gugun said he began to enjoy reading during his junior high school years. 'As a kid I immediately got put off when seeing thick books. But then I tried reading one and found that it was a really fun experience,' he said.
Among the books he read as a teenager were famous Indonesian adolescent books including Lupus, Olga dan Sepatu Roda (Olga and the Roller Skates) and Balada Si Roy (Roy's Ballad).
Taxi Blues
by Seno Gumira Ajidarma and Erwin Prima Arya
The book is a graphic novel based on stories from Seno Gumira Ajidarma's 1999 anthology Iblis Tak Pernah Mati (The Devil Never Dies). I love it because it tells about the various conflicts and stories of a metropolitan city like Jakarta.
15 Years of Dirty Deeds
by Classic Rock
The book contains 10 features on rock bands, including Guns N' Roses, Deep Purple, Mk IV, Alice Cooper, Fleetwood Mac, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Black Sabbath.
This is a book about the rise and fall of big musicians; I rarely see these kinds of stories in the media.
On Nothing: Selected Poems
by Sitok Srengenge
On Nothing is a bilingual collection of selected poems from four of Srengenge's books: Ambrosia, Nonsense, Bastard and Wild Coupling. I like the book because it is presented in English and Indonesian. There are so many
sentences I find nowhere else that are being used in this book of poems.
