Pop Idols
Before Youth Culture
Granta 112:
Kamila Shamsie
http://www.granta.com/Magazine/112/Pop-Idols/1
In 1987 I had a lot in common with many other fourteen-year-olds. I watched the Brat Pack/John Hughes films, repeatedly; I knew the Top 10 of the UK chart by heart; I cut out pictures of Rob Lowe, Madonna, a-ha from teen magazines and stuck them on my bedroom walls; I regarded the perfect 'mixed tape' as a pinnacle of teenaged achievement and gave thanks for not living in the dark days of LPs. But in doing all these things I merely affirmed what every adolescent growing up, like me, in
Instead, we lived in the Kalashnikov culture. Through most of the eighties,
In those days, schools were often closed because of 'trouble in the city'; my school instituted drills to contend with bombs and riots, rather than fire. Even cricket grounds – those rare arenas where exuberance still survived – weren't unaffected; all through 1986 and for most of 1987, there was hardly any international cricket played at
As a result, 'going for a drive' became an end unto itself. A group of us would pile into a car and we'd just drive, listening to mixed tapes with music from the
That was life as we knew and accepted it. Then one day in 1987 I turned on the lone, state-run TV channel to find four attractive young Pakistani men, wearing jeans and black leather jackets, strumming guitars, driving through the hills on motorbikes and in an open-top jeep, singing a pop song. And just like that, Youth Culture landed in living rooms all over
Islamization
It didn't really happen 'just like that', of course. Nothing ever does. There are various contenders for
I'm fairly sure that I wouldn't have been so dismissive of the idea of Pakistani pop videos if I had been born just a few years earlier, and could recall the Karachi of the early seventies, which had no shortage of glamour and East–West trendiness: nightclubs; locally made films with beautiful stars and catchy songs; shalwar kameez fashions inspired by Pierre Cardin (who designed the flight attendants' uniform for Pakistan International Airlines); popular bands who played covers of UK and US hits at fashionable spots in town. It's true, a good part of this world was known only to a tiny section of
The reason for this dissonance was the dramatic shift that took place in
By the time I was watching Nazia and Zoheb on TV, I already knew Zia ul-Haq stood for almost all that was awful in the world; he had placed my uncle, a pro-democracy politician, under house arrest. What I didn't know then was that the video of 'Disco Deewane', at which I was turning up my nose, was coming under attack by Zia's allies on the religious right; they had decided it was un-Islamic for a man and woman to dance together, as Nazia and Zoheb did in the video, even if they were siblings.
These were the early days of Islamization, when the censors were confused about what was permissible. A few years later, the process of Islamization was sufficiently advanced that a video such as 'Disco Deewane' would have no chance of airing. Although Nazia and Zoheb continued to release albums, the censorship laws and official attitudes towards pop meant they never gave concerts, received limited airtime on PTV, never released another video with the energy and sensuality of 'Disco Deewane', and were seen as a leftover from the days before Zia's soulless rule sucked the life out of
BB (Benazir Bhutto;
But I was soon to learn that some dinosaurs can roar their way out of seeming extinction in a single moment. The person who taught me this was thirty-three-year-old Benazir Bhutto. As long as I could remember she had been the pro-democracy politician under arrest, house arrest or exile.
Benazir's triumphant return was one of several watershed political moments that marked my young life. My earliest ever recollection is of my father showing me his thumb, with a black mark on it, and explaining that he'd just been to the polling booth, and that the black mark, indelible ink, was to guard against anyone attempting to cast more than one vote. I was three and a half then, and the start of Zia ul-Haq's dictatorship was just months away. I remember the day Benazir's father was hanged, the day women's rights activists marched on
It seemed just that way with pop music, too. In the mid-eighties, in Lahore and Karachi (and in other pockets of urban Pakistan), groups of students came together in each other's homes for jam sessions; the names of some of those students are instantly recognizable to anyone following the rise of Pakistani pop in the eighties and nineties: Aamir Zaki in Karachi, Salman Ahmad in Lahore, Junaid Jamshed in Rawalpindi. In 1986,
The Vital Signs
Watching the video of 'Dil Dil
Our reaction clearly wasn't to do with their dance moves. The Vital Signs boys of 1987 seem ill at ease, their gyrations arrhythmic, their posture self-conscious. This is particularly true of the lead singer, Junaid Jamshed, but still, I was in love. They were clean-cut, good-looking and, most shockingly, they were nearby. They were Pakistani after all; one day you might turn a corner and run into one of them. This scenario started to seem even more thrillingly possible the day gossip raced through the schoolyard, telling us that one of the boys at school – a boy I knew! – was Junaid Jamshed's cousin.
The first concert I ever attended was Vital Signs playing at a swanky
The concert took place in a function room, one used for conferences, small receptions or evenings of classical music. I had doubtless been in that room many times for tedious weddings, but I don't suppose I'd ever entered it in jeans before – and that alone must have made the room feel different, unexpected. There was a makeshift stage placed at one end and neat rows of chairs set out for the audience by organizers who obviously had no idea what a pop concert was all about. But we did, we
By 1988, a slightly reconfigured Vital Signs, having replaced one of its original band members with the guitarist Salman Ahmad, was in the process of recording a debut album when a plane exploded in the sky, killing Zia ul-Haq and allowing Pakistanis to take to the ballot box to declare what we wanted for our nation after eleven years of military rule and so-called Islamization. The answer was clear: no to the religious parties; yes to the thirty-five-year-old woman.
Democracy and Status Quo
Given the state of
A few months into the tenure of the Bhutto government, with the new head of state's approval, Pakistan TV organized and recorded a concert called Music '89. Nazia and Zoheb Hassan hosted, fittingly; but the event also passed the baton to a new generation, including Vital Signs and the hot new talent, the Jupiters, fronted by Ali Azmat. Tens of millions of people tuned in and religio-fascists fulminated from every pulpit. Benazir, as she would go on to do time and again, gave in to the demands of the religious right and, despite its huge success, the tapes of Music '89 were removed from the PTV library.
One of the most distinguishing features of the Bhutto government was the prevalence of the status quo precisely where there was the most urgent need for change. Islamization was no longer the government's spoken objective, but all the madrasas, jihadi groups and reactionary preachers continued as if nothing had changed, with the support of the army and intelligence services. Benazir's supporters argued that she had no room to manoeuvre given all the forces ranged against her; her detractors said her only real interest was in clinging on to power. Either way, the great social transformation we had expected to see, that Return to Before, never happened.
Even worse, many of the changes begun by Zia ul-Haq gained momentum. Almost all of rural Pakistan continued to hold fast to Sufi Islam, but the cities, where there was no deep affiliation to a particular religious tradition, became, perversely, more susceptible to the reactionaries. There were signs that a reactionary Islam, which entwined itself with world events, had made its mark on several of my schoolfellows – the male athlete who didn't want to run in shorts on the school's sports day because Islam demanded modesty in dress; the close friend of mine who held up a picture of Salman Rushdie in the months just after the fatwa and said, 'He even looks like the Devil!'; and, most notably, the other friend who told me, in 1991, that Saddam would win the war against the Americans. When I pressed him for his reasons, given the disparity in the two nations' armies, he shrugged and made some cryptic comment about Saddam having a 'greater' weapon. Chemical? I asked, and it was only when he continued to look straight at me, without expression, that I realized what he was thinking. 'Allah?' I said, and he raised both shoulders and dropped them – a gesture that told me I may not believe it, but it was so.
Everyone I knew at school had been closely following the Gulf War, though much of that had to do with the excitement of CNN broadcasting into our homes for the first time – after a lifetime of state-controlled TV, we were all hungry for images from around the world. At seventeen I knew certain basic political truths, even if they were never directly articulated on CNN: America had turned its back on Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the Gulf War was about oil; the same America that had embraced the religio-military dictatorship of General Zia was now turning frosty towards the new democratic government and imposing sanctions on the nation. None of this got in the way of the draw of
By the summer of 1991, even though political disillusionment with
The Sufi Rocker
Weeks before I left for university, I had one concert-going experience that was to prove more potent in retrospect than at the time. The group with whom I spent that summer included a boy called Sherry, whose brother Salman Ahmad had just left Vital Signs to start his own band, Junoon. Junoon's first album, released that year, was greeted with total indifference by critics and the public, but Sherry rounded up all the gang to go to a Junoon concert that summer. We went, but without much enthusiasm. Vital Signs was still the premier band in the country, and Ahmad, the guitarist, who was either jettisoned or parachuted out (accounts varied), had a whiff of second best about him. But onstage, Junoon was electrifying – thanks to both Ahmad and the singer, Ali Azmat, formerly of the Jupiters. Later, when Junoon became the biggest name in Pakistani pop, I would talk about that concert with an 'I heard them before they were famous' tone of superiority. But the truth was, soon after that I went to university and started to see the overwhelming maleness of Pakistani pop as alienating – my musical world now revolved around Natalie Merchant, Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls.
I started to pay attention to Junoon again in 1996, when they became megastars with 'Jazba-e-Junoon', the Coca-Cola-sponsored recording of the official
In the Sufi paradigm, God is the beloved and the mortal is the supplicant/lover – the relationship between the individual and God is intensely personal and does not admit the intercession of 'religious scholars' or 'leaders of the congregation'. Small wonder that the Sufis have almost always stood in opposition to those who claim to be the guardians of religion. But the deep-rootedness of Sufi Islam in Pakistan has often meant that the orthodoxy don't dare take it on – through the Zia years, the great singers in the Sufi tradition, such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen, continued to perform, both in public gatherings where the crowds could exceed half a million and on state-run TV. Every note leaping from their throats was a rebuke to the orthodoxy. It wasn't until university that I saw the brilliance of those singers – particularly of Nusrat, who was a worldwide phenomenon by the nineties. You didn't need to understand a word he sang, or feel any religious stirrings, to be struck to the marrow by one of the greatest voices of the century.
Nusrat and other qawwals were such a potent force in
Of course, there was no reason why musicians singing Sufi lyrics should live by Sufi rules. But Ahmad, who now affected the fashionable garb of a long-haired, bead-wearing, goateed mystic, spoke extensively about his immersion in Sufism. The critical acclaim for Ahmad's music began to fade at the start of the new millennium, and yet halfway through the decade he was more visible than ever before – performing at the UN, talking up Indo-Pak friendship, promoting HIV/Aids awareness, appearing on TV, playing at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. It is hard to separate sense of mission from marketing in all this. Whatever he has done in the last few years, and whatever he does in the future, Ahmad's legacy is Sufi rock, that electrifying blend of the deep-rooted mystical side of subcontinental Islam and contemporary, cutting-edge, rocking youth culture.
The Fundo
In Salman Ahmad's autobiography, Rock & Roll Jihad, it is unsettling how often he writes of receiving messages and signs from God, and of his certainty that he is doing God's work through his music. His old friend and former Vital Signs bandmate Junaid Jamshed would doubtless disagree. I still vividly recall the moment in the late nineties when I returned to
Junaid Jamshed? The man who wanted
Rumour had it that some personal crisis had propelled Jamshed into the arms of Tablighi Jamaat, who promised a clear path to salvation. There was no way of knowing if that was truth or conjecture. All I knew was that one day I turned on the TV and there was a man I didn't instantly recognize, with a long beard and white skullcap, quoting from the Quran. Nothing he said was objectionable; he spoke of peace, and the importance of education, and other perfectly right-minded things. But it filled me with despair.
Jamshed himself couldn't seem to decide how easily this mantle of righteousness sat on him. For six years, we all watched as he vacillated between pop star and proselytizing man of faith. He declared he was quitting the music business. Then he refashioned his beard into a neat goatee and appeared with Vital Signs at a tribute concert for Nazia Hassan, who had died tragically young from cancer almost twenty years after burning up screens in the 'Disco Deewane' video. When questioned, Jamshed claimed that there was nothing incompatible in Islam and pop music. Later still, he would insist that the U-turn at that concert was a sign that he had not yet been strong enough to do the right thing. At the time, he rationalized, he'd had four international concerts lined up, as well as a new album he'd already recorded, not to mention a one-year contract with Pepsi . . . it just hadn't been the right time to sever his ties with pop music, the pressures were too great. Once free of contractual obligations, Jamshed again declared pop music haram (forbidden) and soon after took to recording religious songs of praise.
Today, Jamshed's life is divided between proselytizing for Tablighi Jamaat, recording religious albums and running a very successful designer label – J. (Jay Dot) – with stores in the glitziest malls of
There are other ways in which religion can pay. Last year, Jamshed appeared on TV speaking with a tone and urgency that suggested he was about to reveal some deeply important spiritual truth. His message: contrary to rumours, Lay's potato chips are made using only halal products. For this TV spot, which ends with Jamshed munching on a potato chip, he was reportedly paid 2 million rupees (£26,000 – though the comparatively low cost of living in Pakistan makes it a much larger amount in real terms).
That Jamshed was outspoken about his religious faith wasn't in itself worthy of comment. In the
The Rock Star Fantasist
From his early days in the Jupiters, to his huge success as the voice of Junoon and, recently, his critically acclaimed solo career, Ali Azmat has always been the man who most lived up to the idea of the rock star. He remains the most charismatic performer on the pop scene, with a sartorial flair that sets trends, a turbulent relationship with a beautiful model, a reputation for brashness and a personality that is an appealing mix of contagious good humour and artistic suffering. When the journalist Fifi Haroon asked Azmat how many girlfriends he'd had, he replied, 'I'm a lover, not a mathematician.' While Junaid Jamshed was declaring pop music haram and Salman Ahmad delved into the Quran and Sufism, Azmat just focused on the music. He might have been singing Sufi rock, but he made it quite clear that it was the rock that mattered.
Then, in 2009, the rock star shifted his primary vocation from singer to that of cheerleader.
The man Azmat has been championing – introducing him at public events, singing his praises on TV, featuring him as the resident 'expert' on his talk show – is Zaid Hamid, a self-professed 'security consultant and strategic defence analyst'. An example of Hamid's strategic thinking was in evidence early in 2010 when he set out a vision for
A few weeks after this televised address, Azmat appeared on a talk show hosted by the model and actress Juggan Kazim; the other guest was the feisty actress Nadia Jamil, who savaged Azmat for his association with Hamid, whom she described as a hate-monger.
Azmat hotly denied this. 'We're not against any people,' he said. 'We're against a political ideology called Zionism . . . there are all sorts of Zionists. There are Hindu Zionists, Muslim Zionists, Christian and Jewish Zionists.'
'What is Zionism?' asked Kazim.
'We don't even know ourselves what it is,' Azmat replied, without a flicker of embarrassment. 'It's a political ideology where obviously these guys have taken over the world, through whatever means, through businesses...'
Hamid's star has imploded in the last few months, for various reasons, including a murder case against him and attacks from members of the orthodoxy who saw his popularity as a challenge. But the spectacular speed with which he rose to prominence, and the support he gathered, are very telling about the state of
It's a strange business, growing up. Your teen idols grow up too, and you realize that the vast gulf of years which separated you from them is actually just a narrow ravine, and that you are all roughly part of the same generation. In the particular case of the Pakistani pop pioneers, you also realize that your nation is growing up with you too – the Islamic Republic of Pakistan came into being in 1971, when the former
Largely, our lives say that polarity and discordance are rife. However, although they are few and sometimes difficult to identify, there are still spaces in
Now in its third season, Coke Studio is a wildly popular TV show featuring live performances from
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