why coke studio matters

no one in pakistan has any convictions, but everyone has an opinion.


the great joy of opinions is that you can change them with the wind. convictions require standing by your faith while others heckle you and throw half empty yogurt packs in your direction. opinions require you to be loud, and have an inflated estimation of your own self.

the kind of opinion pakistanis excel in is the one which finds faults in others. it doesn't matter if the opinion they currently hold completely contradicts everything they said yesterday, or exposes their hypocrisies. as long as it makes someone look bad, everyone's in on it.


all societies create heroes only to rip them apart. i know that. look at the brits and jordan.  but in pakistan, we skip the hero part, and start directly from the ripping apart business.


and i know that coke studio is already facing all this. everyone's got a million fucking gripes with the whole show.


this is where i answer them. because pakistan can't afford to have assholes with opinions destroy everything we have worth believing in .


(i) How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Cola


Before we had the Islamic Republic of Blogistan, desi opinions were voiced at a place called chowk.com. In 2004, someone named asif memon wrote a seminal piece with the same title as above, detailing the exploitation and destruction of pakistan's greatest ever rock band, Junoon. those of us who went along till the horrible ride knew the story well - a band that had defied governments and invented its own genres was eventually reduced to dishing out half-assed 'Best of' albums, and shitting out what was easily their worst album ever - Dewaar; an album which graced a large coke logo on its front.

but if Coke only epitomized the sloth that accompanied the once-glorious junoon, Pepsi's channeling of a bloke named Machiavelli throughout the entirety of the Vital Signs career was an even greater sin.


before he became a paranoid politico harping endlessly about military governments from a generation ago, NFP was the authority on music in pakistan. he had an even greater article, also in chowk.com, which traced the whole history of the Signs, including the role of Pepsi. NFP tells of how Pepsi tried to influence the kind of songs the band made, how they forced them to tour endlessly and release albums faster, of how they tried to leverage their position by siding with a band named Awaz instead, and how they eventually led to the destruction of the legendary band.

those of you too young to have spent broken-hearted summers listening to "Chalay thay Saath Saath" may not realise this, but at their peak, Junoon and Vital Signs represented the last line of the kalima. to fuck with that was a sin far greater than blasphemy, and both the cola giants had blood on their hands.


there will be idealistic numbnuts who will exhale whatever their smoking, clear their throats, and wheeze out that "that's what  you get when you sell out maaaan..." such assholes have no idea what it means to be a musician, or an artist in pakistan. when the people refer to you as kanjars, they plan to treat you like them too. take a look at the last days of mehdi hasan to get a feel of what i mean. 

this is a land without record deals, without agents or record labels, without royalties, without any way of making any living off your work. work which the whole fucking country would love to pieces, listen to and gain inspiration from, and use for their own commercial purposes, without ever bothering to treat you anything better than a kanjar. so if some young kids decide to make some money off the back of releasing a debut song which would win a shady BBC prize as the greatest song EVER, can you blame them? if an aging band decides that they have nothing to show for their years of building up a fucking industry on their own, so they might as well take the money and run, can you blame them? 


any true fan couldn't. they had to accept the demise of both these monoliths. but they all could, and did, begin to despise the cola kings. them they could hate with all their might. capitalism had destroyed art. end of.


but this is pakistan. where the greatest socialists are feudal lords, where the greatest writers are penniless drunkards, where the greatest sportsmen are chinese coaches and tory cheerleaders. where the maulvis sell heroin and the kuffar save lives. pakistan is that point where the past and the future collide, and you're never quite sure which one you're living in. so it makes sense that the most seismic event in this era's music has a cola sugar daddy which has radically changed the whole rules of the game. as we say, only in pakistan.

what coke has done is not what people think it's done. the whole concept, its equipment, its vision, its outlook, its feel, its music had been planned up, conceived by a man who is the Godfather of Pakistani pop - rohail hyatt. 


what coke did was find an (almost definitely temporary) solution to a problem that the industry has faced for a long fucking time now. you see, music, like much else in this country, survives on patronage. people are loath to pay for music, and as such musicians have very few options. in the past, the national TV and radio would prove to be a modest source for most. but post-80s, the problem has exacerbated. during the 90s, amazing bands would put together the money for a video, then hope to get enough support to put out an album. but it would rarely be enough. which is why any act which manages to put out a second album in pakistan with the original line up automatically enters the hall of fame. 


as time passed, the profligacy of piracy and the rampant spread of downloading meant that money had to be made through endorsements (see Strings, Haroon et al) through sub-standard indian film songs (see Atif Aslam, Jal, Strings) through dubious charitable and religious causes (see Strings, Najam et al) or by pimping out your music fame for any and everything you can (see JJ, Nadeem Jafri)


in recent times, a strange 'improvement' has come about. a record label owned by a media house which loves to get down and dirty has taken on piracy, and started giving out proper deals. only, the kinds of bonded labor shit that the artists are being put through under their watch means that signing up with them is probably akin to artistic and financial suicide.


so when coke came up with the brilliant idea of giving out, handing out, fucking rewarding the whole country with awesome fucking music for free - nay, paying them to run it - it marked a radical departure from what the whole country or even the whole world had so far come up with. 


and then coke did something even better. they decided not to fuck with the sound, or make it commercial. they let it be, or even if they did meddle, they didn't do it enough to ruin the music.


capitalism and art in a win-win situation. only in pakistan.

(post script: in case some of you decide the pepsi is still evil, think of this. the current wave of music, of which coke studio either represents the peak of, or the final hurrah of, began when bands like Aaroh, eP, Mekaal Hasan, Messiah, Schehzad Hameed etc suddenly hit the scene. the reason they all came to the forefront at the same time was because of an event known as Pepsi Battle of the Bands.)


(ii) "Man, this year's Coke Studio has been a huge downer compared to last year..."


after the first episode this season, safieh came up with the golden rule of Coke Studio. sure it's nice to watch it, but you really need to listen to it to get it. the first time is like many other first times - a disappointing preview of whats to come. now you may think this is obvious, but she was speaking to a group which thought that the Arif Lohar song they'd just heard was too long, and Meesha was underused and off-beat. the song you now know as the official song of the summer. 


which is the whole point. most people who were excited about the show this year weren't even bothered with last year's season. in fact, most of the people who did watch last season never got past the blockbuster first episode, which had atif and ali zafar, and noori collaborating with some faqeer dude. so when season three rolled around, there was a lot of hype because of a particular breed of pakistani - the bandwagoner.

bandwagoners are a dime a dozen in this land. whenever they realise something is obviously cool, they jump on and pretend they were always there to begin with. in order to hide their pagan pasts, they become over-zealous about their bandwagon, eventually turning everyone else off. at which point they disembark and bitch to their heart's content. those are the people who were so fucking excited about coke studio because they knew it was cool. and those are the people who fill blog spaces and twitter spaces and youtube spaces with lamentations that the episode sucks.


well fuck you.


to begin with, the songs are being produced by a guy whose last band came out while most of you were still sperms and eggs, and still rumors of its comeback mark a frenzy. rohail hyatt KNOWS how to make timeless music. so if you think that you're the prick who's figured out his music a few minutes after hearing it, you deserve to die.


if anything, the whole program has taken on an even riskier route this season, and a far more nuanced one. gone are the superstars of pop. their place has been taken by people on the verge of breaking out, people who are already massive on another musical plane, and a couple of true blue legends. there is more genre hopping, and a lot, lot less virtuosity, especially for vocalists. this season has been about moods and spaces a lot more than the last one. and the music continues to get denser and richer.


this is not stuff you can digest overnight. its the kind of music you can walk away from and forget for a decade, until one day it suddenly comes rushing back through the smell of a biscuit soaked in brandy.


mark my words - as the time passes, this season will follow its predecessor in continuing to rise in people's estimation. and by the next season (if there is one) the same people who were bitching now would be harping on about how season three was the one that changed their lives and prompted them to create greater space for spirituality in their drawing room paint color choices.


(iii) "Abida doesn't sound so good - how could Coke Studio fuck that up?"


i realise that most of this can be answered by the rant above. but since this is abida we're talking about, i also realise that she deserves a whole section to herself. i concede that the two abida parveen songs weren't quite what i had hoped for, and in the case of the first, the situation has so far not improved with time. i realise that this is still too early, but there is another explanation.


you see, abida parveen is far bigger than the whole sum of coke studio - all the artists and people behind the scene and all the buzz and everything. she's been a global legend for some time now, she's worked with everyone, she's been covered in every genre, she's been produced a million different ways. while the level of technical and aesthetic production at CS has been unprecedented for most musicians, AP has already had that and more. that's why her songs have not been obvious so far, rather layered around her. 

moreover, sometimes the greatest things coming together doesn't work. there is a bootlegged mp3 of jim morrison singing while jimi hendrix plays guitar. its pretty shitty. 


(iv) "Why I'm proud to be a Burger"


one of this year's participants, Omer Bilal Akhtar had recently published an op-ed in the  Dr. NewsPaper/Mr Blog Aggregator Express Tribune recently by this name. it was pretty shit, and was absolutely crucified by commenters. the ADP frontman eventually wrote a hilarious and heroic defence of his piece, but it was too little, too late.


he had a point though - if burgers keep feeling ashamed and aloof, they'd keep being called out for living in a bubble. and since its assumed that those living in a bubble can't communicate with their society, they should and would be ridiculed.

but if anyone sits through the behind the scenes clips on the show, they'd see long haired, american accented, weirdly dressed, farangi influenced, clueless burgers talking very intelligently about music. and they'd see those same burgers being accorded tremendous respect and love by musicians from the other side of the bridge, the other side of the divide, from the 'real' part of pakistan. all goes to show that if you embrace your talent AND your identity, being a burger is no impediment, and even an advantage for creating something remarkable. 


and the ADP song had one of the most vintage pakistani freak out leads in recent history. so stop bitching on them.


(v) "Fuck yaar, they're just ripping off the originals..."


i could spend a long time on this, but a few lines should do. 'copying' someone's music and lyrics and calling them your own, ala Anu Malik, is cheating. paying homage to greats while composing something original is not cheating of ripping off.


there were a lot of people who did, and continue to, hate Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. these were qawwali connoisseurs who hated his cheap remixes, and resented the fact this his fame was not anywhere in proportion to his ability or talent when compared to his peers and predecessors. and i'll be the first to say it - there are some truly terrible nusrat remixes out there. but the whole point is, if it wasn't for those dishkum-dishkum songs, an entire  generation would have been alienated from one of their most significant art forms. because without nusrat, there was no one who was able to make the conditions which allowed pop-music and casual listeners into the world of qawwali. who allowed us to discover his influences, and love it so much that we began to listen to the unremixed, unedited versions of his own qawwalis, and those of others. the man, on his own, resuscitated the entire goddam form.


that's what coke studio is doing now. sure, you have these snobby friends who will show you the original version of "Chori Chori" or "Chambey di Booti" and piss all over the covers. but what these music puritans and fundamentalists don't realise is that without these cover songs, this conversation about which Reshma version of Chori Chori is the best would have probably never happened. these songs are allowing us a way back into our own pasts, our own identities and selfs, which we would have otherwise lost in the morass of unseen youtube videos. 


(vi) "Oooohhhh, so they're not ALL reactionary, jaahil, media-obsessed, heads-in-the-sand, clueless, greedy, selfish miserable chootias..."


the greatest thing about coke studio is that it proves that if you do something with the best people, with the best intentions and the best efforts to create something according to an aesthetic ideal, it can be popular and widely accepted in pakistan. 


this is no small thing.


there is such little hope for people trying to not dumb themselves down, trying to avoid being popular for popularity's sake, for people interested in saying something meaningful, for people who lack the energy and bitchiness to find a savage way to the top. 


so when you see something that brings together the best people and works brilliantly, you know that its possible. if we put aside our bullshit, if we lay down our ideologies, if we shed our inhibitions and our insecurities, we can do something that stands the test of time.


and that is why coke studio matters.