Pakistan's Music Renaissance

Pakistani artists are embracing rap, electronic music, and cross-cultural pop to create a hybrid genre entirely their own.

This story appeared in Sole Magazine, Winter 2022.

When Hasan Raheem was a student at Karachi’s Aga Khan University, he’d write songs and play guitar, often performing for his friends and fellow students in informal concerts, and uploading his tracks on his YouTube page, which boasted a niche but enthusiastic audience tuning in to his songs and covers. 

“Music has always been an important part of my life. When you’re growing up, you’re listening to music, when you’re happy, you sometimes listen to music, and when you’re sad, you listen to music,” Raheem, who is 25, said. “In the beginning, my audience was mostly in Karachi. There were about a thousand students in my university, and whenever I’d release a song, I’d personally tell half of the student population that my song is coming out. I used to hesitate, but then I thought, ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ Nobody listens to my music? But if a few people listen, then that would be a good thing.”

After writing a song called “Aisay Kaisay”, the first couple notes of which Raheem strummed on his guitar, and which was then mixed and further developed by his friend and music producer Abdullah Kasumbi, Raheem decided he wanted to make a video of the melodic ballad, which longs for a love fizzled by crossed wires in a decidedly millennial register.

“When we had the final version of the song, I asked Abdullah, why not do a one-take video of this,” Raheem said. “It’s what everyone was doing, and we’d just do it in our style, wear a hoodie and do it in the middle of the road.”

When Raheem reached Kasumbi’s house, Kasumbi grabbed the pink H&M hoodie hanging on his bathroom door and told Raheem to wear it. The singer and producer drove to Bukhari Commercial, a spacious grid of shops, salons, and empty buildings on the posher side of town. Raheem sat on the back of a gray vintage car and danced in “a random street”, embodying the laid-back vibe of the song, the glow of the pink sunset painting the dusty city in the background.

“At the time, the sky was pink, it was just a lucky day I feel like,” Raheem said. “One of my friends was holding the bluetooth speaker behind Abdullah, and he just told me to sit on that Foxy and start shooting. And that was the first take. And then when we’d completed it, Abdullah says, we got it, and it was two minutes long. We got back into the car and drove home, not realizing what we made.” 

Raheem and Kasumbi posted the video on January 11, 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world and sequestered everyone in quarantine. In the course of a year, “Aisay Kaisay” started gaining rapid popularity in India, where listeners tuned in from Delhi to Pune. After Spotify arrived in Pakistan in early 2021, Raheem uploaded the song on the music streaming app, which is the musician’s top song on the app with over 13 million hits. In Pakistan, teenagers and university-level students saved the song to their playlists, blasted it in cars with their friends, and played it at parties. The video, which Raheem and Kasumbi made purely out of passion, counts over 9 million hits on YouTube. 

Today, Raheem is one of many up-and-coming talents in the Muslim-majority, fifth most populous country in the world, which has a deeply-rooted classical music tradition emerging from the millennia-old cultures and languages of the region, and an avid modern music scene that has produced Sufi rock bands, disco queens, global pop stars singing in Urdu, and commercial artists providing vocals for telenovela theme songs or the soundtrack of films in neighbouring Bollywood.

And yet, even with Pakistan’s eclectic music scene and no shortage of talent, the industry flounders due to poor investment, deeply-ingrained nepotism barring new voices from entering, and a business model relying primarily on cranking network views and ad sales. Multinational corporate giants like Coke, Pepsi, and Nestlé established studios that maximize on nostalgia for the tunes of erstwhile days, as both new and older artists alike re-interpret local pop songs of the 1980s and ‘90s. 

Both the fixation on nostalgia and censorship—casual, state-sponsored, or privately-backed—once suffocated the creative and original voices of younger musicians, and anyone else with an unconventional sound, who experimented with hip-hop, trap and electronic music, flashing a mirror to the contradictions and complexities of the society they inhabited, and revealing their lived experiences, which fail to appear in the mainstream music, TV shows or films in the country.

“All we have is the youth,” Kasumbi said. “If we’re not representing the youth, then what’s left? It just makes common sense. If you switch on the TV in Pakistan, there will be five old guys sitting there, saying things nobody resonates with. It’s a hopeless situation. The Babas need to go.” 

Unlike network TV or corporate studios, the accessibility of the internet provided a safe haven for musicians to develop their sound, build audiences that are local and global in equal measure, and not compromise on their edge to conform to the respectability politics of a conservative country, which is still crudely demarcated on class lines, and in which people are falling into poverty daily due to the rapid depreciation of the rupee against the dollar.

Just as Raheem skyrocketed to fame because of the internet, performing the party bop “Pheechay Hutt” (“Get Back”) earlier this year in the nationally-broadcasted Coke Studio, other young artists who first started posting their music online, recording on their cellphones, or mixing and playing instruments in their bedrooms, now enjoy a spotlight in the mainstream, effectively magnifying the perspective of the youth to a mass audience, and unpacking the hierarchies that once suppressed their voice.

“We have a new world in technology,” Shams Mansur, a fashion designer who co-runs FT.WA Studio with Kasumbi, said. “In the physical world, those old people are still sitting there. Personalities like Hasan, Maanu, and Talal Qureshi found a footing [in the mainstream] because they made a new world that was not controllable by the older generation.”

Rappers who rose on the internet 

And that world was initially created on the internet, a reflector for the issues Pakistani youth faced, ranging from heartbreak and dating to confronting the cultural class divide that sets richer Pakistanis apart from middle class urbanites, who articulated their swag through rap music. 

“I used to listen to Eminem, 50 Cent, and Dr. Dre. In 2013, I heard the Young Stunners,” Shareh, a 22-year-old Karachi-based rapper, said. “Back in the days, they were young teenage boys who were making this bomb-ass music. It was the first time I listened to rap in Urdu, the same thing I’d only heard before so many times in English.” 

In 2013, Talha Anjum and Talha Yunus, a pair of students at a public high school in Karachi’s working-class downtown, released “Burger e Karachi”, the first viral hit that established their prominence as the rap duo Young Stunners. The rap song and accompanying low-res video satirize Pakistan’s Westernized elite, deploying ‘burger’, a citywide slang word that signifies a rich Pakistani, who probably attended English-speaking prep schools, studied in Europe or America, and looks down on the larger Urdu medium, lower middle class population of the city.

Today, Young Stunners have appeared twice on Coke Studio, and performed the Pepsi-sponsored “Why Not Meri Jaan”, which led to several billboard advertisements at major intersections in Karachi in 2021, a city of more than 14 million people. Not only has the hip-hop duo given Urdu rap an identity, they have inspired a generation of younger rappers, who feel emboldened to create music after seeing the Talhas’ commercial success. 

As a boy, Shareh used Audacity and FL Studio on his computer to informally produce the songs he’d written and recorded, cultivating a small audience of young people in Karachi, who related to his verses about hanging out with his friends at roadside hotels serving chai, and hustling to maintain his financial independence. In 2019, Shareh met sultan, a producer, and launched his YouTube channel with quality-level tracks loquacious with Urdu slang set against cooled-down trap beats, which simmer and dissolve, not unlike taking a drive through Karachi’s labyrinthine, no-signal highways as city lights flash at night, or the high induced from inhaling a hash-filled joint. Maybe both. 

In “109”, which features rappers Jani and Zas as well, Shareh utilizes the local slang “109”, another way to say “that’s lit” or “great” or “it’s on” in Karachi. 

“One day, I went to the studio, and sultan was making a beat,” Shareh recounted. “We got super hype because the beat was fire. And then instantly, it came in my mind, ‘109, 109’. So I wrote it down and we recorded the hook right then, and the spot for the verses was still empty. So everybody took their time. They wrote their verses and in two days, we recorded the verses, and it became a song.”

In “109”, Shareh reps Gulshan, the neighborhood from which he hails, and raps: “mehnat maine kafi kii/I started from the scratch” (“I worked hard/I started from the scratch”). “The entire song ran on slang, because of its title and hook. And it’s all about the streets,” Shareh said. 

Jani, who also raps on “109”, invokes Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West in his verse, citing rappers that Pakistani DIY musicians first heard not on the radio, but the worldwide web. Jani’s songs effortlessly blend trap beats with more upbeat Bollywood-esque music, creating a psychedelic sound that matches the fast life in the tumultuous, often crime-ridden megacity. 

“Sultan was my friend from school, and we were both into music,” Jani said. “One day, I was sitting with him, and he had me listen to Juice WRLD, who had peaked at the time and all his songs were hits. I was emotionally touched after listening to his music, and I got inspired to make similar melodies.”

In Lyari, a neighborhood in the city once beset with gang violence, the niqab-clad Eva B. preserves her anonymity, even as she raps in the public sphere. Eva’s “Rozi” (“Daily Bread”), which was featured in Disney’s Ms. Marvel, talks about the rapper’s struggle to make it as a woman in hip-hop in a patriarchal society, where she faced not only the censure of the outside world, but discouragement from within her own family.

“If you’re not getting the support you need at home, then you become anxious and silenced,” she said. “If I’m not getting encouragement at home, then how can I face the world? If you get support from your parents, your siblings, and your relatives, then you can easily face other people.” Eva’s songs express the mental fortitude required to be an urban woman in Pakistan, who both takes care of the home and hustles hard to earn money, rapping: “Kab tak karun phool ban ke kaanton ka saamna/Kanton ko katnay ke liye kulhari banu mein” (“How long can I remain a flower facing thorns?/To cut the thorns, I have to become an axe.”) 

Pioneers in the political unrest of the 2000s

And yet, Pakistan was not always fertile ground in which Raheem and Gen Z rappers could independently make music. In the early 2000s in the aftermath of 9/11, the country faced the fallout of the War on Terror with the meteoric rise of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and the effects of American policy in Afghanistan. Militants poured through the borders of the country and infiltrated major cities, staging suicide bombings and targeted killings. 

Most Pakistanis growing up in that era became desensitized to the militants’ violence and the responding army or police operations attempting to find and root them out. In Karachi, decades-long ethnic violence sizzled, as the exiled head of MQM, a political party representing the descendants of migrants from India, shut the city down at the toss of a coin, provoking ethnic clashes that led to mass casualties. 

In Faris Shafi’s 2012 “Awaam” (“The People”), the Lahore-based rapper eviscerates the political situation at the time and the dire straits in which Pakistan identity is enmeshed. In the music video, Shafi sits in a skit-like news show where Alia, the female anchor, interrogates him about his lack of morals. The segment ends with Shafi putting on oversized cartoonish sunglasses, and rapping the following lines: “NATO fauj ke to qaum hai hamesha se lun pe/. . . aur ab yeh ladkay guns pakar ke/bus chaltay jatay/jihaad chalate/pakhtoon ilaqay ki taraf/baraf, Musharraf/ke dost marain drone/get your postmortem soon or/get a postmodern room/do some shrooms and watch cartoons” (“NATO doesn’t give a fuck about the nation/. . . now these boys are getting guns/they keep walking/doing jihad/towards the Pashtun areas/snow, Musharraf’s friends/are dropping drones/so get your postmortem soon or/get a postmodern room/do some shrooms and watch cartoons”). 

“Cool iiiiit!” is the irreverent, almost-nonsensical refrain of the song, using humor as a refuge and coping mechanism for mind-boggling geopolitical violence, which had a daily impact on the lives of Pakistanis. “The political atmosphere has always been tense around here,” Shafi said. “Politics seems like everyone’s favorite reality TV show. A tragic one at that. I see comedy and tragedy as one, so to be able to comment on what was going through the craft that I love was something that came naturally.”

Without Shafi’s music, which he posted online (the profusion of curse words would never air on radio or television), Young Stunners would probably not have gained the traction they did, nor possessed the confidence to rap in Pakistan, and likewise, the Urdu-language rap that followed would not have come into fruition in the same way that it did. Shafi pioneered the genre, rapping in a politically bleak era when this form of music was still considered unknown and foreign. 

And just like rap, electronic music was also considered foreign, a weird genre not heard of, much less accepted, in a landscape of Pakistani pop music that often used rock as its foundation, and a listenership that otherwise tuned in to Bollywood songs or telenovela soundtracks.

Slowspin, the stage name of Zeerak Ahmed, returned to Karachi in the early 2010s after studying at a university in Ohio, where she discovered her calling to be a musician by producing ambient “soundscapes” mirroring the idyll of the Midwest. In Pakistan, she joined the underground electronic music scene, spearheaded by independent artists supporting each other’s work.

As an eight-year-old girl, Zeerak Ahmed learned to play piano, and apprenticed as a 15-year-old with the Delhi Gharana, a discipleship tradition of the tabla, or hand drums. Now residing in the US, Slowspin is known for haunting melodies that blend ambient sound with the poetic fragility of South Asian folk music. She sometimes trills in Urdu or English, and at other times opts for silence, letting the music resound and envelop in the empty spaces.

“I definitely spent a lot of time in Karachi just waiting for time at night for enough quiet without traffic. Gigs weren’t a thing per minute because of the political unrest. I remember one of my last gigs was at T2F. Sabeen Mahmud, [the founder], had been murdered. The day of our concert, we were at a funeral,” she recounted.

Zeerak Ahmed navigated the fragility of being a female musician in Pakistan, where the underlying stigma on women appearing in public can prevent them from pursuing music. She’d drown her performances in visual projections, and not openly share pictures of herself online, opting for censorship to protect her safety.

“Female musicians are put in a difficult position, where you have to communicate with the public. Sometimes people do make you uncomfortable, and it’s like, how do you deal with that?” she said. “I am no longer censoring the female body, and I’m really trying to understand the embodied experience of music and sound in that space.” 

Janoobi Khargosh, the one-man band containing Waleed Ahmed, anonymously released their first album, Billi Khamba Aur Urantashtari, in 2014, followed by the CPT. Space EP in 2018, and Survivors the next year. Like Slowspin, Janoobi Khargosh also favoured syncretism, opting for blending rock music reminiscent of the 1970s and ‘80s with synth-pop, crafting a surreal world hurtling towards an apocalyptic future.

“We’ve started writing about the universe ending, the Judgment Day. It might not seem that way when you listen to the songs, but most of the songs are about that,” Waleed Ahmed said. “And the latest album I’m working on currently, is mainly a reflection of that idea. It’s called ‘Exit’.”

Janoobi Khargosh’s upbeat “Cpt. Space” was recently featured in Ms. Marvel, the futuristic aesthetics of the song aptly complementing a TV show in which a Pakistani teenager in New Jersey discovers she has superpowers. 

Waleed Ahmed said he received an email from Disney requesting the use of his song. “I was like, ‘is this real, or is this a scam?’ But it wasn’t a scam, thank God. It hardly took five minutes for me to get back to them, and I said, ‘whatever it is, just take it,’” he said. 

A global sound

Today, Pakistan’s renaissance in music has resulted from a steady embrace of digital production, which encompasses the once-niche genres pioneered by older artists, the growing use of electronic music, and the daring to blend cross-cultural pop sounds with the more indigenous music of the region. 

“This change has already come to the rest of the world,” Kasumbi said, describing the widespread turn towards electronic music, and his own fascination with the genre, which appears in the songs he has produced. “In Pakistan, that shift has been a little delayed, and I wouldn’t say there’s a boom here yet. At this point, even pop music is influenced by the underground, and huge artists like Drake and Beyoncé are now making dance music themselves. It’s a trend that’s popular across the globe, and it’s something I’ve experienced in my journey as well.”

Earlier this year, “Pasoori” (loosely translated as “difficult mess”) by Ali Sethi and Shae Gill, premiered on Coke Studio and reverberated across the globe, drawing YouTube covers from the Netherlands to China, staking the number 3 spot on Spotify’s Global Viral 50 list, and counting a staggering 383 million views on YouTube.

Abdullah Siddiqui, a 22-year-old musician who produced “Pasoori” alongside veteran producer Xulfi, pulled from Latin American music, reggaeton, and whale calls to produce the song.

“Ali Sethi’s composition drove the process. I heard the demo over and over, and I discussed with Ali what kind of music he was listening to, and he brought up reggaeton and Latin music,” Siddiqui said. “That gave me a sense of what kind of sonic space it existed in, which is this hybrid liminal space between Desi and Latin music, and contemporary western future pop.” 

The syncretism and blending of genres in “Pasoori” led to its resonance across the globe, the deft mixing of sounds making it enjoyable for many audiences. “[We] created a sonic style that was entirely unique, but also somewhat familiar,” Siddiqui said. 

Often touted a “prodigy”, Siddiqui first appeared in Nescafé Basement in 2019 singing “Resistance”, an original song he’d written in English, and has since produced music for leading artists in the industry, and performed alongside pop singer Atif Aslam in this year’s season of Coke Studio.

As a child, Siddiqui listened to Disney Channel stars Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato, or pop divas like Lady Gaga and Ke$ha, this early exposure guiding his intuition into what makes a hit song successful. As he grew older in his teens, he discovered Imogen Heap and Björk, who continue to influence his sonic sense today. 

“Around the time I was 10, I asked my brother if he could arrange for me to get my hands on some music-making software, and he got me my first digital audio workstation,” Siddiqui said. “I started playing around with it, and just by trial and error, got myself to produce. I’d built up an ear for pop music, and for textures and arrangements. It was just pushing buttons until it sounded right to me.”

Siddiqui favours minimalism with breath-powered vocals, not unlike his idol Imogen Heap. He is currently working on two new albums, one of which ventures into the hyperpop space. 

“I wanted to bring South Asian representation to the hyperpop scene,” Siddiqui explained. “So that’s the album I’m putting out next. It sounds very, very modern, very futuristic, very manic. But also very fundamentally Desi.” 

Siddiqui has, after all, experimented with the maximalism inherent to hyperpop, producing Meesha Shafi’s camp-y feminist anthem “Hot Mango Chutney Sauce” and the majestic, but no less exaggerated “Rajkumari” that celebrates the South Asian queens of the past.

“Meesha has always been completely unafraid to say what she means and get her point across, and makes amazing art in the process,” Siddiqui said. “She’s saying a lot of things people don’t have the courage to say, and if I can help her try to change hearts and minds, I’m really happy to do that.” 

The aesthetics of women’s empowerment can sometimes appear in subtler, more mundane ways. Independent songstress Natasha Noorani centers the feminine voice when singing about relationships, expressing her feelings without shame, and beyond the idealized fragility that has often characterized the female point of view in love songs in South Asia.

“If you look at the music industry, women were not given songwriter roles, or roles in production, direction, composition,” Noorani said. “There were a lot of males writing in female voice. That trend continues, but I’m happy to see that younger femme individuals are writing and producing far more.”

In “Choro”, the first single off Natasha Noorani’s upcoming album Ronaq, named after her fearless alter ego, Noorani sings of being trapped in the tortuous in-between stage of heartbreak and moving on, physically entangled in a complex intersecting web of creamsicle orange thread in a few shots in the video, but still bravely owning and vocalizing her feelings of love and vulnerability.  

“Ronaq is the version of Natasha that gets to be fearless,” Noorani said. “She is a facet of myself that I have not been prepared to unveil in that way. And this album is the opposite of all the invisibility that I needed to showcase growing up.”

Noorani and Siddiqui aren’t the only artists with album-length projects in the pipeline. Raheem plans to release his first album with tracks produced by Kasumbi. Shareh is in the process of making an EP which he aims to drop this year, including a never-before-seen music video. Janoobi Khargosh is working on Exit, and Slowspin is also recording an album without a hard release date, while archiving folk songs passed through the generations on her mother’s side of the family. 

“We’re just now entering an age where Pakistani representation on a global level is about to become much more ubiquitous,” Siddiqui said. “The dam is about to break. We’re going to see uniquely Pakistani art making global waves, and we’re seeing an artistic vocabulary emerge that is unlike anything else that exists. We see it with Ms. Marvel, the film Joyland, and musicians like Arooj Aftab. We saw it with ‘Pasoori’. And in the coming years, hopefully that will keep going, and ultimately create a greater appreciation and demand for art within Pakistan.”