Ali Sethi’s Pasoori, a forbidden love ballad with a catchy tune, has propelled the Pakistani singer’s career. The Punjabi song, whose title roughly translates to “difficult mess,” was 2022’s most-searched song on Google and has over half a billion YouTube views. It offers a melodic metaphor for India-Pakistan conflict in the form of an impassioned love song with a danceable flow. Sethi was requested to write a song for Pakistani TV show Coke Studio after an Indian broadcaster walked out of a creative relationship because the 38-year-old is Pakistani.
“You’re a Pakistani, and India and Pakistan are at war, and now we can’t really put up a billboard saying we are working with you because extremists will set fire to our building,” the musician was warned. I’m Pakistani. “Oh you can’t do this because it’s forbidden, yada yada.”
‘No genuine love’
It inspired him. “Of course, the theme of prohibition is such an eternal theme in South Asian love songs – all true love is prohibited,” he told AFP after an exhilarating performance on Sunday at the Coachella music festival in the US, a cherry on top of his incredible year. “So I wanted to write a song that was sort of a flower bomb hurled at nationalism and heteropatriarchy,” Sethi said, sporting a wide-brimmed hat and black button-up with colorful southwest embroidery. “With fun innuendos and camp energy.” “A nice way to slip in and subvert orthodox views without really appearing to be out beyond the veil,” Sethi used puns and double entendres from Punjabi folk songs of his boyhood.
He sings alongside Lahore-born Christian vocalist Shae Gill. Sethi was “astonished” by the song’s global reception, which combines the improvisational framework of a traditional South Asian “raga” with the region’s contemporary sounds, Turkish strings, flamenco-style claps, and the four-four Latino reggaeton beats that drive much of today’s pop. “I thought it would be this like, indie, niche thing that a bunch of my nerdy fans were gonna like,” Sethi chuckled. “I’m just astounded by how many people around the world—particularly in India—loved it and embraced it.”
The newest crazy idea
Ali Sethi, a published author and son of writer Najam Sethi and politician Jugnu Mohsin, studied Hindustani classical music after graduating from university. He learned ghazal and Qawwali, a Sufi devotional. In New York, he is embracing the “fertile frontier” of experimenting beyond his curriculum and collaborating with jazz, reggaeton, hip hop, and salsa performers. Sethi remarked, “Bringing my stuff to dialogue with it feels very exciting.” It let him accept multiculturalism that society had refused.
“Multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-valent identities were celebrated in the Sufi shrines 800 years ago in Lahore, where I was born,” he said. “But growing up I was never encouraged to think that way.”
Raja Kumari, an American rapper and singer born in California to Indian parents, performed with him at Coachella on Sunday. “What we can’t do over there we can do over here,” he added as he grabbed Kumari’s hand onstage after their thrilling “Pasoori” duet. “Today’s forbidden love is represented.” “If you forbid it we will do it!” he shouted to cheers.
Sethi recently visited the US and Canada, reaching Indian diaspora admirers. Despite his huge streaming audience in India, he can’t play there. Sethi highlighted that ragas have thrived in the California desert for decades, despite their uniqueness. Ali Akbar Khan, an Indian Hindustani classical musician who founded a music school and taught at UC Santa Cruz, popularized the genre in the US. “This ancestry… he smiled. I am the newest wacky concept in America. “And I love it – it feels fine to be a little eccentric, new, unexpected, extra, a little too traditional,” Sethi remarked. I understand.
