Ali Sethi’s song Pasoori, a story of forbidden love with an infectious streak, has become an international phenomenon, combining poetic tradition with global beats to boost the rise of the Pakistani singer’s star.
The Punjabi song, whose title roughly translates to “difficult mess,” was the most searched song on Google in 2022 and has more than half a billion views on YouTube. It offers a melodic metaphor for the conflict between India and Pakistan in the form of a passionate love song with an eminently danceable flow.
The origin of the song comes from when Sethi was asked to write a song for the popular Pakistani television program Coke Studio, which came just after an experience where an Indian broadcaster pulled out of a creative partnership 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’re working with you because extremists will burn our building,” the singer recalled.
“As a Pakistani, I grew up with it… ‘Oh you can’t do this because it’s forbidden, yada yada.'”
‘All true love is forbidden’
The experience set his creative wheels turning. “Of course the theme of prohibition is such an eternal theme in South Asian love songs – all true love is forbidden,” he told AFP news agency after a thrilling celebration of a performance on Sunday at the Coachella music festival in the United States. , a icing on the cake of his remarkable year.
“So I wanted to write a song that was kind of a flower bomb hurled at nationalism and heteropatriarchy,” Sethi continued, wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a black button placket with colorful embroidery that hints at styles of the American Southwest. “With all the fun insinuations and all this camp energy.”
Sethi says he drew on Punjabi folk songs from his childhood, infusing the lyrics with puns and double entendres, “a nice way to slip in and subvert orthodox views without really appearing to be behind the veil”.
He performs the song with Shae Gill, a singer born into a Christian family in Lahore.
Sethi was “amazed” by the worldwide response to the song, which has the improvisational framework of a traditional South Asian “raga” mixed with the contemporary sounds of the region, along with Turkish strings, flamenco-style claps and the four-four Latino reggaeton beats. keeping rhythm for much of today’s mainstream pop.
“I thought it was going to be this kind of indie, niche thing that a bunch of my nerdy fans would like,” Sethi laughed. “I’m amazed how many people around the world – especially in India – loved and embraced it.”
‘The latest wild idea’
Ali Sethi, the son of journalist Najam Sethi and politician Jugnu Mohsin, is also a published author, who began his formal Hindustani classical music education after graduating from college. He studied Qawwali, a form of Sufi devotionals, and ghazal, a style of lyricism that can be traced back to ancient Arabic poetry.
Today, he lives in New York and enjoys the “fertile frontier” of experimenting beyond the confines of his education, collaborating with musicians from a variety of genres, including jazz, reggaeton, hip-hop, and salsa.
“Bringing my stuff to dialogue with it feels very exciting,” Sethi said, adding that it’s helped him embrace a multiculturalism that societal strictures had denied.
“Multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-valent identities were celebrated in the Sufi shrines 800 years ago – in Lahore, which was where I was born,” he continued. “And yet growing up I was never really encouraged to think of it that way.”
For his Coachella set on Sunday – he will perform again at the major festival next weekend – he brought onstage Raja Kumari, an American rapper and singer born in California to Indian parents.
“What we can’t do over there we can do over here,” he said as he grasped Kumari’s hand onstage following their electrifying “Pasoori” duet. “There’s all kinds of forbidden love represented here today.”
“If you forbid it we will do it!” he said to resounding applause.
Sethi has toured recently across the US and Canada, in cities where he can reach fans in the Indian diaspora. Yet he can’t perform in India itself, where, according to streaming metrics, he has an enormous fan base.
But for all the surface-level novelty of singing ragas in the California desert, Sethi noted that the form has been thriving there for decades.
The Indian Hindustani classical musician, Ali Akbar Khan, was instrumental in popularising the genre in the US, establishing a music school and also teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“There’s like this ancestry … but it’s also so American on some level,” he said with a wide smile. “America is the land of wild ideas, and I am just the latest wild idea.”
“And I love it – it feels fine to be a little eccentric, a little new, a little unexpected, a little extra, a little too traditional,” Sethi said. “That makes sense to me.”