- This article was written in 1998 so it does not have include any latest stuff. I found the article very interesting so I thought I’d share it with you people. Please give your opinion with things you agree/disagree with. Enjoy. *
When four young, clean-cut, jeans-clad boys ventured on to Pakistani television screens with their guitars and a catchy, if lightweight, patriotic song in 1986, there was an uproar in the country. It was something completely new in a society still struggling to come to terms with the censorship imposed by a repressive military dictatorship and the narrow, ideologically defined limits of state culture. The four young boys’ clothes, their music and their behaviour smacked of Western influences and they represented a youth culture heretofore denied any representation on the staid state channel. While the young hailed them as a breath of fresh air in a stultifying environment, to the older defenders of public morality the four boys represented all that was wrong with the youth of the day: “illiterate of their own culture, interested in slavishly aping the West, and wasting their time in frivolous pursuits rather than becoming respected citizens of society.” **Little did either side suspect at the time that the Vital Signs, which these boys fancifully called themselves, and their song, “Dil Dil Pakistan”, would signal the start of a kind of musical revolution in Pakistan. **
The Vital Signs and their music represented a watershed in Pakistani pop music. Suddenly, after being gradually split along ethnic and rural-urban lines during the early ’80s, Pakistani commercial music had become divided along generational lines as well. What the youth of the country listened to, danced to and liked now was very different from what their parents’ generation could appreciate. And this was a divide that would only grow with time. Since that fateful day in 1986, the pop music sector has grown into a full-fledged industry catering mainly to the youth of the country, evidence of the profitability of which can be gauged from the multinational money pumped into corporate sponsorships for it. And while the industry has now grown enough to allow for niche-targeted music, the dinosaur-ish Vital Signs are still accepted as the fathers of modern Pakistani pop music.
But were the Vital Signs really the pioneers of pop music in Pakistan? Certainly not, if one accepts that the definition of “pop” is a fluid one and changes over time. At least for the generations that grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, film music was the most influential popular music there was. The 1966 Ahmed Rushdie-sung, Sohail Rana-composed “Ko Ko Korina” can easily lay claim to be the first real Pakistani pop song by any definition of the term. No wonder then that the image of a charismatic Waheed Murad shaking and lip-synching to this famous number remains deeply evocative of the swinging sixties to this day. Defining “pop” music as non-filmi music will, thus, always be highly problematic.
But even if one were to separate (unfairly, it must be stressed) pop music from film music, the Vital Signs could still scarcely claim the honour of being pioneers. In fact, the real pioneers of non-filmi pop music in Pakistan were the “underground Anglo” bands of the ’60s. Modelled on the musical style of English performers such as Cliff Richards and his band The Shadows, Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck, mostly Christian bands such as the Karachi-based Keytones and Ivan’s Aces and the Dhaka-based The Iolites were all the rage on stage in hotels across the country. Ivan’s Aces, for example, got feet moving at the Hotel Metropole and the Horseshoe Restaurant and Bar. This was the time when the theme song from the American film “Come September” stayed at the number one slot on the Capstan Hit Parade for a record 30 straight weeks, and when Radio Pakistan’s English show deejay Edward Carrapiet ruled the airwaves.
The only thing that can be said against considering these hotel and dance-hall bands as the true pioneers of pop music in Pakistan is that they sang mostly covers of English songs and did not ever release their own music, if they wrote any. But then this is a quibbling matter and it must be remembered that this was the pre-cassette age, a reality that made releasing one’s own music financially prohibitive for most artistes. Even if one accepts this argument, however, **there is no way that the Vital Signs could wrest the title of pop pioneers from the next generation of performers that achieved widespread acclaim throughout the country, courtesy the advent of television: Runa Laila and Alamgir. **
Runa Laila had recorded many film songs as a playback singer beginning in the late ’60s, but she really shot to fame in the early ’70s on the “Zia Moheyuddin Show”. Appearing in a tight-fitting shirt and bell-bottomed trousers with her sister Dina Laila to sing “Shakira Ki Maan Yeh Boli”, she was probably Pakistani television’s first pop star. Since her appearance on PTV, the raucous number “Hoye, Hoye, Hoye, Dil Dharke”, originally recorded for the film “Anjuman”, was never identified with anyone else. Her instant celebrity also meant that she easily procured recording contracts and was able to release her own albums on LPs complete with psychedelic sleeves.
Pakistan’s first male pop star was easily Alamgir who arrived in West Pakistan, like Runa Laila, from Dhaka. Alamgir’s first big hit, the rebelliously upbeat “Dekha Na Tha (Kabhi Hum Ne Yeh Sama)”, remains the song he is still most identified with, though later songs such as “Yeh Shaam Aur Tera Naam” and “Mein Ne Tumhare Gagar Se Kabhi Pani” continued to add to his oeuvre. There is no denying Alamgir’s contribution to the evolution of the pop music genre in Pakistan, even if he did later succumb to some political correctness by mauling the lyrics of “Dekha Na Tha” (the subversive word “nasha” became the milder “jadoo”) in culturally more repressive times. Alamgir, it must be said, laid the groundwork that countless others used to break into the music industry. He not only sang well, he was a performer in the true sense of the word, dancing, shaking his trademark tambourine and emoting for television audiences. Later on, he would also introduce instruments such as the acoustic guitar and keyboards on camera in his television performances.
The ’70s were as much a period of cultural and intellectual ferment as they were of political excitement. This was the period when the svelte Iranian singer Khanum Gogosh could be seen dancing her way through Farsi numbers on Pakistan Television and folk musicians such as Alan Faqir, Pathana Khan and the Sabri brothers were being introduced to the national audience for the first time. Pop singers such as Shyhaki followed in the trail blazed by Runa Laila and Alamgir, even though he started on PTV with the traditional ghazal genre with Iftikhar Arif’s “Tum Se Bichhar Kar Zinda Hain”. Among the talent that emerged at the time, he was the most successful in translating the recognition he received from television appearances into a lucrative stage career. At the same time, Naheed Akhtar emerged as a powerful new pop female voice, even though she limited her exposure to film and television and never really became a stage performer in the true “pop” sense. Nevertheless, her funky film songs such as “Tut Turu Turu Tara Tara”, “Zuzu Zuzu Mera Mehboob Hai Tu” and “Yeh Aaj Mujh Ko Kya Hua (Lara Lara Lara)” became huge popular hits and defined the sound of the ’70s for many people.
The imposition of General Zia’s martial law in 1977 coincided with many other social developments which together changed the face of music in Pakistan. For one, the mid-to late-’70s saw the demise of Urdu cinema in Pakistan and the rise of the more earthy Punjabi cinema. This was coupled with the strict code of censorship imposed by the martial law regime to drive middle-class viewers away from film houses. Television, thus started playing a more important role in urban areas and new musical talent became more inclined to put itself on display in that medium. Consequently, the quality of film music also declined. At the same time, audio cassettes became increasingly widespread and recording equipment became relatively cheaper, allowing small studios to flood the market with new talent. This was the era that saw the rise of such folk-pop heroes as the Seraiki-singing Attaullah Eesakhelvi whose entire popularity in the early to mid-’80s was based on the dispersion of his cheap audio cassettes which were popular in particular with long-haul truck and bus drivers.
The popular discontent with the military dictatorship had engendered a political movement against it, which was most visible in Sindh. It was only natural, then, that music reflected this dissent and the early ’80s also saw the rise of political pop in Sindh, whose lyrics explicitly dealt with issues of freedom and repression. In addition, the state’s attempt to impose a unitary culture, in the shape of religious ideology, actually resulted in a backlash in the form of a further assertion of ethnic and spiritual identities. Sindhi Sufi and Seraiki folk music, in particular, became extremely popular and saw the rise of master musicians such as Alan Faqir, Pathana Khan, Sohrab Faqir and Abida Parveen. Such was the popularity of this music that even the state-controlled PTV channel had to nod its head to it. The most visible display of this acknowledgement was the Alan Faqir-Shyhaki duet “Humma Humma” recorded and broadcast by PTV in 1984. Folk musicians would continue to have a major impact on more mainstream pop music well into the future.