How I ended up on Coke Studio
4:00am: Sheraton Hotel, Karachi. I walked out of the hotel lobby with my guitar case and suitcase in hand. I was thinking about the past and an image (comic above) came to mind. In 2008, I was a moody, disillusioned LUMS student who was spending an unhealthy amount of time indoors mostly penning comics and writing song lyrics just as moody and disillusioned as me. Now I was in a hotel bus going towards the airport where I’d catch a flight back to Lahore. I stare out at the dark, empty Karachi roads barely registering the sounds emanating from my headphones. I ...
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My heroes: Jal, Noori, EP, Aaroh, Fuzon
I remember jumping to the first Noori record during my teenage years, and I wasn’t the only one. An entire generation of youngsters during that time was crazy about the band. Inspired by the pop-rock industry’s boom during 2003 to 2006, which saw bands such as Jal, Noori, EP, Aaroh and Fuzon emerge, the phenomenon forced me to pick up a guitar during my A-levels. I can proudly say that as a school-going kid, my idols were not Zepplin’s Jimmy Page, or Jimi Hendrix. To be honest, I did not even know back then that these people existed. My inspirations ...
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Faraz Haider’s Andher: Hits and misses
Faraz Haider derives his musical inspiration from life, be it human emotions or current affairs. His debut album Andher reflects this, as most of the songs on the album have been composed by him and the relation of the artist to his lyrics lends them honesty – as if he is relating real life experiences. As soon as I popped the CD into the disc drive and hit the play button, I was greeted with an Audioslave inspired rock intro. Faraz Haider’s classic rock-esque wails and croons in the title track Andher are disappointing; the music and angry-guy lyrics are predictable ...
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Making money instead of music
There’s always been a truckload of false hype regarding Pakistan’s music scene. Many people do not consider Pakistan as good as ‘any worthwhile western nation’ when it comes to producing music. For many reasons, such a statement is ridiculous because music should never be about competition, and there should really be no nationalist basis for it. So, despite the half-assedness of Eurovision, music by and large exists in a world where territorial borders don’t exist. Still, I suppose if we were to entertain the notion that a national music scene could be compared to another nation’s, Pakistan’s music scene would be considerably ...
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