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With passion, Pakistani
trio rocks for social change
Dec 12, 2002
The singer deplores terrorism from behind his silver-lensed sunglasses before
the guitarist, his shirt unbuttoned halfway to his navel, unleashes licks
reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix. If there is a symbol of a modern, moderate
Pakistan, this is it.
Once a protest band banned (a pun they employ liberally) by the government,
Junoon is now arguably Pakistan's biggest musical sensation, selling millions of
albums and even counting President Pervez Musharraf as a sometime fan.
Junoon was the brainchild of Salman Ahmad, a Pakistani raised in the United
States where he acquired a passion -- junoon in Urdu -- for Hendrix and Led
Zeppelin. After fulfilling family expectations and attending medical school back
home, he picked up his guitar.
Dubbing themselves "Sufi rockers," Junoon melds Ahmad's love of loud riffs with
South Asian rhythms and lyricism in the Islamic mystic tradition -- inspired,
Ahmad said, by Pakistan's biggest musical export, the late qawali singer Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan.
When airlines hijacked by Muslim extremists killed thousands last year in the
United States, Ahmad said he experienced "a paradigm shift in my consciousness."
He was approached after a concert in New York by Polar Levine, a music
journalist who lives blocks away from the former World Trade Center, and the two
agreed to turn a poem by Levine into a song that looks at the tragedy from both
the American and Pakistani perspectives.
The result was Junoon's first song in English, No More: "Stormy winds seduce the
night / Over New York and Karachi skies / Sinking in a sea of time / Mourning
since 11/9."
Apart from the musical influences, Junoon has a very visible American component:
bassist Brian O'Connell, a friend of Ahmad's from his youth in New York state
who Ahmad joked is "the most popular American in Pakistan."
The description seems accurate. After a recent mini-concert in the capital
Islamabad at a function of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF),
O'Connell and his bandmates were swarmed by dozens of teenage boys and girls
asking that they autograph their programme fliers.
"People have started accepting me as an ambassador," O'Connell said. "Pakistanis
often suffer from a collective low self-esteem, and instead of wondering why I
left America, land of opportunity, it says it can be cool to be Pakistani."
O'Connell, a Christian, said he felt at home in the music's Sufi message, but
admitted it has been an uphill battle to convince friends from the United States
that Pakistan was safe to visit.
Pakistan has seen a string of attacks against Western and Christian targets that
have left dead more than 40 people since October last year.
In one of the most horrific attacks, US journalist Daniel Pearl was abducted in
January in Karachi, the port city where Junoon is based, and beheaded by his
captors.
In tribute to Pearl, Junoon joined a concert in New Jersey on October 10, what
would have been the Wall Street Journal reporter's 39th birthday. Ahmad said the
band took part after he got a call from the late reporter's father, Judea Pearl,
who told him "Danny was a musician himself and loved Junoon's music."
Ahmad, who pens the lyrics that are sung at full volume by Ali Azmat, has used
his platform to campaign for numerous causes, including AIDS awareness, for
which he was selected as a UN representative in Pakistan.
They were banned under both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif's governments.
"The attitude was that music was supposed to be just entertainment, not a means
to challenge the status quo," said Junoon's manager, Shehryar Ahmad.
The blacklisting forced the band to relocate abroad and seek an audience out of
Pakistan -- which they did with a bang, as the first 50,000 copies of their 1997
album Azadi (Freedom) sold out in India within days.
The band's relationship with the Pakistani establishment has changed
full-circle. Musharraf, who ousted Sharif in bloodless 1999 coup, invited Junoon
to play last December for the birthday of Pakistan's founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
To the surprise of his security guards, the media-savvy 58-year-old president
hopped onto the stage and clapped to the beat.
But politics can still cast a shadow over the band. This year they called off
shows for their massive fan base in India, as New Delhi and Islamabad stood on
the brink of war.
"One of my great passions is to bring peace between India and Pakistan," said
Ahmad, in his late 30s. "We connected there with so many millions of people and
showed a different side of Pakistani culture."
"It's ludicrous that 55 years later (after India and Pakistan's independence)
we're still pointing nukes at each other."
Ahmad pledged to keep campaigning for a better world and said he was touched by
an e-mail of support a few months ago by U2 frontman Bono, who Ahmad praises for
rising above many other Western pop stars by using his music "to create
awareness."
"Pop culture in the West, the entire sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll thing, is
pretty dispensible," Ahmad said. "Pop culture has more power than being sexy."
SHAUN TANDON
Agence France Presse
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