Pakistani music has recently started to see it revival, and no one could be more excited than us, the deprived music lovers of Pakistan. New artists and new music has adorned all the mehndis and radio stations. The biggest and most popular trend within music is putting a fusion touch to puraanay gaanay. But is this “trend” anything worth spending time and energy over?

Big brands are trying to pump some energy into the stagnant Pakistani music scene.

These businesses ask the new and established singers to reinvent old songs as well as write new ones, and then release them under their umbrella. Sadly, the fusion trend grew into reinventing old songs into new ones, instead of actually taking inspiration from the classic material and building upon that.

What this means is stripping the songs of their original beats and totally revamping them, which is different that fusion that preserves the originality yet mixes them with new ones to a certain extent. With so many companies, artists and songs now involved in the highly commercialized reinvention process, the music of the past is bound to get lost and destroyed.

And that’s what happened a couple of days back when Komal Rizvi murdered the classic “Desan Da Raja“

The magic of the original was that it was sung is such a typical shaadi mohaul. The song was so perfectly simple and yet it captures so many emotions.

However. the reinvented version is anything but. The simplicity of the song is replaced by the same techno bass we hear in so many songs nowadays and of course the heavily auto-tuned awaaz to go with it. Props for at least contributing something to the music scene, I guess.

This song begs the question in my mind, how long do we have to keep reinventing the ghazals and gaanay of the past to the pumping beats of the day. Songs of today are perfectly fine as they are and the songs of yesterday need to be left alone. Each era of Pakistani Cinema and Music has its own characteristic and style.

Fusion to a certain extent is perfectly awesome, the generation of today and the future need to reconnect to these songs, but reinventing these songs is outrightly wrong. The integrity of these ballads needs to be preserved. Their lyrics, surr taal are the only vessel we have to the golden age of the Pakistani performing arts. We need to respect them rather than reinvent them.

They weren’t made in today’s age, their past is their beauty and that beauty needs to be celebrated.

Coke Studio is about to return for a new season soon, let’s just hope we see more innovation than regurgitation.

Cover Image via: Mag The Weekly

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