Rock & Roll Jihad by Salman Ahmad

Author:Salman Ahmad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Junoon

In 1990, the soul of Pakistan was up for grabs in an epic struggle.

Benazir Bhutto, celebrated in the West as a champion of democracy, was showing her true feudal colors at home. She put her progressive agenda on the back burner and was singing a different but familiar Pakistani tune called “Power Equals Corruption.” The young prime minister was following her father’s script, making shady deals with the military establishment and the mullahs from behind a façade of strong populism. But the jinn was out of Pakistan’s bottle and people were ready for real change. At the Vital Signs’ concerts across the country, Pakistanis were showing their true, joyful faces after years of living in the shadow of a dictator. I didn’t want to see that spirit get stuffed back into any bottle by anybody. So I turned to music for ammunition.

In 1990 I wrote a bunch of songs for the Vital Signs’ second album which reflected my growing awareness of the bubbling youth spirit. Young people wanted their voices to be heard, not hijacked by politicians. That year, I agitated for heavier-themed music that went beyond the Signs’ “Red Red Wine”–influenced offerings. I also wanted us to drop the group’s happy-go-lucky image. Young Pakistanis were ready for a band that was socially conscious and not just limited to patriotic pop platitudes and puppy-love anthems. But my band mates thought I had it all wrong.

“Sal, our popularity’s going to plummet if we record your songs, yaar,” an exasperated Rohail said to me as we rode to a show on a tour bus in July of that year.

Rohail and I happened to be going to a concert hosted by Nawaz Sharif, then the chief minister of Punjab. Traveling on that bus, I felt like a jester on his way to the king’s court. We were just another prop for a politician to display his so-called progressive credentials. I’d had it. Living in Pakistan for the past eight years had awakened me to some of the ways of the world. I’d made my band mates squirm by writing finger-pointing op-eds for Newsline and The Star, challenging politicians to do something meaningful about campus violence and drug addiction. I also wanted our “leaders” to bolster kids’ opportunities to express themselves through the arts. An arrow had pierced my heart and I wanted to bleed my passion into my work.

But Rohail, Shehzad, and Junaid gave me an ultimatum instead of empathy. After the “Concert for Nawaz” in the northern hill-station resort of Patriata in July, the three of them told me to quit rocking the boat with my “save-the-country complex” or leave. My obsession with social reform and writing songs that shook up the system were viewed as a direct threat to the band’s pocketbooks. Quitting would mean going back to scratch. I also had to think about Samina. Only a few months after the euphoria of “Dil Dil Pakistan,” I’d come to an imposing crossroads.

In the end I decided my soul wasn’t for sale.

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