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Pasoori: Everyone loves a little angst

One of Coke Studio season 14’s big hits seems to have turned on our collective angst button. What is its magic sauce, wonders Rashmi Vasudeva
Last Updated 29 April 2022, 21:20 IST

‘Pasoori’ begins gently enough — there’s only a hint of its power in the opening strums. The camera glides towards renowned Pakistani Kathak dancer Sheema Kirmani who, in a resplendent yellow saree, moves gracefully to music that has not yet burst into flames. But burst it does as the multi-talented Ali Sethi casually walks from deep within, singing, into a set built to resemble an aangan (courtyard). And suddenly everything happens at once.
Dancers groove, a man stares at a full-speed table fan, a fuschia-pink bohemian window opens into nothingness and on the screen is Shae Gill, the singer Pakistani Instagram is in love with, sitting pretty amidst flowers, ready to match Sethi, tone to tone, beat to beat.

To term ‘Pasoori’ a stupendous global hit would be stating the obvious.

At last count the views of the song on Pakistan’s Coke Studio season 14’s official channel was 82 million-plus; in March, it was in the third place on Spotify’s global Viral 50 list and it has shattered and broken the internet with trending reels, YouTube spin-offs, dance challenges (we even found a Bharatanatyam version) and cover versions.

So, what’s the secret sauce? Does it switch on our collective angst button, an angst that Covid has contributed greatly to, in the past two years? ‘Pasoori’, for those who don’t know, is a Punjabi word that roughly translates to ‘angst’. As Sethi himself says, the word is hard to translate. Call it the bittersweetness of unrequited love, the Wabi-Sabi in art or the strange joy one sometimes finds in melancholy, ‘Pasoori’ is all this. It speaks of anguish, art, music and passion and how all of these can be uplifting, transformative even.

So big has the track become that an overwhelmed Sethi, in a series of Instagram posts, tried to find the magic ingredient himself.

He described how it took the team more than a year to make the song and find the right blend of its Turkish, Arabic, Persian and Indian influences. The lyrics apparently were finalised only 12 hours before the actual shoot with one of the hook lines taken from a quote Sethi saw on the back of a truck.

The author-composer believes they have created what he calls ‘Ragaton’, a hybrid new genre of music that blends raga and reggae, among other sounds.

A new genre or not, ‘Pasoori’ is in our bloodstream now. We may never discover its magic sauce but our hearts, just like how Sethi croons, have already “lurched and slid”.

Well, kaga bol ke dus jaavay (let the crow tell me why).

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(Published 29 April 2022, 12:11 IST)

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