Noori Kushti

There are no visible lines on Ali Noor’s face. I notice this one day in Lahore, while sitting on a couch across from him and making a business proposition. I represent a nascent online music app, while he represents one of the last great bands of an era that peaked a decade ago. Theoretically, I ought to be the one who is fresh-faced while he bears the cruel passage of time, but his face is as smooth as a statue’s. He is speaking in the style and attitude that has come to define him – there is a lot of confidence, a supreme belief in himself, a well-rehearsed conviction.

Our business isn’t too complicated – we are planning a series of concerts in three cities that will serve as previews for the new album, Begum Gul Bakaoli Sarfarosh. BGBS is Noori’s third album in terms of release, but theoretically it’s the first of a trilogy: Raja Jani And Peeli Patti is the second part, and their first studio release, Suno Ke Mein Huun Jawan, is the conclusion. BGBS will be Noori’s first album in a decade, and these shows themselves will be the first ticketed events the band will have done (in an otherwise busy schedule of performing at corporate or institutional events) in several years.

A few nights later, I meet a friend who has recently covered the national T20 tournament for TV. He tells me that while doing a coin-toss with Shahid Afridi, a player he’d seen many times from the stands, he felt something unique. Standing in the middle of a roaring stadium, he felt the true magnitude of the crowd’s adoration. He describes the sensation like this: a sound that hits you on your legs and threatens to sweep you away.

Could the old heyday of pop that defined Noori still be rekindled?

A few hours before this exchange, I have been on a stage with Noori: they were performing their first concert of the tour. I was seated there because as per our plan, I would have conversations with the band about their album between each song.

Despite having attended many Noori concerts, and despite not being the sort of “Noori Nut” who I would encounter often on this tour, there was something absolutely unique about the way the sound from the crowd hit me on stage. It was like being surprised by a wave when you are at the beach – its force causing your legs to buckle. It was during one of those moments, when the crowd was upon us like a wave, that I turned to look at the band. Ali Noor was looking back at me and his face was completely scrunched up with emotion, a mass of lines running all across it.

Lahore

It is not a stretch to say that the band exists like a travelling circus, but their various corporate gigs have meant that there is a method to the madness. All this happens out of their Gulberg home in Lahore, which has long been a gathering point for Lahore’s musicians. Flitting in are band member Ali Hamza and various children – all of whom wander in and out of the setting at various points, not really disrupting the proceedings. Apart from these, there are friends, servants, session musicians, sound engineers, roadies and a few others milling about. Scattered around the room are various printers and piles of blank CDs and album sleeves. These items are all here because the band wanted to retain the physical connection with the listener that a CD creates, yet when they begin the process, they realize there are no real CD manufacturing operations left in the country, and so they have to set the whole thing up themselves.

It is yet another sign of how this time is going to be different – but those problems seem to be at bay in Lahore. The question now is whether that old heyday of pop which defined Noori can still be rekindled.

As the band goes through their sound check, I am struck by the dynamic between the two brothers.

The elder brother often knows how to articulate what the younger one feels, and has an instinct for knowing when to intervene.

In Lahore, this happens in the form of a malfunctioning guitar pedal: Ali Noor interrupted his brother and told a technician to fix it. “Mei ker duun? Lao mei kerta huun.” It was a scene out of any household with two young brothers, and at first it even seemed patronizing. But over time I saw that Ali Hamza would often turn to Ali Noor when speaking of an idea, and look to check if the elder agreed. That didn’t mean that he was averse to picking on his brother’s ego, and in Lahore that night both of them were relaxed enough to do so several times.

I feel Ali Noor's questioning of Islamabad is coming across as petulant

Islamabad

A televised football match is underway when we arrive at the Islamabad venue for the concert. The ones on Noori’s side (for it is quite clear that sides have to be taken when every tribe is wearing its colours) are wearing black T-shirts, which read “I am one in 333” – a reference to the exclusive, fan-driven and fan-supported nature of the event. The other side is wearing replica jerseys of their football clubs. The war seems to be over when, right at the start of the show, a late goal (presumably) draws large roars from the football fans. It’s a stark moment of exuberance that stands out against the leaden start of the concert.

The open-air venue doesn’t feel intimate, and the crowd sits largely dispersed despite several requests to “close ranks”, and one group in particular is given to the very noisy taking of selfies. Half an hour into the start, I have personally given up hope of the crowd ever coming to life.

The band’s approach is to perform a set tighter than they had played the night before, and later, to start speaking pointedly to the audience. At one point, I feel Ali Noor’s questioning of Islamabad is coming across as petulant, and the crossed arms throughout the audience seem to confirm this. Asking an audience why it is being so boring doesn’t seem the right way to do it, but Ali Noor keeps cushioning the blows with pleas to the transformative power that the connection between an artist and an audience can create.

“Sir mere khayal mein, Islamabad was a city made because of politics,” begins one bespectacled fan, “magar hum to politicians nahi hain – hum to apni shanakht khoj rahay hain” (but we are not politicians – we are searching for our identity). That observation is the moment the night finally switches. After almost two hours of cajoling the audience to sing along and launching into long introspective monologues, the band and the crowd are on the same page. Noori’s repeated requests for the audience to follow their lead – both on the night and through their lyrics – finally make headway, and the crowd is coming alive.

The wave finally hits my legs, and my view of the band starts to change. At this moment, I still have to decide how I feel about their new album or their music in general, but I am able to observe one aspect of their craft up close. Despite all these years and how much this country has changed, Noori still understands the excruciating art of connecting, viscerally, with a Pakistani audience. Everything else aside, that is no mean feat.

Noori-style pop is a sort of a urban folk music for contemporary Pakistan

Karachi

By the time we land in Karachi, a groove has been established – everyone knows what they have to do, and more importantly, the last two nights have given the whole band a lot of hope. In many ways, it felt like the old days again. For me too, it felt like a throwback to the days when regular concerts were the norm, rather than newsworthy. That night, after the concert ends and we discuss the plans for the album launch, there is a more relaxed vibe – the lines on Ali Noor’s face have vanished again.

In true Karachi style, the city throws up opposite extremes – the crowd at the venue shows up earlier than in either of the two cities, and it is the loudest one so far (after plenty of emotional blackmail from my end). Yet Karachi also ends up being the only city that fails to sell out. The ones who show up complain bitterly about the ten year wait for the album, and sing the songs they know with abandon – a reminder that fans’ passion isn’t the only thing that has to be courted.

But the relaxed atmosphere allows me to dwell on the album, on Begum Gul Bakaoli Sarfarosh itself. The album is about the travails of the fictional eponymous character who arrives in Pakistan on the dawn of independence. The album’s songs chart her triumphs and disillusionments with the new state, and travels to where the country stands now. Although six of the nine songs have never been released before, the lyrics were written over fifteen years ago, before the band had made it big. They were largely a way for the brothers to speak about the experiences of their grandfather, the polymath Raza Kazim, who won renown in the fields of music, philosophy and law.

Despite these nuances, the album’s general themes have much in common with the classic ideas of the Nooriverse – they share a sense of movement; a discontent with surroundings; a call to community and a search for transcendence. Until before this tour, I had thought of Noori’s songs as paeans to friendship, which they are, but the discussions brought up by the fans gave me an insight into what else they meant.

The reason I and others have not been prone to dissecting Noori is that the songs feel very simple. Ali Noor himself displays a surprising self-awareness when he mentions on-stage that he knows how most of the band’s songs have a lot of repeated words – “all that tan dolay, man bolay stuff”. Beyond the lyrics, the band’s sound was also predictable in the sense that it would involve catchy riffs and moments to indulge emotionally. For music snobs, such sameness is often undesirable, because it reveals a creative stasis.

I have often talked to Noori about these issues – a rejection of songs which appeal to cheap sentiment, a desire for music’s sense of community to create a better society, a need for the connection with music to represent something more valuable than material attainments. Whether it was in Ali Noor’s impassioned, theatrical monologues or Ali Hamza’s sonorous quips, there was always this concept-driven core to their discussions that seemed at odds with how I perceived their music.

I would repeatedly ask them why they would juxtapose such complex thoughts with simple, repetitive lyrics and catchy music.

The answer that I decided upon, after listening to them and their fans and what the air and walls told me over this period, is detailed below.

Pop music endures in Pakistan because it expresses the complex desires and thoughts of a diverse, urbanizing population in accessible symbols and sounds. At the risk of sounding vulgar, Noori-style pop is a sort of a urban folk music for contemporary Pakistan, and the musicians are able to tap into a collective unconsciousness that was seeking a modern release. At its best, Pakistani music provides something that the Pakistani state and identity rarely can – a sense of combined, cohesive belonging; a confidence and comfort about who we are.

What is special about Noori is that they consciously model their ideas within the garb of popular and simple lyrics and then set it up against music which repeatedly aims to move the body and create a visceral, physical connection. The attempt is to move the subtext, the meat of their message, from beyond the intellect into an extension of the entire body itself.

How far the message goes, however, is anyone’s guess.

Begum Gul Bakaoli Sarfarosh is now available online on Patari.pk, and is also on limited release in CD