Sometimes the universe can be an extremely generous place. It’s not a common thing: you can hardly expect it and almost never predict it. But in the rarest of moments, there will come a shining beacon of hope and audacity which to you – a metaphorical Chilean stuck in a mine – will seem like a gem so sparkling and so brilliant that time itself will stand still in wonder.
My gem this week boasts a lustrous purple gown, sparking glittery wings, a depth-defying unibrow and a twinkling tiara. All of this glorious stuff displayed on the sprawling green turf of a golf course. His name is Taher Shah, and I want to thank the heavens for his deeply fabulous existence.
That Shah has put out such a ludicrously unselfconscious video in a time when so much in Pakistan seems terribly straightjacketed is kind of heroic
He is, in case you have been comatose this week, Pakistan’s biggest viral sensation that doesn’t have to do with germ warfare. You may remember Karachi-based Taher Shah came out with a song called Eye to Eye a few years ago, which won the hearts and ridicule of the nation for being equal parts ridiculous, satirical and disturbing. He won a massive following, myself included, and none of us were disappointed in the least by his latest offering that has became the global phenomenon of the week: Angel. Step aside Sarah Mclachlan, there’s a new diva in the firmament.
If you have not seen it, I urge you to put down this paper, get out your phone and make your life better. It is one of the fastest-growing videos on YouTube and it has been covered in magazines, papers, blogs and websites across the planet. The song is about how there is an angel in us all, and features Shah dressed in the most amazing trailing gowns and royal jewelry, the sunlight dancing off his deep V-neck chesthair, as he walks – nay – sashays around the smoothly contoured premises of his Karachi golf club. His long black hair floats behind him like cascading smoke and his eyebrows (forestache?) unify in a show of cosmic strength and otherworldly deification.
You are never quite sure how seriously he wants us to take him. At a certain point, there comes another angel dressed in what looks like a frilly Victorian dressing gown and sparkly scepter (like a fat Glenda from Oz) and eventually, though no coherent explanation is given, there appears a child in a blue frock and a blond wig who looks like a younger Yoda. It’s around this time in the video, with close-ups of the cherubic Yoda fingering the rose petals that sprout around his golden hair, that one begins to suspect the child is actually Shah’s own, which makes sense because the lyrics of the song (a postmodern free-verse new form if ever there was one) become a lot more personal. The music video can’t be taken as a narrative, and I think it’s important to access it like one would a self-contained art work. An amazing, fabulous, theatrical, exuberant, cross-dresser-on-crack art work.
I get that “trans issues” are now in, given Caitlyn Jenner and the plethora of trans and non-gender conforming performers that have become mainstays on contemporary global culture, but the fact that Shah has put out such a ludicrously unselfconscious video in a time when so much in Pakistan seems terribly straightjacketed is, I believe, a kind of heroic. When I see him, arms outstretched and chest hair gleaming while standing in front of a semi-circle of white-clad Gregorian monks, I start thinking of everything from the KKK to the pink angels to the Council of Trent that wrote a treatise on the roles of icons in the Chuch in 622 AD. In short, like with all good art, I think when I see this video.
And that is why I believe it should be taken as something rather more serious than a joke or side-show. It may be a spectacle, but its originality in outfits, humor and self-awareness is something I think the world will always respond to because it’s sincere and so completely itself. I for one am so happy to see someone creatively embrace religious symbolism in a music video, especially at a time when we seem to be self-censoring ourselves when it comes to religious topics generally and visual culture specifically. And, like I said, the video raises some good questions (I’ve seen it 17 times and counting). For example: Why is the kid blond? Is Shah’s angel a pansexual being, without gender? If so, how did it create a kid? Is the kid the chosen one? Who are the Gregorian monks? Who is the lady in white? What is she wearing? Is she dead? Why is the angel in Karachi next to a lake? Is that a commentary on water shortages in Sindh or class privilege in Pakistan?
Humour is, as we know, often the only way for us to contextualise the world when it becomes too much to talk about, and if nothing else this video shows that we as a people still have a sense of humor, even if it does look chunky in purple. I can imagine someone writing a thesis on the subject in the near future, but in the meantime let us bask in the glow of this most sparkling post-queer pre-divine diamond of originality. In the words of the Phantom of the Opera: Come to me, my Angel of Music…
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