Let’s start with this song by the Pakistani rock group co-VEN, “Ready to Die”:

co-VEN was featured in a recent New York Times multimedia video by Adam Ellick (not embeddable) which can be seen here.

Other musicians mentioned in the Times story include Ali Azmat and the band Noori (identified in the video as the Noori Brothers). To me, Ali Azmat comes across as a blithering idiot in the Times video, but I found the comments from co-VEN more compelling — at least coherent. (For the most part, I agreed with the Pakistani journalists in the Times’ video, not the musicians.)

What was interesting to me was the fact that Ellick, in the Times video, seemed to be putting co-VEN forward as an example of a band that criticizes the west but not the Taliban.

I haven’t heard much of co-VEN’s other music (none of the songs on YouTube seem political) or looked closely at their public statements, but the lyrics to the song above are present in the YouTube video, and they seem more ambiguous than Adam Ellick suggests. While “Ready to Die” does put forward the idea that there is a pattern — and a long history of failure — to western policy in the Muslim world, I don’t necessarily think the song reflects Pakistanis in denial. You can be opposed to the “game of chess” co-VEN is talking about while also being opposed to what the extremists have been doing in Pakistan in recent months. I’m not sure co-VEN is actually willing to go there, but it seems like a stretch to put an interesting indie/metal band next to the more banal pop music of Ali Azmat and Noori, as if they’re all the same.

Oh, and one more thing: it’s a shame that this irreverent and upbeat song, Laga Re by Shehzad Roy, was apparently banned on Pakistani TV. (I wonder whether it might have circulated anyway through the internet etc.) Continue reading →