Junoon
At the time of the first gulf war under the first Bush, I was a student at a tiny midwestern college where lefty politics was the wind beneath our collective wings. I remember somebody had a tiny black-and-white portable TV and some 40 of us had crammed into a dorm room to watch the bombs fall. We were perversely excited: now was the time for action! But even we were savvy enough to realize that a protest on our insular campus would be an exercise in group masturbation, so we hied ourselves to the nearest air force base.
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The kitsch sprouted like mushrooms–weeping bald eagles and vengeful Uncle Sams filled my in-box by the wee hours of September 12. One of those collectors’ mints advertised an amazing specimen in the Sunday newspaper magazines a few months back: a crude, stiff rendering of the “Tribute in Light” memorial in “genuine crystal” that looked like plastic, its base wrapped in a molded flag and eagle. To me it was an aesthetic emetic, but I felt guilty knowing that sweet old ladies out there would be setting this icon in a place of honor on the mantelpiece. It made them cry. They bought it because it made them cry. And who am I to call someone else’s artificial grief response generator tacky? Truth is, Titanic makes me cry, even though I know in my heart it’s a dreadful movie; effective emotional manipulation is not the same thing as good art, after all. Knowing this, it’s hard to take my own impulsive responses too seriously.
But if you want to talk to America, you’ve got to learn its language. The Pakistani band Junoon, a hugely popular Karachi-based trio that sells out stadiums in south Asia and was once visited onstage by their country’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, has just released its first English-language single, with the intention of reaching beyond its Urdu- and Farsi-speaking fan base. With lyrics by Polar Levine, a poet friend who lives in lower Manhattan, it’s called “No More,” and it’s about…well, you can guess what it’s about. “In my lungs through my windows on my head on the floor / Ashes of falling hope choking me inside these doors / Stormy winds seduce the night over New York and Karachi skies / Sinking in a sea of time mourning since 11/9.”
What distinguishes these singles from the rest of the terrorism tchotchkes that we’re drowning in? In some ways, there’s no difference: the idea is still to buy them. But music is different: these songs don’t just make us cry; they encourage us to come together, right now. And if Springsteen is calling us out to a block party, Junoon reminds us that the block is the whole wide world. You might not always think the music at the street fest is the height of art, but that’s hardly the point: to sneer at kitsch for its very mass-ness is to ignore the need for, every once in a while, some particularly collective sensation. We can keep it in the national family, and lick our wounds with exclusionary zeal, or we can see that our wounds give us more in common with the rest of the world, not less.
