Zeb & Haniya

 Z&H are a duo of Pakistani singer/songwriters.  They are cousins who, while both attending college in the NE United States, would meet periodically because they were homesick and they began to sing the songs from their childhood together.  Obviously, both were gifted musically.  They also made pilgrimages to the Radio City Music Hall in NYC to see shows.  Zeb, I believe, became a big fan of the Delta blues.  Eventually they went home and all these influences came together in a wonderful format that was for some time advanced by a live studio sponsored by MTV and Coke.  For a few years, some of the best music in the world was broadcast from this studio, a hybrid of modern musical forms and instrumentation, paired with folk instruments indigenous to Pakistan and the Punjab.  I found it a brilliant combo.

Eventually, the powers that be in Pakistan seemed to exert their influence and the music from this studio became much more conservative.  Such is life.  But I found it truly enlightening that a country we know so little about in terms of culture, Pakistan, should have been at the cutting edge of the world's music scene, at least in my estimation.

There are a couple of things to say about this song.  It is nested, lyrically speaking, in the tradition of the Urdu ghazal, in terms of content and style if not form.  The ghazal as a poetic form originated in medieval Persia and emigrated to India (and what would become Pakistan) along with the Moghul invasion and subsequent dynasty in northern India.  Traditionally, the ghazal was a form of love lyric, but it has an unusual structure in that each couplet stands as an independent unit.  The whole is not linear as English language tends to be.  And yet there must be a thread of unity throughout any given ghazal.  The analogy is that of a necklace with many kinds of gems and stones threaded upon it.  So you have many surprising twists and turns in a ghazal, with social and personal commentary included therein.  

The Urdu ghazal is really the only living form of poetry at present that attends to the subject matter of love and all its many permutations.  I only mention all this in order to introduce the listener to the sensibility behind the lyrical style of this song.

One other thing.  What stood out to me about this song was how the delicate dynamic was maintained throughout.  In contemporary Western pop music, people seem addicted to shifting from delicate intros into thrashing choruses, which just bores me to fucking tears.  Thank goodness for musicians who can carry a delicate melodic line through to the song's conclusion.  I love the lilting feel to this performance.

I'm pushing the edge a bit here but this is still intended to be part of my Valentine's Day theme and thread.  Click on the "cc" closed captions to get the translation.  Best to watch it on a laptop, then.

And so, without further ado....