Ali Sethi’s infectious hit ‘Pasoori’ makes it big at Coachella

The singer has shared numerous takes on the thought process behind the hit song

Pakistani singer Ali Sethi has achieved international success with his Punjabi song Pasoori, which has become an infectious hit that fuses poetic tradition with global beats. The track, which translates to "difficult mess", has garnered over half a billion views on YouTube and was the most-searched song on Google in 2022. The song offers a melodic metaphor for the conflict between India and Pakistan in the form of an impassioned love song with an eminently danceable flow.

Pasoori originated when Sethi was asked to write a song for Coke Studio. The inspiration came after an Indian broadcaster pulled out of a creative partnership with Sethi due to his Pakistani heritage. “You’re a Pakistani, and India and Pakistan are at war, and now we can’t really put up a billboard saying we are working with you because extremists will set fire to our building,” the singer states. “As a Pakistani, I have grown up with that… ‘Oh, you can’t do this because it’s prohibited, yada yada.”

The incident, coupled with the theme of prohibition in South Asian love songs, inspired him to write a song that was "sort of a flower bomb hurled at nationalism and heteropatriarchy," as Sethi explained. “Of course, the theme of prohibition is such an eternal theme in South Asian love songs – all true love is prohibited,” Sethi told AFP after an electrifying performance at Coachella.

The Punjabi folk songs of his youth were the basis for the lyrics, imbued with puns and double entendres. These provide a nice way to subvert orthodox views without really appearing to be beyond the veil, he said. The track features Shae Gill, a singer born to a Christian family in Lahore.

Sethi was astounded by the global response to the song, which has the improvisational framework of a traditional South Asian raga mixed with the region's contemporary sounds, along with Turkish strings, flamenco-style claps, and the four-four Latino reggaeton beats that dominate much of today's pop music. “I thought it was going to be this like, indie, niche thing that a bunch of my nerdy fans were gonna like,” Sethi laughed. “I’m just astounded by how many people around the world – particularly in India – loved it and embraced it.”

The son of journalist Najam Sethi and politician Jugnu Mohsin, Ali Sethi is also a published author who began his formal Hindustani classical musical training after graduating from university. He studied Qawwali, a form of Sufi devotionals, and ghazal, a style of lyricism traceable to ancient Arabic poetry.

Currently living in New York, Sethi is enjoying the "fertile frontier" of experimenting outside the confines of his education and collaborating with musicians spanning genres, including jazz, reggaeton, hip hop, and salsa.

For his Coachella set, Sethi brought Raja Kumari, an American rapper and singer born in California to Indian parents, onstage. He cannot perform in India, where he has a significant fan base, but he has toured recently across the US and Canada, where he can reach fans in the Indian diaspora.

“What we can’t do over there we can do over here,” he said as he grasped Kumari’s hand onstage. “There’s all kinds of forbidden love represented here today. If you forbid it we will do it!” he stated, with his proclamation being met with thunderous applause.

Sethi sees his musical journey as an opportunity to embrace multiculturalism that societal strictures had previously denied. "Multilingual, multi-ethnic, multi-valent identities were celebrated in the Sufi shrines 800 years ago – in Lahore, which was where I was born," he said. "And yet growing up, I was never really encouraged to think of it that way."

Despite the novelty of singing ragas in the California desert, Sethi noted that the form has been thriving there for decades, with the Indian Hindustani classical musician Ali Akbar Khan instrumental in popularising the genre in the US by establishing a music school and teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "There's like this ancestry...but it's also so American on some level," he said. "America is the land of wild ideas, and I am just the latest wild idea."

“And I love it – it feels fine to be a little eccentric, a little new, a little unexpected, a little extra, a little too traditional,” Sethi said. “That makes sense to me.”

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