Coke Studio’s original song, Pasoori, which was released about three months ago and sung by Ali Sethi and Shae Gill, has now been sung by a Dutch singer-songwriter-Youtuber Emma Heesters who is popular for covering popular songs.
The popular vocalist from Netherlands, Emma Heesters released her remake of Pasoori song on her YouTube channel. On Instagram, she wrote, “Pasoori. It was time for a new reels! sooo which song do you wanna hear next?” Here is Heesters’ cover of Pasoori song:
Coke Studio’s Pasoori song has over 106 million views, whereas, Heesters’ English remake garnered over 329,500k views as yet after it was uploaded on May 7.
The New Yorker termed Pasoori a pop song that’s uniting India and Pakistan.
The article read, “A few years ago, the musician Ali Sethi was driving through Punjab, behind a jingle truck—the long-haul trucks known in his native Pakistan for their filigreed paint designs—when he spotted a phrase in florid Punjabi calligraphy on its back.
The New Yorker covered the whole story behind the song, which read, “Agg lavaan teriya majbooriya nu,” it said—a call to “set fire to your compulsions.” It’s not uncommon to glimpse bits of verse, or dire warnings—against straying eyes or losing yourself in the big world out there—among the fluorescent parrots and tropical fruit schemes of jingle trucks. But Sethi couldn’t stop thinking about that phrase.
It inspired the first line of “Pasoori,” the thirty-seven-year-old’s latest single, a joyous, dance-fuelled hit that has drawn more than a hundred million views on YouTube since its release three months ago and is playing on the radio everywhere, from the United Arab Emirates to Canada. The song is stealthily subversive: a traditional raga—the classical Indian framework for musical improvisation—has been laid over an infectious beat that sounds South Asian, Middle Eastern, and, improbably, reggaetón, all at once. Even if you don’t understand the lyrics, you can tell that it’s a song about longing. “If your love is poison, I’ll drink it in a flurry,” Sethi sings in Punjabi with smooth anguish, in a rousing duet with Shae Gill, a Pakistani singer and Instagram star. “It’s my favorite genre,” a friend of mine said. “A love song that sounds like a threat.”
The idea for the song began when Sethi, who lives in New York, was invited to collaborate on a project in Mumbai, which he had visited many times before for literary festivals and music gigs. But any travel to India for Pakistani nationals is subject to the politics of the moment, and Sethi was told by the producers that he wouldn’t be able to work there as a Pakistani artist, because extremists might burn down the studio. The danger of arson reminded Sethi of that line from the jingle truck. “So I did what desi bards have done for ages,” he said, referring to South Asian songwriters of yore. “I might not have been able to travel to India, but I knew my music could.”
“Pasoori,” a Punjabi word that translates roughly to “difficult mess,” is about an age-old situation: two people who are forbidden from meeting each other. It’s written in the style of a courtesan song, a genre with origins in medieval South Asian poetry that emerged in response to the custom of arranged marriages. (Often the song is about an extramarital affair, and a courtesan is trying to persuade her married paramour to stay the night.) Full of puns and erotic innuendos, courtesan songs typically lament trysts that must take place in secret, meetings that don’t materialize, and the oppressiveness of polite society. “Pasoori” is ostensibly about star-crossed lovers, but it’s also an apt metaphor for the relationship between two countries in perpetual conflict whose histories and cultural touchstones are entwined.
In early 2021, Sethi sent a voice note with the melody and the first few bars of the lyrics he had in mind to the producer Zulfiqar Khan, who goes by Xulfi. Xulfi had just been brought on to helm the fourteenth season of “Coke Studio,” a popular musical TV series in Pakistan produced by the soda company. “I had goosebumps. I wanted to dance,” Xulfi said. “I knew that people were going to love it, and that they wouldn’t know what hit them.” Xulfi found Anushae Gill, a.k.a. Shae Gill—a student of economics whose best friend started posting videos of her singing on Instagram in 2019—and brought her into the project, thinking that her smoky voice would pair nicely with Sethi’s rich tenor.
The video, shot in old-Bollywood, Technicolor style and directed by Kamal Khan, introduces Sethi and Gill, dressed in boho interpretations of traditional outfits—he in a striped kurta pajama in jewel tones and a matching cap, she in a flowing white dress and embroidered vest—as they sing in the courtyard of an ancestral home. Their duet is intercut with glamorous stills—a young man in gem-studded makeup, a woman in elaborate braids. Each character sends a message of inclusion, from Sheema Kermani, the bharata-natyam dancer and activist from Pakistan, who spins slowly between two columns, to Gill, who is from the Christian community, which makes up only 1.59 per cent of the population of Pakistan. A pair of boys performs a delicate jhumar dance, the hems of their kurtas flaring. Like many desi classics, the song operates outside traditional gender roles—here Sethi sings to a man—with the singer in the role of a narrator weaving a tale.
In 2012, Sethi recorded Farida Khanum’s “Dil Jalaane Ki Baat” (“Talk That Burns the Heart”), for Mira Nair’s film “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” The song brought Sethi international recognition as a singer, and, in 2015, when he performed a traditional song, called “Umran Langiyaan” (“Lifetimes Have Passed”), on “Coke Studio”—his first appearance on the show—he cemented his place as an interpreter of classics. In 2016, he also started training with Khanum, affectionately known as the Queen of Ghazal, who taught him “the exquisite art of phrase-making”—how to generate captivating loops and hooks out of ragas. She had performed this art in the courts of rajas and maharajas, where singers like herself were the chief providers of musical entertainment. Sethi credits the playful, seductive-at-all-costs “earworminess” of “Pasoori” to the skills that he learned at her side.
It was partly the emerging wave of Pakistani pop singers such as Siddiqui and Hasan Raheem, who began uploading their sample-heavy songs online in 2019, that nudged Sethi to branch out musically. He brought up Raheem, a twenty-four-year-old singer-songwriter (and doctor), whose song “Joona,” an irresistible, poppy guitar-funk track, is accompanied by a charming video, in which Raheem dances his way through a supermarket while shopping for groceries. The lighthearted lyrics are about the small moments, crushes, day-to-day life, instead of the subcontinent’s collective cultural burden, and, for Sethi, it represented a shift in post-Internet South Asian music. “Here I am,” he said, “trying to perfect these medieval microtones with my throat, thinking, Enough is enough. I want to make a banger.”
His “banger” now sits firmly at No. 1 on the Indian music charts, which have traditionally been shaped by the Indian film industry’s endless supply of soundtracks. People are streaming “Pasoori” in villages, in cities, in regions where people don’t even speak the language but furiously feel the vibe, and Sethi has received love letters from every stripe of diaspora desi who play it to their children every day, in the way that he remembers his mother used to play her Qawwali tapes for him. The week that “Pasoori” hit No. 1 in India—just after Arooj Aftab became the first Pakistani singer to win a Grammy—two Indian teens were arrested in Bareilly, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, for listening to Pakistani music. With communal tensions currently on the rise in India, the headlines weren’t necessarily surprising, but they ignore a larger truth: even if they can’t cross borders—India and Pakistan do not generally issue visas to each other’s civilians—Pakistanis were raised on the same diet of Bollywood movies, and Indian households sit down to their favorite Pakistani soap operas nightly. They have actively sought out culture from each other, through leadership changes and political upheavals.
Like many popular desi songs, “Pasoori” started spreading with a forward on WhatsApp from family members in India, moving through the Middle East, Europe, and Australia, before finally reaching—all of a few weeks later—the United States.
Now it’s poised to cross over, and so is Sethi. When the possibility came up of attending an Oscar party in Los Angeles that was celebrating South Asian nominees, Sethi, who travels frequently, was game.
Singer Ali Sethi had also been spotted at the pre-Oscars celebration of South Asian nominees for the 94th annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles, California in March.
The pre-Oscars event was hosted by international South Asian stars including Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Pakistani-American comedian Kumail Nanjiani, New York restaurateur Maneesh K Goyal, Chopra’s manager Anjula Acharia, actor Mindy Kaling, head of Global TV at Netflix Bela Bajaria, and film producer Shruti Ganguly.
Bollywood actors Abhay Deol and Swara Bhasker had also attended the event, and later posted pictures with the Pasoori singer on their Instagram profiles. Pooja Kohli, a film producer and digital creator from India, also posted pictures with the Pakistani singer and called the latter her “latest obsession.”