Ali Sethi wants to make art that represents the many selves he’s had to embody: as an immigrant, a queer person, and a musician trained in a Hindustani classical tradition but also captivated by reggaeton and electronic music. The 39-year-old’s 2022 hit “Pasoori” did just that—on an unbelievably massive scale.
It’s a love song that doubles as a lament to the geopolitical conflict between his native Pakistan and India, a rift that goes back to the Partition of 1947. The clash has led to several wars between the two countries as well as ongoing tensions, as a right-wing, Hindu-supremacist government has gained an increasingly large following in India. Sethi was inspired to make the track after a collaboration in Mumbai, India was canceled because, since he is a Pakistani artist, there was a worry that someone would attack the studio where he planned to record.
“Pasoori,” a duet with fellow Pakistani singer Shae Gill, pastes a propulsive, raga-driven melody over handclaps and a reggaeton beat. This unique combination of styles, along with its star-crossed narrative, led to its worldwide success. It was the first Pakistani song to make it onto the Spotify Viral 50 Global Charts. The YouTube video, set in a courtyard bustling with dancers, musicians, and blossoming greenery, currently has more than 660 million views. It was one of the most searched-for songs on Google last year. Reflecting on the phenomenon, Sethi says, “It gives South Asians a place to congregate freely through an aesthetic experience.”
Over Zoom, Sethi pops up in a black shirt covered in large white squiggles that reminds him of his grandmothers. I tell him that I’m wearing a sweater made by my own grandmother, and he immediately starts asking about my family history. When he finds out that most of my family lives in the Indian capital of New Delhi he tells me he cannot travel there, adding, “The loss of one of my favorite Indian cities adds to my preexisting melancholia.”
Sethi, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in South Asian Studies in 2006, immediately dives into the history of Partition and what it means for Indians and Pakistanis culturally and emotionally. “The pain and the beauty of that connection is so unique,” he says. “When I start explaining what it means to come from that to Americans, they ask, ‘Do you love each other or hate each other? Are you enemies or lovers?’ I’m like ‘We’re both. My only love sprung from my only hate.’”
Sethi was trained in Pakistan. One of his teachers, the classical singer Ustad Naseeruddin Saami, is famously the only person known to be able to sing every note in the microtonal scale. His other teacher, Farida Khanum, is known as “the queen of ghazals,” a form of spiritual Sufi poetry and music that ruminates on loss and yearning. Though both imparted rigorous traditional skills, they also encouraged Sethi to follow his interest in forward-looking cultural synthesis. Sethi remembers Khanum once telling him, “Do not think of our traditional music as ossified or sealed. When I was coming of age, we were doing everything—crashing Édith Piaf into Ustad Barkat Ali Khan. The whole point is to give voice to new experiences and sensibilities.”
Following the star-making popularity of “Pasoori,” Sethi has taken a couple of musical left turns while staying true to his core goals as an artist. In July, he released Paniya, a four-song EP that merges Urdu ghazals with dewey, slow-moving ambient production. And next month he’ll put out a collaborative album with visionary electronic producer Nicolás Jaar called Intiha. The project splices bits of Jaar’s 2020 record Telas into inky soundscapes that twist around Sethi’s largely improvised riffs on Urdu poetry.
Sethi’s approach is inspired in part by the Urdu concept of “bohl banana,” which he describes as “phrase-making.” It is the improvisational process of pulling words into new musical rhythms or forms, or as Sethi puts it, “keeping time and then eluding the beat.” While making Intiha, Sethi would sing in a different time signature than Jaar’s underlying instrumental. “It becomes trippy because you’re experiencing two grooves overlapping and converging,” he says. “The music starts to feel chimerical.”
For Sethi, the desire to engage in these sonic experiments is rooted in that tension and the conflict he witnessed growing up within the South Asian subcontinent, as well as what he’s felt as an immigrant in the U.S. and as a queer person. “When you live on the fault line of various identities, you want to make something that reflects all of you,” he says. “I just have this undying need to recontextualize things and make unlikely connections.”
Ali Sethi: It turns out the beat is great, Shae Gill is an amazing singer, and Abdullah Siddiqui is a prodigy producer who is fluent in the aesthetic of pop but also knows how to treat my vocals like Imogen Heap from 10 years ago. That, combined with a melody completely rooted in raga, is very compelling. Those are the main reasons.
I have my grand ideas, too. Unlike many other viral songs, where people are making TikToks of the sound, most people listen to “Pasoori” on YouTube. The visual for the song is like a room where people feel safe. You have someone doing Bharatnatyam [South Indian classical dance], someone with gem stones on their face, folk and contemporary instruments being played. The visual enacts a kind of multiculturalism that is increasingly rare in South Asia. It’s very hard to find a space where you can simultaneously have Hindu and Muslim aesthetics together. In most cases someone is going to try to police that.
The YouTube comments are also like a forum. People are interpreting the visuals, the language, translating for each other, making sense of the melody. Someone is saying, “At 3:05 there is this moment where this happens, and I wonder what you all make of it. Anyway, good night from Bangladesh.” Then someone else will be like, “I’m sitting in Sweden right now. I think you’re exactly right sister, and here’s my cell phone number.”
One of the most gratifying things is that children love that song so much. They sing it back and forth, and there are so many videos of little children who don’t yet speak the language stomping their feet to it. I think that’s because I wrote it like one of the Punjabi limericks that I grew up hearing.
“Pasoori” was an experiment, it was me asking a question of the form. It just so happens that a lot of people thought it worked. So now there’s this anxiety of answering the question, “Where are the 10 next ‘Pasoori’s?” I am working on a solo record that is kind of like Pasoori, the Album, but I just want to feel free to be able to do and create what I want, when I want.
My process is so much more important to me than fulfilling the promise generated by this one big thing. It excites me to share my musical process with the audience. Through my Instagram, which is like a magazine that I publish every day, I am constantly sharing and teaching the raw material and the thought process that goes into making my music—the raga and the beats and the microtones, the harmoniums and the tablas. So much of my life as a musician has been about learning and being a student of it, and when I’m performing or when I’m songwriting, part of what I’m doing is sharing it back.
I’ve been in love with Nicolás Jaar’s music for so many years without knowing anything about him. There’s something really craft-oriented about his work. You encounter him through the music first.
I heard his music for the first time in London eight years ago, when I was out shopping. I was like, “Shazam! What is this thing that sounds so fresh and so other but that reminds me of Hindustani music, because of the patterns of percussion and little melodic motifs?” His music is so familiar to anyone who has grown up listening to folk music from the Global South. I kept hearing it in random places. On a rooftop in Lahore one rainy night, some guy who was passing out was playing Nico on loop. I was in Istanbul and I heard the azan from a mosque and then afterwards I heard some music and was like, “That’s Nico!” and of course it was.
In the pandemic, I was doing Instagram Lives where I would open my phone and have my harmonium and tanpura with me. I would do my morning practice with whoever joined me. One of the things I would do is play Telas and find spaces in the music where I could do raga phrases. I sent a friend of mine who is a visual artist who worked with Nicolas an alapa, which is an ornamental raga phrase, over a portion of Telas. Next thing I know, I have an email from Nicolás Jaar. We talked, and he was like, “Why don’t you do more of what you did in this fragment I just heard using whatever you find interesting from Telas?” That’s how it was born.
I really like recontextualizing. So much of my life has required that of me. Living between places, translating between contexts, and going between a very traditional apprenticeship and the very untraditional world I live in and love. I refuse to choose one over the other. I have been forced to make connections where none have been allowed. On the rare occasion that that is embraced, nothing is more gratifying.
That’s what Sufi poets do too. Their writing was polyvalent. We were encouraged to receive it like that. “Muddat,” from Intiha, is a 19th century ghazal written by Ghalib, who is the poet laureate of Delhi. He lived through the war of 1857, when the British took over, and many of his friends were executed. He couldn’t explicitly critique the British, so one reading of the poem is that it is about the loss of his milieu. When he says, “It’s been long since I hosted a friend of mine, when my world was suffused with the glows of wine,” what he means is that the cherished milieu of poets, rebels, and renegades who he would hang out with were all in hiding or had been displaced.
You can experience this poem as a simple love song—which is great—and you can also experience it as a lament for the loss of a culture. I love that we can do both things at once. I come from a tradition of inviting multiple interpretations. I want to keep some of that alive. Use your imagination and your own subjective experience to pour into this beautiful lattice work.
