Junoon - almost a legend

Not active so much any more, but Junoon was indeed a phase in the lives of all of us who grew up at the end of last millenium.

Their journey into music is quite amusing. The Junoon would have been just another college rock band, trying to impress the college chicks, imitating their favorites icons from 60s and 70s, going hippy, and just enjoying with the target crowd of college-going pakistanis. But it was only when they started experimenting with the sufi music that they could reach the masses, crossing the boundaries of countries and ethnicities. It was all due to Brian, may be, if he hadn't unified the other guys, the band would have never become the phenomenon that it eventually became.

The innovation into the music was nothing spectacular, at least in terms of the musical rhetorics. The sufi music is well established in South Asia, just the way Rock is in the whole of West. A band made of college goers who had the usual dreams of getting to become the next led zep or guns and roses, aimed to express the soul of Pakistani music with all what they had. This was not to be encouraged too much in the islamist country they hailed from. But still the music clicked. With the rhythms in the harmonics of tabla, the deep and polished voice of ali azmat, and the really impressive bass lines by Brian, the band was ready to hit a huge market otherwise dominated by cheap Indian music that should be appropriately considered devoid of any art at all.

It wasn't hard for Junoon to get popular in India. The reasons were simple. There is and never was any rock scene in India. All the rock bands localized among the elites of big cities, popular not even in all the colleges of the city they were in. Rock in India, like in most of South Asia, was never about anti-establishment and world peace, or about ideal of freedom of human soul. Rock in india is yet another commodity imported from West, which neo-rich people show off to serve their elitist snobbery.

The mind of youth seeks escape from the norms of the world, and it found its expression in Junoon. The Junoon had expressed something as traditional and mystified as sufi music with western means, something that symbolically represented what the minds of those in the colonies are always trying to accompolish.

I haven't been so much of an ardent fan of Junoon, even though it remains a fact that the only reason I took up the task of reading Nastaliq script was because I was having trouble looking up for some of the lyrics of their song, and was really disappointed at the way the available lyrics were transliterated into Roman script. Transliterations or translations really don't help too much when you wish to feel the spirit of a language or a country and its people. That was my personal infatuation with Junoon. Once I felt what they meant, I knew that nothing what they said could be limited by countries and religions.