Radical rock - Page 2

Originally posted by: sonyaee

One of my favorite bands. Thanks.

Some Junoon music videos:

Azadi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TywU-DDkGc

Sayonee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GONiLbKSX3k

Bulleya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRuor8MafTA

Heer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZ3QRE35FU

Garaj Baras: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU7jVdC192k

sonya, Thanks for the tube I do enjoy Junoon.

Originally posted by: Qwest

http://www.freemuse.org/sw11317.asp

Thanks Bobda. I had the fortune to listen to this band live. And actually liked their songs.

Thanks for the interview. Why do they bring religion into music!!! Music should be kept away from all these religious things. Finally it is harm for the music itself.

Sufi Rocker Merges Old With New, East With West

By: Carey King

April 22, 2006 05:20 PM | Permalink

In Pakistan and India, rock star Salman Ahmad plays to crowds of hundreds of thousands, filling cricket stadiums with fans obsessed and screaming his name. The goateed, long-haired musician can't walk the streets without being besieged for his autograph. His every move is tracked on blogs maintained by devotees.

The founder of Junoon, South Asia's best-selling rock band, Ahmad, 41, has been called the founder of "Sufi rock," a style that blends the traditional qawwali music of the region's Sufi shrines with guitar riffs that someone the likes of Led Zeppelin or Santana might play. His band has sold more than 25 million albums – a number that places him in the realm of Janet Jackson and Nirvana and makes him no stranger to MTV India's No. 1 spot.


Rocker Salman Ahmad jams at a recent reunion concert for his band Junoon in Dubai, Saudi Arabia. In Urdu, "Junoon" means obsessed. (Courtesy Salman Ahmad)

The glow of fame in New York, however, is a different story, and since Ahmad moved here three years ago, he has found himself playing to a bevy of smaller, more academic audiences. As if to explain, posters outside university lecture halls label him the "Muslim Rock Star." He only sometimes finds his CDs buried in "World Music" bins at record stores. And the multicultural organizations that host his shows often request pre-concert talks so he can tell who he is and what he's about to play.

It's a contrast, but Ahmad was the one who chose it. He moved his family here not only to provide them some breathing space and anonymity, but because his heart told him he needed to come. He's in America, he said, to build bridges after Sept. 11 and to add his Sufi-influenced tolerant outlook to the worldwide discussion on the future of Islam.

"It's been a roller-coaster ride," said Ahmad, reflecting. "But I can better see Pakistan and South Asia from this perspective. And I'm trying to get where more mainstream America can find out what I'm about."

Ahmad's approach to rock 'n' roll has been compared to Bono, and his band's to U2: Their lyrics aren't about women or sex, but about greater matters of peace, health and healing. Banned in Pakistan for several years in the late 1990s because of songs challenging government corruption and the nuclear race with India, Ahmad was later appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. He has used his most recent releases – about AIDS prevention and reconciliation after India and Pakistan's historic 1947 split – to raise money for victims of last fall's earthquake in Kashmir.

The credit for that social-justice outlook, Ahmad said, goes to Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam and the dominant form of Islam in South Asia. There, Sufis seek God or spiritual truth directly, through a wide range of beliefs and rituals – such as meditation, music, ecstatic dancing and poetry – and practitioners include not only Muslims but Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and most anyone else who wants to join in.

With love as a central theme, Ahmad said, peace and tolerance follow.

"It's like all the time being inside and thinking about the beauty and truth in the universe," he said. "You acquire an ability to see with the heart. Religion, color – they just melt."

A visitor to any of the Sufi shrines that dot India and Pakistan's landscape will hear, on Thursday or Friday evenings, the sounds of traditional Sufi qawwalis – Urdu or Punjabi praise music played on tablas, or hand drums, and harmonium, a hand-pumped organ. Decades ago, singers such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen made qawwalis commercially famous; Ahmad took them one step further in the merge with rock 'n' roll.

Ahmad's Sufi leanings come not from growing up in a Sufi-following family. With much of his childhood spent in the United States – in Rockland County, N.Y., because his father worked for Pakistan International Airlines – Ahmad was turned on to Sufism only after returning to Pakistan for medical school. After completing his degree and joining a well-known Pakistani pop band called the Vital Signs, he found himself unfulfilled until he met Nusrat at a benefit concert about 15 years ago. Discovering the depth and meaning of Sufi tradition, he spent two years studying with Nusrat, learning to merge qawwalis with his Aerosmith-sounding guitar.

"The Sufi idea came through music and I was stung. Obviously there was something in me waiting to be wounded," Ahmad said. "It kind of blew my mind. I had just associated Sufis with religion. Then I was so blown away by the poetry, by the voice."

Describing himself as musically "born again," Ahmad now uses the words of the Qur'an and Sufi poets Rumi and Bulleh Shah when he writes. While not a member of any particular Sufi order – the mystics are grouped together in certain lineages, almost like monastic orders in the Catholic Church – he describes the composing process in the same spiritual terms Sufis use to describe their zikr, or meditation.

"Once I got into music I had all these questions about where melodies come from, where inspiration comes from, where creativity comes from," he said. "When I write, I get possessed. I get struck. I have no concept of time."

The band Ahmad pulled together in 1990 with Pakistani Ali Azmat and later Brian O'Connell, a boyhood friend from New York, drew its name from that concept – Junoon in Urdu means "obsessed" and its fans are called Junoonis, or "obsessed ones." The group hit its stride in 1995 with a CD called "Inquilaab," or revolution, and a song called "Ehtesaab," or accountability, followed by a music video featuring a horse dining at a fancy hotel – a stab at then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's husband, who owned polo ponies. A few years later the band toured both India and Pakistan with hits from their album "Azad," which means freedom.

Parallel to the group's rapid rise in success was an increase across India in the popularity of Sufi music, a trend both Swaminathan Kalidas, India Today magazine Arts Editor, and Sohail Hashmi, a documentary filmmaker, attribute to Muslim-Hindu violence in Ayodhya in 1992 and Gujarat in 2002. The nation was seeking calm in the midst of religious tumult and Sufi groups like Junoon – singing of harmony and acceptance – spread a message that soothed that need, the Delhi-based critics said.

The popularity of Sufi music continues today, but Junoon does not: The band decided to call it quits after more than a decade and after Ahmad and O'Connell each moved back to New York. Citing too many years together and needs to explore new avenues, Ahmad said one of the main reasons the group broke up was so he could get beyond that fame kept him from doing the work he likes most.

"I felt frustrated with what I was doing with Junoon. I was in this rock 'n' roll circus. People were affected by my celebrity," Ahmad said, so much so he felt he couldn't get out his social-justice message.

Sept. 11 made him realize, more than ever, his role: "For most Muslims it was the lights being turned on, somebody asking the question, 'Are Muslims inherently violent?'" he recalled.

He knew it was up to him to answer the question.

Living again in Rockland County, his boys enrolled in the same middle school he attended and his wife Samina, also trained as a doctor, serving as his manager, Ahmad has been at work on his solo album, "Infiniti," released last year, and two documentaries for the BBC. The first show, "The Rock Star and the Mullahs," tells the story of a tour Ahmad made of northwest Pakistan after increasingly fundamentalist Islamic leaders attempted to ban music in all forms. The second, "It's My Country, Too," features his interviews with Muslim Americans on life in post-Sept. 11 America.

In February, Ahmad performed at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, and in March, he joined former Junoon members for a reunion concert in Dubai, Saudi Arabia. At the end of April he'll be honored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council for his use of music to promote peace. He's also slated this summer to perform in Central Park.

It's a busy lineup, but the shows Ahmad most looks forward to, he said, are the ones on small university stages where only a few audience members may know his name.

"That's where I find myself in my element," he said. "Doing unplugged storytelling concerts, telling how the Sufi tradition and Sufi music translate into the 21st century."

If a recent performance at Nassau Community College on Long Island is any example, Ahmad is talking about meeting crowds of 20-somethings who live lives far from Pakistan, far from understanding the complexity that is Islam. Students who, if they're paying attention, will meet through music the Sufi outlook Ahmad hopes can open doors between East and West.

Backed by a tablas drummer who beats out rhythms on the floor, Ahmad – clad in stonewashed jeans, a black V-neck shirt, wooden necklace and backward baseball cap – will pluck out qawwali ecstasy on his guitar strings, his knee lifting and head shaking in pure rapture as the audience slowly rises to its feet. Students from the South Asia who already know his music may lead, but soon others will join in unabashed, full-arm, above-head hand-clapping and bangra-influenced fancy footwork. Cell phones will snap pictures, friends will ride friends' shoulders, cries of "Pakistan Zindabad" ("Long live Pakistan") may even be heard.

Ahmad plans to be here for the next 10 years at least – enough time, he hopes, to show that Islam, especially Sufi Islam, has more to offer the world than bloodshed and war.

"The world separates and polarizes, yet Sufism sees everyone as one," he said. "Sufism is for me a long-lost bridge people have to find. It allows me to look at someone else – black, white, green, red, Jewish, Christian, Muslim – and see them as human."

Pioneer of Urdu rock

Pakistan's leading rock star writes songs about love and reconciliation. His embrace of social causes has invited comparisons with Bono. But many mullahs want to ban his music. Marco Visscher meets up with Salman Ahmad, the first rock legend in the Muslim world. Will he show that music can be more effective than diplomacy in making peace?


Salman Ahmad was 14 when he attended his first rock concert in 1977. Rock was a little-known phenomenon in Pakistan, where he lived until moving to New York at age 11. Everyone in his family considered it strange. But Ahmad was determined to go to a Led Zeppelin concert. Nearly 30 years after that show, Ahmad still remembers it vividly: "We enter the venue and through a haze of smoke, I see all those long-haired freaks with flowers in their hair. Then the lights go down and an almighty roar comes out. A guy appears on stage with long hair and a two-headed guitar with dragons painted on his pants, playing 'Stairway to Heaven.' I must have been watching this guy, Jimmy Page, the whole night. I knew for sure that I wanted to be like him."
He bought a guitar and spent hours in his room every day jamming with Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Santana and Pink Floyd records. He listened to the solos at a slower rpm so he could hear every last note. And he played and played, to the point that his fingers bled onto the strings.
He drove his mother nuts.
Fast forward to Joe's Pub, a Manhattan music club, in the summer of 2006. The man onstage has long hair, pants in a wild print pattern, a double-neck guitar. It's Salman Ahmad of course. Together with his band he's performing hits released by Junoon. With 25 million albums sold, Junoon, which Ahmad formed in 1990, is the most popular rock group ever to emerge from South Asia. Ahmad is also playing songs from his successful 2005 solo album Infiniti, the first Pakistani rock album (in Urdu!) to be carried by iTunes.
Until Junoon's soaring guitars and politically tinged lyrics, Pakistani audiences were used to polite songs about romance and love for their country. The government, accused of corruption in a few of the songs, prompted Junoon's music to be banned from radio and television. But a song criticizing the nuclear-arms race between Pakistan and India went to No. 1 in India. Junoon (Urdu for both "passion" and "obsession") was awarded UNESCO's Award for Outstanding Achievements in Music and Peace in 1999.
But since its album Dewaar, released in 2003, received poor reviews, Junoon has taken a break. In the meantime, along with his solo career, the 43-year-old Ahmad has been appointed by the UN as a Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) global ambassador—which led to his hit single "Al-Vida." The penetrating lyrics of the song describe Shukriya Gull, a woman from Lahore, Pakistan, stigmatized by those close to her when she became infected with the AIDS virus. But instead of succumbing to the criticism, Gull became an outspoken AIDS activist. The song became a hit on MTV India and went to No. 1 on MTV Desi, the music channel for Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis living in America.



The crowd at the intimate Joe's Pub is made up mainly of Asian immigrants. They clap and sing along enthusiastically. Ahmad is a raging success in South Asia; he can't walk down the street there without being recognized. And Western music fans are starting to discover his talents—in part because he is often compared with Bono, with whom he shares a penchant for social activism. Ahmad, flattered, shows off a letter he received from the U2 icon: "Just wanted to write you a quick note to say how much we here in the rest of the musical world appreciate what you are doing in your own region for peace. … You're a great man." The letter is signed: "Your fan, Bono."
Ahmad, like Bono, is a musician with a mission. He's a bridge-builder. In his native Pakistan, he does what he can to stimulate the dialogue between the traditional Islamic community and the more moderate modern Muslims. And in his other homeland, the United States, he is continually in contact with Americans who are afraid of the next terrorist attack.



When at the age of 18, he returned from the U.S. to Lahore, Pakistan, to study medicine at the prestigious King Edward Medical College—following his mother's wish—Salman Ahmad couldn't have imagined he would become a music star and leader of Pakistan's most sensational rock group.
"There was a talent show," Ahmad says, remembering his first few days at the university. "I knew how to play the guitar and I knew a guy with a drum set. We would play Van Halen's 'Eruption' and at the end of the song I would break my guitar, just like a real rock star. As soon as we were onstage, there was an almighty noise, and I thought Wow, all these people like this gig! It turned out that the Jamiatis [students from a militant Islamic political party] had come in screaming 'Obscenity!' They climbed on the stage, took all the instruments and smashed them. And I thought What the hell is this? They're stealing my act!"
He has probably told that story many times. But during our lunch at Trattoria del'Arte outdoor caf in the heart of Manhattan—a half-hour drive from Ahmad's house in suburban Tappan, New York, where he has lived since leaving Pakistan again in 2002—he manages to relate the anecdote with fresh enthusiasm. He even adds, as if it's the most ordinary thing in the world, that he was warned afterward that there might be a sharpshooter in the crowd at his next performance. Ahmad never cancelled an appearance. He felt the music inside him had to come out.
Pakistan had changed drastically since Ahmad's father was transferred to New York to work for Kuwaiti Airlines. When the family returned—after Salman had finished high school—General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq was president. He had replaced the constitution with the sharia, Islamic law. Pop music had been outlawed; only religious songs were tolerated. There were no concerts, there was no music on the radio or television; tapes and albums weren't sold anywhere.
"When I discovered they had put a ban on music," Ahmad says, "that was a turning point in my life. If music is such a danger to these people, if it means for them that they can go and kill someone, I realized I needed to do more of this." After finishing his medical degree, he never picked up a stethoscope. He used the guitar instead to help heal his country. Music became his medicine.



The mullahs in Pakistan justified the ban, saying that the Quran forbids music, that it can only lead to obscene and vulgar behaviour. But when Ahmad carefully reread the Quran in search of passages denouncing music, he found none.
After General Zia-ul-Haq was killed in a plane crash in 1988, the laws in Pakistan were relaxed. This wave of democratization led, among other things, to music being played again on radio and television. Ahmad joined Vital Signs, Pakistan's first notable pop group, as a guitarist. In 1990 he left the band and created Junoon so he could play harder rock along the lines of Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. His band became successful only years later, when it created its own distinctive sound, a mix of electric rock and Pakistani folk music, with lyrics based on verses from the Quran or the works of Sufi poets. This new blend of rock 'n' roll, poetry and spirituality became a resounding success.
But a number of years later, Ahmad received a letter from an Islamic scholar telling him he was "on the path to damnation." He and all his fans would burn in hell if he continued to make music. Ahmad saw in this letter a clear sign that extremist Muslims were once again gaining ground in Pakistan. He decided to tackle the issue head-on with a documentary film, The Rock Star and the Mullahs, filmed as Ahmad travelled through Pakistan speaking with religious leaders. "Unless you confront these critics directly, there's always going to be a sense that it's not right what musicians do."
In the documentary, aired by the BBC and other channels, one mullah is seen making jokes about Ahmad's long hair and sinful fans. After spending two and a half hours together, they say goodbye, and to Ahmad's amazement, the mullah begins to sing. "He was singing a religious song, perfectly in key. It totally blew me out! When the cameras went off, he told me he was a singer and a dancer when he was young. And then I realized: This man is afraid of losing his gig! The mullahs are just hungry for an audience. They want people to listen to them, not to the musicians."
Although current Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf is an outspoken fan of Junoon and has even joined the band onstage, there continues to be a ban on music in the northern part of the country. But something has definitely changed: Ahmad has paved the way for other musicians. Rock music enjoys large audiences, and MTV Pakistan, which primarily plays rock in Urdu and Punjabi, is a very popular satellite channel that falls outside national and local laws. And the number of Pakistani bands that continue to make music despite condemnations from the extremist community is rising.

Yet music is exactly what the world needs, Salman Ahmad hastens to add, as we leave the restaurant in New York. This was recently reaffirmed for him at a meeting of the United Nations focused on AIDS. He sees an important role for the UN because he feels the organization embodies the idea that borders are obsolete. Ahmad is a citizen of the world who realizes that modern challenges like AIDS and terrorism are not limited to geographically defined areas. World problems can only be solved if countries work together—in other words, when peace is more prevalent.
And music is an important tool to bring us closer to peace, says Ahmad. "I think we should be seeing each other with the heart. For a musician, it comes easy to communicate from the heart. I'm convinced that every human being has the opportunity to see other people with the heart. If you are in touch with your heart, you'll see all the masks fall down. You'll notice that national borders don't mean anything; nations are manmade.
"The Sufis teach us that mankind is one. I've experienced that music can bridge any gap. While clergy can divide people, music is something everyone can connect with. Music is a universal language. It's the soundtrack to peace."

Salman Ahmad's music can be heard via www.isufirock.com.

Wow, I didn't know most of the things about Junoon and Salman Ahmad which are posted here. Thank you Qwest da for the post 👏 .

Thank You so much Bobda 👏 Came to know about many facts 😊