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Amidst all the tributes to 9/11 victims, comes
one from an unlikely country – Pakistan. Junoon, the
Pakistani band that rocked the Indian charts in’98 with
Sayonee, have just released an empathetic 9/11 tribute, No
More. Composed by lead guitarist-songwriter Salman Ahmad,
the song is based on a poem by a New York musician, lyricist
and journalist, Polar Levine.
As
the twin towers collapsed, dust collected in Levine’s
apartment 10 blocks away. Blocked off from home, he choked
on the realization that along with charred plastic and crushed
concrete, he was “inhaling firefighters, police officers,
cafeteria workers, secretaries and executives… Muslims,
Jews, Christians, atheists, heterosexuals and homosexuals.”
He wrote a poem about it.
Ahmad
was personally affected by the 9/11 attacks. New York city
had been his childhood playground: “It’s where
I saw my first rock concert, first bought a guitar, joined
my first garage band, first kissed a girl.” After listening
to a Junoon concert at the Tribeca College, two blocks from
Ground Zero, Levine entrusted his poem to Ahmad. He admired
Junoon’s seamless merging of American rock with South
Asian music and their multicultural makeup (lead singer Ali
Azmat is Pakistani and Brain O’Connell, bass guitarist,
an American). “After the Karachi suicide bombings and
the threat of a Indo-Pak nuclear war, I came up with lyrics
and melody to go with Polar’s lines,” says Ahmad.
No
More may be Junoon’s first English song, but its concern
over terrorism, grief and hope are themes they have sung for
over a decade in Urdu and Punjabi. They were the first band
to perform at the UN General Assembly last year. Ahmad has
also written to the Indian and Pakistani governments, requesting
permission for a Peace Concert at the LoC.
Will
peace remain a dream? Perhaps. But Junoon are willing to chase
it with roses, not guns.
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