It seems that we Pakistanis cannot even get through a few hours of the New Year without some new source of outrage. The latest fauxtroversy arises with Arbaz Khan, the self-proclaimed “youngest Pakistani rapper”. Young Arbaz broke into the scene last fall with his debut track 12 Saal Ka Larka (12-Year-Old Boy) in which it was ominously foreshadowed, “Ek gaana kaafi hai hilanay ko music industry.” (One song is enough to shake up the music industry)
There’s nothing particularly remarkable about his debut track; think Willow Smith’s Whip Your Hair with none of the catchy memorability or the celebrity family to afford it any significance. Yet Arbaz‘s bubble is so wildly removed from reality that it is genuinely comical to watch him flashing his expensive watch and Nikes, or boasting about Happy Meals (while rhyming that particular gem with the cringeworthy “record deals”).
Co-singer Mathira is no stranger to ruffling feathers?—?it’s pretty much the cornerstone of the VJ-turned-model/singer’s oeuvre. Why stop at being suggestive, she established early on, when blatant aggression gets far more attention? It’s not a particularly groundbreaking or creative method, but it tends to stand out in a sexually repressed environment. She rose to fame as host of a late night request show, where she would babytalk her (mostly male) callers and be sexually harassed in turn. Yet while many women in her position would back down, she very remarkably stood her ground and fought back in what became her trademark feisty, sometimes even crude manner. She bared her skin with pride, regardless of how perverted and outright hostile the reaction to it became. It was this very brazen flouting of the norm that became the basis of her notoriety.
[quote]The attempts at accumulating views through shock value alone are as transparent as the song's own mediocrity[/quote]
So polarized is the public reaction to this one woman that she consumes the bulk of the national conversation for days on end. Are we to laud her liberated confidence in a sexually repressed, patriarchal society? Are we to scoff at how she threatens whatever we’ve built of our apparently still fragile national identity? Are we to defend her against the absolute violence of the male ego that seems to confront her at every turn, or silently admire her as she fights her own battles against widespread derision?
In Arbaz and Mathira’s new collaborative track called “Jhootha” (Liar), their strategy (or rather, the studio’s) strategy seems to be “bad attention is attention all the same.” The attempts at accumulating views through shock value alone are as transparent as the song’s own mediocrity. The rap is about as advanced as one could expect of a preteen, making Rebecca Black seem like a poetic genius. At one point, the prepubescent Arbaaz offers to play Jay-Z to Mathira’s Beyonce, and plaintively tells her cleavage (which is just as high as the hyperactive lad’s eyes reach) they look real good together. She, in turn, coyly deflects his advances, telling him she’ll never be within his (or any other dishonest suitor’s) reach.
For anyone who’s grown up watching Lil Bow Wow or Aaron Carter, or indeed, any of the countless underage rappers that rose to fame in the 90s and 00s, the video is hopelessly derivative. Mathira unabashedly flashes her significant assets while crooning her heavily auto-tuned chorus (which borrows liberally from 90s hip-hop beats). She gyrates and pouts at a camera quite conveniently angled to offer a view down whatever little she’s clad in, leaving very little to the imagination, while lounging on expensive cars, leather recliners or a heavy bike. Most of this happens while Arbaz is out of shot. In fact, the entirety of their physical contact is some awkward hand-holding and bumping into each other with a complete lack of timing. Both “artists” spend so much time enamored by their own screen presence, they completely forget to establish a rapport.
The immediate reactions to this video have been, unsurprisingly, all over the place. People have been exclaiming “pedophilia” and “child molestation” even though the kid is never the object of the video’s sexualization. It’s a teenage sexual fantasy?—?young Arbaz is merely playing precursor to all the men who used to call in to Mathira’s old show and ask her to push her hair back for an unobstructed view of her cleavage. She knows this well, and she mocks them all for it.
But the most important question that everyone raises is the most simplistic: who do we blame here? The kid’s parents, for letting such an “influence” violate his childish innocence? The video’s director (who some claim is the kid’s own brother, by the way) for foregoing class and sophistication in favor of fidelity to the hip-hop culture he seems so desperate to adopt? Or should we just conveniently point fingers at the woman who has no qualms advertising just what everyone hires her for, just because she’s in the same frame as the underage “star” of the video?
It seems that we can never quite agree upon what standards to judge our own cultural output by. Still surprised by the fact that we can, indeed, produce a vast array of literature, cinema and music, we remain incapable of judging any of it on its own merits. Objectivity is out of the question, because our identity is still evolving. The shadow of Islamization, we argue, has made cultural creation so precious a gift that we must handle it with baby gloves, and create a safe new context within which it can flourish. Creative types?—?or at least, the few that we have?—?operate in such a vacuum that we tend to celebrate the quantity over the quality of their output, often magnifying it beyond its worth. Instead of putting it to any real test, we turn to the evergreen question of “what represents Pakistani culture best?”, a concept that somehow simplifies to “what makes Pakistan look good to everyone?” The parameters of this apologist categorization are forever fluid. In the absence of any requisite objectivity, inconsistency is inevitable.
A prime example of this is how we all react to Mathira. The real trouble with her and her unique brand of fame is that she doesn’t fit conveniently into the narrative set by her culture. She is our own version of a reality star without a show. One minute she’s our hero, wielding her sexuality like a weapon in the one place she’s mostly likely to fall on it. The next, she’s a godforsaken harlot leading our innocent children astray. But because we cannot simply judge her based on the quality of what she produces, she becomes a symbol of our hypocrisy, both moral brigades and erstwhile defenders. Somehow, we cannot simultaneously admire her for her bravery and also point out her lack of singing talent.
Right or wrong, the team behind Jhootha accomplished exactly what it set out to do. As of the writing of this piece, the video has gotten 15,000 views and counting. We’ve gone and tossed cultural relevance and validation at a kid who could’ve used the criticism provided by an objective point of view. Many others like him will come and go, and we will continue to elevate their significance by being unable to grade something on its merits (or lack thereof) and move on.
In the meantime, may this be the year we learn that it’s okay to classify a piece of entertainment as just qualitatively bad without lapsing into a moral quandary over it.
There’s nothing particularly remarkable about his debut track; think Willow Smith’s Whip Your Hair with none of the catchy memorability or the celebrity family to afford it any significance. Yet Arbaz‘s bubble is so wildly removed from reality that it is genuinely comical to watch him flashing his expensive watch and Nikes, or boasting about Happy Meals (while rhyming that particular gem with the cringeworthy “record deals”).
Co-singer Mathira is no stranger to ruffling feathers?—?it’s pretty much the cornerstone of the VJ-turned-model/singer’s oeuvre. Why stop at being suggestive, she established early on, when blatant aggression gets far more attention? It’s not a particularly groundbreaking or creative method, but it tends to stand out in a sexually repressed environment. She rose to fame as host of a late night request show, where she would babytalk her (mostly male) callers and be sexually harassed in turn. Yet while many women in her position would back down, she very remarkably stood her ground and fought back in what became her trademark feisty, sometimes even crude manner. She bared her skin with pride, regardless of how perverted and outright hostile the reaction to it became. It was this very brazen flouting of the norm that became the basis of her notoriety.
[quote]The attempts at accumulating views through shock value alone are as transparent as the song's own mediocrity[/quote]
So polarized is the public reaction to this one woman that she consumes the bulk of the national conversation for days on end. Are we to laud her liberated confidence in a sexually repressed, patriarchal society? Are we to scoff at how she threatens whatever we’ve built of our apparently still fragile national identity? Are we to defend her against the absolute violence of the male ego that seems to confront her at every turn, or silently admire her as she fights her own battles against widespread derision?
In Arbaz and Mathira’s new collaborative track called “Jhootha” (Liar), their strategy (or rather, the studio’s) strategy seems to be “bad attention is attention all the same.” The attempts at accumulating views through shock value alone are as transparent as the song’s own mediocrity. The rap is about as advanced as one could expect of a preteen, making Rebecca Black seem like a poetic genius. At one point, the prepubescent Arbaaz offers to play Jay-Z to Mathira’s Beyonce, and plaintively tells her cleavage (which is just as high as the hyperactive lad’s eyes reach) they look real good together. She, in turn, coyly deflects his advances, telling him she’ll never be within his (or any other dishonest suitor’s) reach.
For anyone who’s grown up watching Lil Bow Wow or Aaron Carter, or indeed, any of the countless underage rappers that rose to fame in the 90s and 00s, the video is hopelessly derivative. Mathira unabashedly flashes her significant assets while crooning her heavily auto-tuned chorus (which borrows liberally from 90s hip-hop beats). She gyrates and pouts at a camera quite conveniently angled to offer a view down whatever little she’s clad in, leaving very little to the imagination, while lounging on expensive cars, leather recliners or a heavy bike. Most of this happens while Arbaz is out of shot. In fact, the entirety of their physical contact is some awkward hand-holding and bumping into each other with a complete lack of timing. Both “artists” spend so much time enamored by their own screen presence, they completely forget to establish a rapport.
The immediate reactions to this video have been, unsurprisingly, all over the place. People have been exclaiming “pedophilia” and “child molestation” even though the kid is never the object of the video’s sexualization. It’s a teenage sexual fantasy?—?young Arbaz is merely playing precursor to all the men who used to call in to Mathira’s old show and ask her to push her hair back for an unobstructed view of her cleavage. She knows this well, and she mocks them all for it.
But the most important question that everyone raises is the most simplistic: who do we blame here? The kid’s parents, for letting such an “influence” violate his childish innocence? The video’s director (who some claim is the kid’s own brother, by the way) for foregoing class and sophistication in favor of fidelity to the hip-hop culture he seems so desperate to adopt? Or should we just conveniently point fingers at the woman who has no qualms advertising just what everyone hires her for, just because she’s in the same frame as the underage “star” of the video?
It seems that we can never quite agree upon what standards to judge our own cultural output by. Still surprised by the fact that we can, indeed, produce a vast array of literature, cinema and music, we remain incapable of judging any of it on its own merits. Objectivity is out of the question, because our identity is still evolving. The shadow of Islamization, we argue, has made cultural creation so precious a gift that we must handle it with baby gloves, and create a safe new context within which it can flourish. Creative types?—?or at least, the few that we have?—?operate in such a vacuum that we tend to celebrate the quantity over the quality of their output, often magnifying it beyond its worth. Instead of putting it to any real test, we turn to the evergreen question of “what represents Pakistani culture best?”, a concept that somehow simplifies to “what makes Pakistan look good to everyone?” The parameters of this apologist categorization are forever fluid. In the absence of any requisite objectivity, inconsistency is inevitable.
A prime example of this is how we all react to Mathira. The real trouble with her and her unique brand of fame is that she doesn’t fit conveniently into the narrative set by her culture. She is our own version of a reality star without a show. One minute she’s our hero, wielding her sexuality like a weapon in the one place she’s mostly likely to fall on it. The next, she’s a godforsaken harlot leading our innocent children astray. But because we cannot simply judge her based on the quality of what she produces, she becomes a symbol of our hypocrisy, both moral brigades and erstwhile defenders. Somehow, we cannot simultaneously admire her for her bravery and also point out her lack of singing talent.
Right or wrong, the team behind Jhootha accomplished exactly what it set out to do. As of the writing of this piece, the video has gotten 15,000 views and counting. We’ve gone and tossed cultural relevance and validation at a kid who could’ve used the criticism provided by an objective point of view. Many others like him will come and go, and we will continue to elevate their significance by being unable to grade something on its merits (or lack thereof) and move on.
In the meantime, may this be the year we learn that it’s okay to classify a piece of entertainment as just qualitatively bad without lapsing into a moral quandary over it.