Vide ’made’ the Radio Star

LAHORE: Video mania began with Nazia and Zohaib’s teenybopper fairy-tales and has come to an electric-blue Ali Zafar pursuing his ‘Channo’ complete with a genie in a lamp. All these videos rely on love, the universal emotion and the safest theme to play. However, in the Pakistan video industry, love isn’t considered sincere unless it is professed with a sachet of your favourite paan masala in hand.

“Video directors and producers have been having a field day ever since the growth of music channels that are spewing out anything and everything they can get their hands on,” said Mohammad Ali Jafri, the bass guitarist and music video director for Noori, the pop-rock band making waves on the local music scene with their debut album, ‘Suno kay mein hoon jawaan’. “Most of these directors hail from the advertising sector and wholeheartedly believe that a video isn’t really a video unless it contains a product to be sold.”

However, product placement in music videos isn’t an originally Pakistani idea. It has been borrowed from MTV where it is done much more discreetly. MTV screeners have forced labels to blur images of products or logos that find their way into videos and directors have come up with an endless stream of innovative ways to put products in front of potential consumers without infringing on the artist’s image and the video’s premise. “Unfortunately for us, that takes a certain measure of creativity and vision, something that we sadly seem to lack,” said Mr Jafri. Artists end up selling their art, integrity and image for the sake of a mega budget, meticulously directed, but spiritless video.

“A good video doesn’t require sponsorship or camera equipment, nifty editing, or even special visual effects,” said Mr Jafri, maintaining that excellent videos had been made on shoestring budgets.

Sameer Ahmed, the bass guitarist for Mekaal Hassan Band and Co-ven agrees that a video is “infinitely important” for the popularity of a song because it is “a visual representation” of what the song tries to convey and should “compliment the sound, feel, and energy of a song or artist”. However, although he believes that Pakistan has progressed in the field, he does have contentions with the way videos are made.

“‘Music ads’ would be a more appropriate term for music videos because they are primarily advertisements commissioned by record companies to promote their artists,” said Mr Ahmed. “The top priority of these directors is to bring out the ‘shine all you can’ effect by using generous doses of glamour, bright colours, maximum styling and ‘too close for comfort’ shots of the artists,” said Mr Ahmed. “As if a video would be incomplete without the singer flashing his teeth at the camera and showing off designer labels!”

‘Concept videos’ have been the thing-to-do on MTV since the eighties, whereas Pakistani directors have reluctantly woken up to the idea just recently. U2 was perhaps the first band to employ the ‘one-shot video’ concept that Ali Zafar caught on to just now. Then there is the simple but effective concept of a band playing their instruments in front of a stark, white-washed background, a technique that bands like Rage Against The Machine, Keane and Coldplay have been using for decades and that Noori recently used in its video for ‘Gana number one’.

Perhaps the starkest of differences between the west and the rest is the west’s aesthetic glorification of cities. In the west, artists weave their videos through narrow alleys, filthy ghettos, streets with no names. They understand that reality draws people much more than saccharine illusion. Videos in Pakistan on the other hand, from the eighties to now, take audiences on a journey across mountains, deserts and beaches, set apart from the everyday life of the common person. Perhaps in Pakistan, the artists think that their audiences would prefer to escape in the illusion of pastoral beauty rather than face the dirty back alleys of Faisalabad. Depicting human life and the human condition would mean deviating from the norms, and that clearly isn’t on anyone’s agenda in Pakistan.

Sikander Mufti, a creative director at Matteela studios, responsible for organising the South Asian film festival, Lahore Moving Images 2002, and currently working on an exhibition of Matteela’s films in London, explained why Pakistani music videos have stagnated qualitatively and thematically, despite the media boom.

“Pakistani directors have been sucked into an abyss of mediocrity,” said Mr Mufti. “They are averse to change and refuse to accept that the more abstract and creative they are, the more emotions they’ll evoke.”

“We have to erode the clichés and break out of doing tried and tested methods like the typical ‘boy meets girl routine’,” said Mr Mufti. “Videos have greater potential than a song on tape to catch the attention of a generation, to engage its members emotionally, and to galvanize them around a new set of symbols, impulses, and values.” Mr Mufti feels directors have to move away from what he calls the “obligatory band shot”.

“Hail the video age,” said Mr Mufti. “It has given artists new ways to seduce viewers with great visuals even if the music is not that brilliant: all they require is the styling genius of Tariq Amin to take their music a long way.” However, even Sikander Mufti can’t deny that the music video business is going through a revolution. He gives the example of Ali Zafar’s new video for ‘Chal Dil Mayray’, which is definitely a milestone in the history of the Pakistani music video.

“That is a video that strives to send across a crystal-clear message without actually spelling it out,” said Mr Mufti. “Jami is a brilliant director because he has incorporated ideas that conform to popular demand and are, at the same time, so daring and different.”

“Pictures came and broke her heart” were the lyrics of the first song whose video was played on MTV. It was a one-hit-wonder by “The Buggles” called “Video Killed the Radio Star”. However, it turns out that everyone agrees that the video makes the radio star now. What people agree with even more is that the ways adopted to churn out video after video has given rise to a video industry with no barriers on entry. Just about anyone with a video camera, a corporate brand and the inherent craving to shout “lights, camera, action!” can now become a video director. But just because they can make a video doesn’t mean they won’t kill the song.