Pakistani popular music
The Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was also a prominent influence on Pakistani pop music.
From Rushdi's pop hits to songs sung by the Hassan siblings, to bands including Junoon, Vital Signs, Jal and Strings, the Pakistani pop industry has steadily spread throughout South Asia and today is the most popular genre in Pakistan and the neighbouring South Asian countries.
Cinemas sprouted up in various corners of the nation, especially in Lahore, Karachi and Dacca in East Pakistan and playback singing became popular.
[1] Paired with Runa Laila, the singer is considered the pioneering father of pop music, mostly hip hop and disco, in South Asia.
Following Rushdi's success, Christian bands specialising in jazz started performing at various night clubs and hotel lobbies[1] in Karachi, Hyderabad and Lahore.
Rushdi sang playback hits along with Laila until the Bangladesh Liberation War when East Pakistan was declared an independent state.
[1] The 1980s saw a nose-dive in the progress of cinema in Pakistan as the nation was left in a state of turmoil over the changes in the government administration.
In 1973, influenced by disco and funk, Alamgir sang Albela Rahi, an Urdu song literally translated from a famous Cuban hit originally in Spanish.
Alongside Alamgir, Muhammad Ali Shehki also rose to fame with his renditions of the Hindustani classical forms with mediums like jazz and rock.
Influenced primarily by disco beats and hip hop, Nazia along with her brother Zohaib Hassan produced successive hits.
[9] Despite the hardship and problems faced by the music industry, the siblings, Nazia and her younger brother Zohaib Hassan, teamed up to produce more pop albums, but in the turmoil that Pakistan was headed through, the duo lost viewership and sales in their own country.
[10] The public generally welcomed the new hair styles and fashion wear (popular among university female and male students).
[10] During the peak and end times of Zia's conservative regime, there was a popular wave of cultural change, and the Western fashion style and music stormed the country.
[13] With the rise of Vital Signs and later, Junoon and others, the rock music, exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, became a vehicle for expressing patriotic nationalist spirit in Pakistan.
[14] According to the editorial written in The Express Tribune in 2011, the "Vital Signs and Pakistan's ingenious rock music was the only "arsenal" the country had against India's encroaching entertainment industry.
When people started getting acquainted with the show's format, amateur bands and singers taped their own videos and sent them to be aired.
With competition rising and only a few minutes dedicated to a single video, pop and rock musicians from all over the country were being recognised for their work.
The show made upcoming artists such as rapper Fakhre Alam, Danish Rahi, Fringe Benefit (the debut album Tanhai was recorded and mixed by Tahir Gul Hasan at his recording studios in Karachi), Strings, Junoon, Aamir Saleem, Aamir Zaki, and Haroon Rashid and Faakhir Mehmood from Awaz household names.
At this time, various rock/pop bands earned a lot of recognition abroad after Vital Signs made its debut international concert in the United States in 1993.
Abrar-ul-Haq, since his debut with Billo De Ghar (1995), became known as the "King of Pakistani Pop",[17] having sold over 40.3 million albums worldwide.
[18] Hadiqa Kiani made her debut in Adnan Sami & Zeba Bakhtiar starrer "Sargam" in 1995 which became a phenomenal hit and the music album of the movie was a chartbuster in Lollywood Top 10 (PTV), Yeh Hai Filmi Dunya (NTM) and FM channels.
Her albums "Raaz, Rung and Roshni" sold millions and made her an ultimate female pop star after Nazia Hassan.
In 1999, following the Kargil War, all Indian channel broadcasts were limited or banned in Pakistan and after Pervaiz Musharraf's coup d'état, the media was privatised.
But the law and order situation in Pakistan had limited the number of concerts and artists are not heavily promoting their albums.
Entity Paradigm, Aaroh, Mizraab, Mizmaar, Fuzon, Raeth, Noori, Mechal Hassan Band, Jal, Roxen, etc.
Aag TV was the first-ever Youth Music Channel of Pakistan which presented many thought-provoking programmes as well on youth issues The band Jal formed in 2003, with Atif Aslam, Goher Mumtaz and others brought in a new wave of Pakistani pop music with hits like Adaat, Woh Lamhe, and their respective albums.
Moreover, the new wave of cinema in Pakistan supported the pop/rock music scene, as most of the background scores and OSTs of new movies are generally produced by pop/rock artists.
This season featured judges Atif Aslam, Meesha Shafi and Fawad Khan who performed Vital Signs' "Do Pal Ka Jeevan" and Alamgir's "Dekha Na Tha" as a tribute;[24] Fifi Haroon (S1) Shahi Hasan (S1, 2) Fawad Khan (S2, 3, 4) Meesha Shafi (S2, 3, 4) Atif Aslam (S2) Farooq Ahmed (S2, S3) Strings (S3) Kashan Admani released Pakistan's first music web series, Acoustic Station in 2019.
