Music to the profiteers
The writer is a lawyer.
In Pakistan, when it comes to music, you take what you can get. And more often than not, what you get is the backwashed brain-child of some beverage company’s marketing department. Using music to sell products has always been our thing. In fact, nursery-rhyme-scripts are even used to help us remember phone numbers. And so, these corporate music performance gigs are the Woodstock of ad marketing. Which is why you can’t exactly blame Velo for wanting a piece of the action.
Selfishly, anything that introduces more people to Natasha Noorani (who I have been convinced for some time, will prove to be a once-in-a-generation kind of talent) ought to get a pass. But when a new product materializes into existence with a marketing budget that can afford the likes of Atif Aslam and Strings - with money to spare for an exceedingly enthusiastic (and not exactly anonymous) entourage in galleries - one can’t help but wonder who is signing the