Old timers love to talk about how, in their day, songs meant more than what they said. When the ghazal was in ascendance and a qawwali was as fringe as it got. But those who accuse modern Pakistani pop of being too shallow, obviously haven’t heard of Poor Rich Boy.

A veritable motley crue of talented musicians, this band from Lahore has gone through plenty of iterations, a la Fleetwood Mac or Jefferson Airplane.

The current line-up consists of Zain Ahsan on guitar and Umer ‘Duck’ Khan on vocals. For their upcoming album, the band enlisted Daud Ramay on drums, Sameer Ahmed on bass and Umer Ahmed on keyboards.

Poor Rich Boy started out singing in English, and that remains their primary output to this day. But the prosaic Duck, whose day job involves shaping impressionable young minds at university, has always had a penchant for Urdu literature.

Their latest Urdu single, Nazar, can be considered an alternative rock mash-up of Dr Muhammad Iqbal’s greatest hits. On their YouTube page, Umer Khan writes: “Many years ago, Iqbal wrote some verses suggesting maybe it would be a good idea to have freedom of thought and expression in educational institutions, or just generally. Since he’s our national poet, we thought why not push this fanciful idea of his, which, to date, remains a controversial one. These are his words that we took from two poems in Baal-i-Jibreel and rearranged thus.”

If the Urdu single Nazar is anything to go by, 2023 could very well belong to Poor Rich Boy

The track opens with a gentle strum and an easy-listening beat, allowing Umer’s lullaby-like delivery to act like the “spoonful of sugar” that helps Iqbal’s bombastic vocabulary (read medicine) “go down”, as it were.

Admittedly, the singer was not looking to channel the certainty and passion invoked by Iqbal’s signature ‘Shaheen’. Instead, he says, he wanted to know what else the good doctor had going on. “It was all the same concerns I see around me: student unions, freedom of expression, the arguments with Marxism,” Umer says of the ‘writing’ process.

In much the same vein as W.B. Yeats when he wrote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” the narrator inverts this invocation when he beseeches his listeners to lend him their ears: “Andaaz-i-bayaan agarche bohat shokh nahin hai, shayad ke utar jaaye teray dil mein meri baat.”

The only original line Umer added to the song is the titular refrain: “Meri nazar hai yahaan”, and it is really what brings the whole idea together. After the rearranged stanzas of Iqbal, which manage to remain within the traditional Urdu parameters of rhyme and meter, this phrase offers a respite.

Ironically, when Umer shared his efforts with his mentor at university, he complained that this line did not fit the ‘wazan’ of the rest of the verses. But it is the perfect epilogue, offering some closure, after letting Iqbal sell you his vision of a Muslim utopia.

But there is far more subtext here than the audio track lets on. Watch the video and it is this final refrain where the viewer is bombarded with images: of a crackdown on PTI marchers, Arshad Sharif signing off, Malala Yousafzai in hospital, the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons’ march, a handcuffed Manzoor Pashteen and crowds upon crowds of flood victims.

These pictures leave no room for equivocation. It would be remiss not to mention the guitar solo, which is among Zain Ahsan’s finest. It channels a classic rock sensibility that harks back to the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Admittedly, there is a lot of the guitarist’s own childhood in that solo, drawing as it did from a lifetime’s worth of musical memories.

This track is merely the precursor to the band’s forthcoming English album, No Honour Among Thieves, which will be followed by a complete album of Urdu tracks. But if this track anything to go by, 2023 could very well belong to Poor Rich Boy.

Published in Dawn, ICON, February 19th, 2023