One of the stranger ideas consistently repeated in music circles in Pakistan over the past decade is that audiences no longer care about musicianship. They care about the narrative. Technique, it is asserted, belongs to an older world of gatekeepers and specialists. What matters now is honesty, authenticity and the ability to communicate a personal truth. This argument has become increasingly influential, particularly within elite urban creative circles that view older standards of musical authority with suspicion.
I contend that this argument rests upon a false binary. It assumes that musicianship can be reduced to displays of virtuosity and that emotional communication exists independently of craft. Both assumptions collapse under scrutiny. A singer's ability to shape a phrase, control rhythmic placement, manipulate tension and release, or inhabit the emotional architecture of a composition is no less a form of communication than the autobiographical content of a lyric. To contrast narrative with technique is therefore to mistake one narrow manifestation of skill for the totality of musicianship itself. More significantly, it risks reducing music to a form of testimony in which the artist's personal story matters more than the artistic means through which that story is communicated.
Asad Ali Murtaza, a keys and harmonium player who has performed in Coke Studio and Nescafe Basement, and a dear friend of mine, strongly objected to the suggestion that honesty somehow exempts one from learning the craft in a recent discussion while working on an arrangement project with me.
The reduction of musicianship to spectacle has had significant consequences for how musical value is discussed. Somewhere along the way, musicianship became confused with flamboyant showboating. The fast taan, the mordent, and the shredded instrumental phrase became shorthand for everything supposedly wrong with traditional ideas of musical excellence. The gamak taan, in particular, has become the strawman of contemporary local music discourse, especially after Sham Chaurasi's Shafqat Ali Khan's infamous viral video from 2021 did the rounds. It is wheeled out whenever somebody wants to dismiss training.
What disappears from view are the less conspicuous dimensions of musical knowledge. Phrasing, memory, rhythmic command, endurance, restraint and interpretive judgement rarely lend themselves to spectacle, yet they constitute the foundations upon which musical meaning is constructed. The irony is that many of the qualities now celebrated under the rubric of authenticity are often inseparable from these forms of discipline. Emotional conviction is not merely possessed. It is rendered intelligible through technique.
The history of performance traditions across South Asia demonstrates this repeatedly. When Mehdi Hassan improvised a phrase beyond its expected resolution while maintaining fidelity with the raga context, the effect was not technical display but emotional revelation. When Farida Khanum lingered on a single word, often using syncopation and thehrao (patience), she altered its emotional weight without altering its meaning. Abida Parveen's command over dynamics allows her to create spiritual intensity from familiar texts, rendering every performance of the same piece different. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's greatest performances derived their power not simply from vocal range or stamina, but from extraordinary laykaari (rhythmic experimentation) to control momentum, expectation and release. None of these achievements can be separated from training, yet neither can they be dismissed as mere technique. They demonstrate that craft and expression are not competing sources of artistic value. The former is often the condition through which the latter becomes possible.
The contemporary tendency to equate musicianship with virtuosity and authenticity with emotional truth leaves us with a remarkably impoverished vocabulary for discussing music. And this binary is often being used by bubble-gum pop producers to mask their limited repertoires. It should not be surprising that their music is consequently formulaic in structure, as the goal is catering to a mass audience, which, unsurprisingly, is younger people owing to the country's huge youth bulge.
The sociological significance of this shift is equally revealing. The decline of traditional gatekeepers has often been interpreted as a democratisation of culture. Recording technology is inexpensive, distribution platforms are widely accessible and artists are no longer dependent upon institutions, such as PTV producers, record labels and studio owners, that once regulated entry into the profession. From this perspective, the weakening of technical gatekeeping appears emancipatory, and it is, to a certain degree. Yet the disappearance of one hierarchy does not entail the disappearance of hierarchy itself. The old gatekeepers may have left the room, but nobody noticed the new ones walking in.
Cultural legitimacy is still distributed through forms of advantage, although the nature of those advantages has changed. Where authority once derived from mastery acquired through apprenticeship and sustained practice, it is now increasingly linked to visibility, financial muscle, self-presentation and the ability to produce a compelling public identity. Narrative has become a valuable currency in this new economy. What presents itself as a rejection of elitism may therefore be understood as the emergence of a different elite, one whose advantages lie not in conservatories, gharanas or pedagogical lineages, but in access to networks, platforms and the cultural competencies required to navigate them successfully.
This is particularly visible within sections of the contemporary indie-pop ecosystem. Pakistan's indie-pop establishment often speaks the language of openness while exercising its own forms of exclusion. The credentials have changed. The hierarchy has not. The authority to define what is progressive, authentic or culturally relevant is often concentrated among a relatively small network of elite artists, media professionals, festival programmers, development sector practitioners and tastemakers. Their preferences are frequently presented as universal rather than situated. Their assumptions about artistic value are often treated as common sense rather than opinion. Every generation declares war on gatekeepers. Most eventually become gatekeepers themselves. The iron law of oligarchy persists.
For this reason, debates about authenticity and technique are rarely confined to aesthetics. Beneath them lies a struggle over legitimacy. The question is not simply what kind of music deserves recognition but what kind of authority should be recognised in the first place. One tradition locates authority in discipline, accumulated knowledge and demonstrated competence. Another locates it in relatability, narrative coherence and the capacity to occupy a meaningful position within contemporary culture. Neither framework is sufficient on its own.
There is a particular danger in celebrating accessibility in a manner that quietly devalues expertise. The suggestion that sincerity can compensate for the absence of craft may appear democratic, but it risks diminishing the labour that underpins artistic excellence. Many of the artists most revered for their emotional depth were also among the most accomplished practitioners of their craft. Their expressive power did not emerge despite their training but through it. The enduring challenge for contemporary music criticism is not to choose between authenticity and musicianship but to resist treating them as opposites.
