Hulleye Comes By!

the bullshit generator v 2.0. via adnan

So Falak is back in the news. This time in the Toronto Star.

Falak’s 9/11 imagery, banned from MTV, draws publicity for budding rockers

January 20, 2007

Tim Lai
Entertainment Reporter
It starts off like many other hard rock videos, with a female silhouette dancing amid strobes and smoke before cutting away to the streets of New York City.

Then four words appear: Based on tragic events.

A south Asian man, looking shattered after a long night of drinking, exits a cab. And then controversy begins – flashbacks to flying lessons, farewell videos and letters, open maps, airport security screening and takeoff. Perhaps the most infamous image of this century concludes the video, when the plane punctures the second World Trade Center tower.

“It’s just a story about loss,” said Zaed Maqbool, drummer for Falak, a Pakistani hard rock outfit based in Toronto. “We’re not sympathizing with anyone.”

The imagery for the song “Yadein II,” which means “memories,” has stirred expected and unexpected commotion in their native country for Falak, which in Arabic and Islamic mythology is a great, omnipotent serpent capable of swallowing the entire universe.

While most TV stations, including internationally available ARY, are airing the video, MTV Pakistan has decided against it, deeming it too controversial. That, in turn, has helped members of Falak reap publicity and stretch its profile in Pakistan.

“Since when I first picked up a guitar, since when I first formed a band, I’ve always had this urge to come back home,” said frontman Farid Khan over the phone from Karachi, a city of 15 million people.

Politically charged Falak doesn’t shy away from contentious issues, evident in the anti-George W. Bush song, “Blood for Oil.”

“We’re a band with a cause,” said Khan. “We talk about social justice, we talk about corruption.”

What started off as a video release in Pakistan for Khan, who was visiting family after being laid off from his HR job in Toronto, has turned into numerous media interviews, two well-received gigs and a buzz bigger than the response they have had here.

Falak was supposed to open a park concert for some of Pakistan’s biggest acts in front of thousands today, but organizers abruptly cancelled the event earlier this week.

Nevertheless, Khan said the band, whose members are all in their 20s, has three labels trying to sign it, but he will sit down with the entire group back in Toronto to make the right decision.

Khan and guitarist Siddiq Mohammad, a banker temporarily based in Dubai, have been the faces and voice of Falak in Pakistan as the others couldn’t get time off from their day jobs to make the trip home.

Bassist Shibil Siddiqi is currently in Afghanistan doing development work, while keyboardist Raheel Gauba is in the U.S. working as a software developer. Maqbool is getting experience in the music industry by working for a booking agency here.

The boys hope to reconnect in Toronto in February and add to their 200-plus gigs in the city since they formed five years ago after meeting through connections in the city’s tightly knit Pakistani community.

You may have moshed to them at the Reverb and the Docks or when they opened for Junoon, one of Pakistan’s biggest rock exports.

They hope to complete their first album by the end of March, then launch it simultaneously with a second video. Khan is confident Falak will have signed with a label the next time the group heads back to Pakistan, where they fit into an untapped niche.

Khan said Pakistani acts are better known for folk and pop music, but hard rock reaches only a small percentage of the population. But with a population of more than 165 million people, a small percentage in Pakistan is more than some of Canada’s largest cities – combined.

“Coming over here, you don’t see many hard rock bands performing well on stage and we do that with a tight sound,” said Khan.

The recent barrage of two-faced (or otherwise unusually shaped) animals just won’t stop coming.

Hot on the heels of the two-faced cow and the six-legged cow comes a new entrant in the odd animal hall of fame.

But unlike the previous examples, which have been hailed by Metro (if, admittedly, not by anybody else) as a sign of the imminent apocalypse, the birth of this two-headed pig in China is being hailed as a miraculous conception by the farmers.

beautiful galleries of people writing on and vandalizing walls.

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