A “Cabaret for the End-Times”: Ali Sethi Is Touring the US in Support of His Debut Album, Love Language

Your album  Love Language blends a lot of different genres, from more classic South Asian sounds to pop, EDM, and R&B. What was your creative process like making this album? 

I described this album recently as a “diary of displacement.” I grew up in Pakistan, I came to the US from college, and I moved back to Pakistan, but my audience is all over the world. My biggest audience in terms of where my music is streamed is India. But because of the ongoing tension between the governments of India and Pakistan, artists have often found themselves at the crosshairs of the animosity and the kind of tit for tat, vengeful tactics that governments employ to punish one another. And in May, after India and Pakistan had a mini war the Indian government decided to block a bunch of Pakistani musicians, actors, etc. So my Instagram got blocked in India, my music got removed from Spotify. This in spite of the fact that over the years Indian audiences have loved my music, have supported me personally and professionally in so many ways. 

So it's a kind of bittersweet situation for me, where I know that there's a lot of love but there's also this strain of prohibition. So I wanted to reflect some of that. And I thought that I should turn to some of the tropes of Indian classical music, which I trained in for many years. I took all those metaphors of forbidden love, of separation, of exile, of people who want to be together, but cannot be together because society won't let them or social norms won't let them. I took all of that, and then worked with producers in places like L.A., New York, London, and Lahore, to create a kind of camp, satirical, almost 1970s style cabaret energy. Because I think having a sense of humor about some of this stuff is how many of us get through it. And it's also how we subvert authoritarianism, which is something that I think people are learning for the first time in America now. So I'm taking it around North America. I'm hoping that it resonates with people who come to see the show. 

Being South Asian and queer, do you feel like you have a unique story to tell?

There are many of us now who are telling stories in many different mediums. But it's still one of the “no go” areas in our communities, in our culture—being queer and embracing that as an aesthetic, and then running with it and having fun with it. I think that feels kind of unusual and risky, but also fun and innovative in some ways. I also think that so many South Asian art forms are just anciently genderqueer—they play on ambiguities of love. I think it's so native to classical musical genres, and to erotic poetry like the ghazal, and even to a lot of mystical poetry. I know so many Sufi love songs and bhakti love songs where the gender of the beloved is deliberately obscure, so it could be a person, it could be a man or woman, or it could be God. But these have often been Trojan horses that queer poets have used to sneak in these other meanings and these other subjectivities.

I’m always drawing on those traditions because I think a lot of those songs, which are playful in these ways, use metaphors to tell stories. They're never literal or on the nose. They're subversive precisely because they could contain many different interpretations and meanings. And so a sacred meaning rubs up against a queer interpretation, and a kind of special tolerance is created in that shared space…and I always loved that about South Asian culture—the idea that, briefly, music can become the broad church where we can all congregate. And it doesn't matter if you're conservative or traditional or modern or rebellious. You can experience shades of all kinds of interpretations in one space. It's in some ways a very premodern and also postmodern situation. So I’ve drawn on all of those things in my album. I mean, that's why it's called Love Language. In a way, it's gesturing at the ancient love languages of Indian music.

What would you say are some of your other musical influences? ‍

Oh my God, all the things that I grew up with. Sufi music, definitely. A lot of Qawwali that I grew up hearing. Ghazal, which is another late medieval Urdu music art form—courtly music, that has had a wonderful reincarnation in the 20th century, and then I would like to believe through my work in the 21st century, too. Electronic music which I love, some disco, some vampy, camp, cabaret numbers from the 1970s masala flicks. 

In America, the expectation is that you will assimilate in one way or another, and immigrants have had to confront this for decades. And I feel like we’re at a place where now…for people like me and the people I work with, it's incumbent on us to synthesize rather than assimilate. Because we know the roots of Western pop culture, which we inhabit and partake of and perform in, but also Indian classical music, all the the sacred rituals that are musical that we grew up with and are some of the earliest sounds that we absorbed as children. We should feel free to make creative connections between these things. And that's what I've done on this album. When I'm listening to American bluegrass music or folk songs, the way they play guitar—especially blues guitar—reminds me of strings in Sindhi and Punjabi folk music. When I see connections between things that are not meant to be or not expected to be connected, I get very excited by that. Because briefly in those moments of creative alchemy, I feel like those contradictions of culture get resolved or temporarily settled in this playful way. So that's what I'm hoping I've done with this album and that's what I think people will see when they come to my show. 

‍Are there any artists or DJs that you'd like to collaborate with? 

I would like so much to collaborate with Anoushka Shankar, I think she's amazing. She plays sitar and there's such a kinship there, because she's taken this instrument that is so associated with Indian classical music, and she ended up taking it into all these other spaces where I certainly did not expect to hear the sitar. I recently heard a collab that she had with M.I.A. which is just an amazing amalgamation of sounds. M.I.A. is another artist that I love, who I think really did things that were super radical and novel, but also reflected culturally where she was coming from. I would love to work with people who make electronic dance music, EDM. I think Diplo is great. I think Calvin Harris is great. I feel like there's a siren in me waiting to break through. I think EDM is what I’m doing next. 

What can audiences expect to see when they go to one of your shows? 

I'm calling it a cabaret for the end-times. It's kind of a variety show with my music interspersing a narrative—a commentary about these emergent times that we find ourselves in. I keep hearing the phrase that the pendulum has swung the other way, and I don't know if it's going to swing right back. I don't know if that's the way it works. Having grown up in Pakistan, I don't take that for granted. I feel like there are these regimes of refusal—everything from denying people visas based on what they posted on social media or their political views, or based on where their parents were born in the case of India and Pakistan, all the way to your record label can drop you because you made a statement online about Gaza. I’ve said that my show is “levity and depth, hilarity and heft, theology and theft.” I'm trying to make light of it, but in a satirical vein, addressing and living through this moment that we're in without having to surrender what makes us human and connected to one another. So that's why I'm calling it a cabaret for the end-times. It's because I think we are in the end-times, but we got to get through it. This is not the end. It cannot be. And I think, like any good South Asian, I know that a song and dance routine can help you get through it. 

You can catch Ali Sethi now on his US tour, including the Ford Theater in LA on October 8th! For a full list of tour dates, check out: https://alisethi.info/tour