Arooj Aftab, Pakistan’s first and only Grammy award winner, has called out an American magazine for hiring “fossilised white men”, racial prejudice and Islamophobia. A review of her latest album by jazz and blues magazine DownBeat elicited this strongly worded response after contributing editor and music critic John McDonough said he was “obliged to embrace the timeless beauty of Urdu chants in the spirit of ‘celebrating diversity.’
For her new experimental jazz album, Love in Exile, which she released in March, Pakistan-born and Brooklyn-based composer Aftab collaborated with American pianist and jazz composer Vijay Iyer and musician Shahzad Ismaily.
On its release in March 2023, the album received rave reviews. Music magazine PitchFork wrote that the singers manage to “coax an entire album’s worth of pathos out of a handful of Urdu couplets, crafting complex emotional inner worlds through the ritualistic repetition of just a few lines of poetry.”
“In the celebratory spirit of diversity, maybe I’m obliged to embrace the “timeless beauty” of these Urdu chants. But in the rigor of critical candour I must admit that music is not a universal language and warn of their tedious monotony,” McDonough wrote in his review of Love in Exile.
Following this, the Pakistani singer took to social media to express her displeasure over the review. “Outrageous and unapologetic racist remarks towards three brown musicians creating in a contemporary idiom. This is what journalism is passing as in 2023. Grotesque,” she tweeted.
McDonough also called her album a “tedious monotony”, to which Aftab, on Instagram, accused the magazine of hiring “fossilized white men having platforms and safety to publish their racist views.”
Outrageous and unapologetic racist remarks towards three brown musicians creating in a contemporary idiom. This is what journalism is passing as in 2023. Grotesque @DownBeatMag https://t.co/OIXr4sbXeP
— arooj aftab (@arooj_aftab) July 12, 2023
Aftab further added that the critic in question is merely reducing “a new contemporary jazz music album to chanting. Only because we are brown people and he does not believe that we are allowed to exist in the contemporary music scene.” She also accused McDonough of reducing South Asians to “meditation, yoga, chanting and Bollywood”.
Vijay Iyer, who is of Indian origin, also supported the singer and applauded her for calling the review out. “This is what passes for okay in jazz journalism”, he tweeted.
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Calling out racism
On social media, fans and a few writers have criticised DownBeat for the ‘racist’ review. Another writer, Stewart Smith called the review an “Appalling racist claptrap.”
Aftab’s fans in India, too, questioned the gatekeeping tendencies among music critics in America. Many came to her defense and said that ghazals aren’t “Urdu chants”.
One user pointed out that this is not the first time that Aftab has had to deal with controversy.
Earlier in May, she had written about singers being reduced to their identity in the contemporary music scene. Her comment had drawn subsequent backlash as well.
“Pakistani singer arooj aftab…… Urdu singer arooj aftab….. arooj Aftab’s amazing Urdu singing… like. It’s fine I guess? But can a person of color musician ever just get to be without this tag to whatever someone else is presuming is our root or heritage,” she had tweeted on 26 May.
Aftab became the first Pakistani singer to win a Grammy for Best Global Music Performance in 2022 for her rendition of Hafeez Hoshiarpuri’s ghazal, Mohabbat— which also featured on Barack Obama’s 2022 Annual playlist. She makes music of different styles, including jazz. She was also the first Pakistani artist to perform at the Grammy award this year.
The Guardian, in its review of Love in Exile, had called the album a ‘beauty in quietude’ while ‘building undulating textures as if establishing an onstage atmosphere’.