Two women, framed by the doorway to a pale green room, work on a brightly coloured patchwork and applique quilt. The wall behind them has hand-painted floral motifs and a shelf of glazed and hand-painted pottery pieces. The dress and bangles the women wear signify that they are rural Sindhis. The quilt they are working on is a ralli. In this self-consciously quaint shot, the camera slowly pushes in, revealing the center of the ralli: bright white lettering framed by scarlet reads: Coke Studio.

This was the teaser that Coke Studio dropped on its Instagram page a few days before the debut of its 15th season. The leading track of the season was “Aayi Aayi”, a Sindhi language collaboration between singers Noman Ali Rajper and Marvi-Sahiban (women from Tharpakar who are officially credited as such) and rapper Babar Mangi. Rallis such as the one we see in the teaser are spread across the sets of the music video and similar ones were also commissioned for other promotional material, including an enormous one that served as Pakistan’s largest hand-crafted billboard.

Ralli comes from the word “rallana” which means to piece together. These colourful quilts, emblematic of Sindh’s heritage, are designed and crafted by women with the remains of old dupattas, sheets, and leftover textiles to form brightly coloured geometric patterns. Abstract and non-representational, they are not usually known to carry branding and advertisements for corporations.

As the latest season kicked off after much delay, the biggest media event in the Pakistani commercial music calendar received an unusually mixed and wary reception. This ambivalence was largely due to the ongoing global consumer boycott of The Coca Cola Company in solidarity with Palestinian resistance; the corporation continues to operate in Israel with a factory constructed in Atarot, an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

While this season was filmed in early 2023 and was wrapping up post-production in the summer, the corporation chose to delay its release in the midst of the events of October 7th. Dawn Images reported that the decision to finally release the season was in no small part due to mounting pressure on the corporation to pay its artists and vendors.
While the official BDS movement, a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel, has an official list of targets which does not include The Coca Cola Company, an organic consumer boycott of Coke precipitated on a global scale, most strongly within Muslim majority countries across the Gulf and South Asia, leaving the soda company in an uncomfortable position in these markets. The company has made attempts to address this backlash; the most recent is an inaccurate, ham-fisted ad released by its subsidiary in Bangladesh that attempted to obfuscate not only Coca Cola’s ties to Israel but also its origin as an American corporation— parroting the ideological claim of corporate multinationalism. When the announcement was made online for the release of Coke Studio’s new season, Pakistanis on the internet were polarized: some called for a boycott of all Coca Cola products including Coke Studio, whereas others maintained that while Coca Cola may be an American corporation condoning and profiting from the settler-colonial regime of Israel, Coke Studio Pakistan is a national cultural institution— the country’s biggest cultural export.

The calls for the boycott of Coke Studio in Pakistan has understandably yielded spiky debate. The Pakistani music industry, such as it is, has long featured a heavily stilted economy where commercial music production is dominated by a handful of corporations. Most musicians who dare to aspire towards financial security rely on being featured by platforms such as Coke Studio, Velo Sound Station and (previously) Nescafe Basement. Additionally, Coke Studio’s popular appeal and the success of its past seasons continue to have a formidable hold over the public imagination of popular music. Critical voices, however, have remained steadfast in their boycott of the platform, arguing against the exceptionalism that Coke Studio benefits from.

Early on in Season 15’s release schedule, there was also some ill-considered condemnation of the artists involved. Apart from the fact that the season was reportedly produced in January 2023, artists’ contracts typically include conditions regarding promotion during and after release of the work. There is also the aforementioned economic argument of artists relying on platforms such as Coke Studio for the very feasibility of their careers. The problem however, runs deeper than what artists— who, barring some big name exceptions, are usually independents with no prior experience of working with corporations— sign on to work with Coke Studio.

The calls for boycott dust off old questions about the legitimacy of the platform and lend them new urgency. Coke Studio has long claimed the lofty position of a cultural institution but more importantly, it has profited as an economic nexus of the production of cultural goods. Songs are artifacts that reflect the beliefs, desires, and discontents of a culture but at this scale, they are also, inescapably, merchandise. This quasi monopoly has made the commercial music series central to the double movement of culture as commodity and culture as the aesthetic, normative, and spiritual expression of a people. The depth of the problem, that is inherently part of Coke Studio’s popularity, lies in its assertion of itself as the sound of the nation.

Zulfiqar J. Khan, popularly known as Xulfi, taking the helm as lead producer last season signaled a major change in format, which has only been cemented with this season’s “Aayi Aayi” and the successive tracks that have come out since. Working with filmmakers including Zeeshan Parwez and Awais Gohar, Coke Studio stepped away from its roots as a live performance music show and into new territory: a nebulous blend of live music recording and high production-value music videos with elaborate sets, choreography, and filming techniques.

The production design and photography of seasons 14 and 15 take cues from other commercial image production such as fashion editorials and promotional campaigns. In fact, the same industry professionals are involved, recreating in the process some of the same issues inherent within fashion capital’s exploitation of cultural symbols. When fashion brands swipe ajrak motifs or stage photoshoots in the kind of crowded bazaars their products would never be sold, they appropriate these symbols to be more relatable to the consumer by invoking a vague sense of solidarity. The ralli-as-billboard particularly speaks to this issue as it suggests that not only is Coke Studio Pakistani, it is also Sindhi.

Coke Studio has always been in the business of representation, long before the new creative direction of seasons 14 and 15. In past seasons, its large soundstage, littered with Coke Studio logos, featured a house band of seasoned industry professionals and an array of folk, classical, and pop musicians coming together to collaborate on, admittedly, some of the most striking tunes in popular memory. In the process, we were dealt with images and implications of a diverse Pakistan with inter-ethnic, inter-faith, and inter-class harmony— a Pakistan that valued the cultures that made up its social fabric. We could all come away from Akhtar Channal Zahri singing in Balochi on national television feeling like we could share in this world, that we were a part of something: that we had witnessed what some like to call “the real Pakistan.” The new music video format distances the order of representation further: we now enter the territory of narrative, of commercial aesthetics, of vibes.

With the new seasons, we are now overwhelmed with colourful, bombastic imagery from gaons, mohallas, and havelis that do not exist. “Aayi Aayi” showcases Coke Studio’s new representative philosophy par excellence. The set of the music studio is a fabricated village scene on a soundstage; it features mud walls adorned with carvings, hand-painted murals, and a sign that reads Happy Diwali. There is an open sehan with charpais, claypots, and rallis emblazoned with the Coke Studio logo and tagline. The male stars, Noman Ali Rajper and Babar Mangi, are costumed in patchwork jackets with kantha stitching, and at one point, a gorgeous peacock saunters through a doorway in slow motion.

During the released BTS featurette on the making of “Aayi Aayi”, Babar Mangi observes that the set is indistinguishable from a real village— that it appears as if they’re back in their goth. However, he goes on to add that if the goths in Sindh were indeed as beautiful as the set appears, they may never have left.

This hyperreal goth scene reveals the conceit of Coke Studio. This and other sets such as the “Blockbuster” Punjabi mohalla that was constructed in an empty plot somewhere in Karachi and the shaadi wali haveli dripping in marigolds from “Maghron La”, exist in a separate reality constructed by Coke Studio. The platform manufactures these cultural replicas that it then slaps its logos and branding over— rallis, street scenes, truck art, havelis, qawwalis alike— in an effort to lay claim to a national culture. But this nation that Coke Studio claims to represent, to “show” but never engage with, the nation that it tells us we are, exists purely in the Coca Cola Imaginary.

Even in previous seasons, this formula was alive and thumping, albeit not as advanced as it is today. A noteworthy example is the rousing Season 11 rendition of communist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem “Hum Dekhen Ge”, sung by the entire ethnically diverse cast including, for the first time in the platform’s history, khawaja sira singers Naghma Bibi and Lucky. The track and accompanying video served as that season’s pre-release promo and as it revealed, line-by-line, the season’s artist roster, some glaring omissions in the words were revealed. The recording noticeably left out key lyrical phrases (“sub taaj uchaalay jayen ge, sub takht giraye jayen ge”), diluting the original poem’s anti-establishment and revolutionary spirit Through this work of editing, we are reminded— as we are through the contributions of generations of cultural studies theorists such as Stuart Hall, Angela McRobbie, and Anamik Saha— that representation is not a mirror that merely reflects reality but rather a tool for the construction of realities. These representations are deliberately produced to be as they are: revolutionary poems watered down to be anthemic celebrations of some nationalist notion of diversity.

Coke Studio follows the late-capitalist cultural logic of maximizing spectacle. Spectacle for all its aesthetic excess is politically weightless, and so requires little thematic heavy-lifting. The commercial music platform takes no account of the lives of real people, let alone their struggles. Coke Studio may feature representations of Baloch or Sindhi aesthetics in order to represent them as part of its nation-building activities, but it will never engage with any issues that affect these communities.

The indigenous craft of ralli is essentially an anti-capitalist practice as it is built out of a deep care for labour and its fruits; cloth is re-used and recycled— old becomes new while still carrying its legacy— each patch scavenged from within the home or donated by a neighbor or loved one. As this community centered craft becomes co-opted by the soda company and the rallis get emblazoned with its logos, we enter into a new reality just as we do with the music video itself. All its usual function and meaning is excised from the final product; it now exists solely to sell more soda. Similarly, the village set is meant to be its own reality rather than some accurate depiction of a Tharparkar goth. In this way, the Coke Studio ralli and goth are representations of the order of simulacrum, copies with no specific origin to track fidelity to.

Through the ralli, as it has done for over a decade with music styles and kalaams, Coca Cola snatches at cultural authenticity in the eyes of local audiences so that it may enfold us in the simulacrum of the nation it constructs. That this work is done by Pakistanis themselves who work with and for Coke Studio, is immaterial: the primary purpose of this cultural production is the marketing of soda - all good intentions and positive outcomes are coincidental niceties.

Whether it's censoring revolutionary poems, butchering the lyrics of qawwalis, or building aspirational and #positive narratives around national culture in Pakistan, Coke Studio exists, has always existed, to promote the corporation. Capitalism expropriates cultural symbols, whether they be ajraks, rainbow flags, or keffiyehs, in order to adapt and stay relevant to the masses. These symbols say to us: “we’re all the same; we’re in this together.” while the corporations that wield them continue to profit from the exploitation of indigenous land and peoples.

The Pakistanis working for and with Coke Studio, including and perhaps especially those representing marginalized communities, also have symbolic value. They become markers of authenticity for the platform in much the same way as the ralli or the peacock. As we see in the BTS featurette, Marvi and Sahiban were quite literally the authenticity that it was Xulfi’s quest to find. The artists, as designated cultural capital, are valuable resources more than they are valued partners. This is one of the most worrying relational aspects of the production of Coke Studio.

In a moment from the behind-the-scenes footage of the making of “Aayi Aayi”, near the end of production, Xulfi says through tears, “Allah mauqa dai… we can do so much for them” regarding the Tharparkar locals he worked with. He continues, “Abhi toh inn ki kahani shuru hui hai, in a way. Dunya tak inn ka bridge ban raha hai.”

For all of Xulfi’s earnestness, his remarks when put into context, read as a distillation of everything that is troubling about the involvement of Western corporations in indigenous cultures. The “we” that Zulfi speaks of, whether it be him and his production team or the larger corporate institution at hand, is set apart from the “them” with an implied benevolence. The audience is also implicated in this exchange. “We” are “Their” benefactors as audiences and cultural producers necessarily interact with each other to offer these benefits to the artists - in this case the primary benefit offered seems to be a bridge to “the world” while the world of indigenous peoples, the lands and rivers of Sindh, continues to be threatened by environmental degradation and urban land capture.

In this dynamic, there is at play: the imbalanced relationship of urban extractive processes and rural authenticity; the neoliberal extraction of politics from cultural identity, leaving behind pure aesthetics; and the colonial impulse to offer their “world” to the natives— by building bridges, by providing exposure.

The pan-Africanist writer and organizer Kwame Ture maintained that European colonialism was a product and offshoot of capitalism and that the two political economic systems share not just a common point of origin but philosophies and methods. There certainly is an entrenchment between the two given the common extractive tendencies that seek wealth and value in indigenous lands and bodies. It is also not a mystery why corporations find little moral difficulty in working with settler colonial regimes like Israel.

Ultimately, Coke Studio’s main ingredient is Coca Cola. The tricky ontological proposition that the corporation may be American but the music platform is Pakistani, is difficult to digest for precisely this reason. Much like the beverage, Coke Studio may be agreeable to our uncritical sense of pleasure, but in place of enrichment, it mainly offers saccharine excess.

When it comes to the cultural products of Coke Studio, the only meaningful content, to borrow a phrase from famed cultural pessimist Theodor Adorno, is capital. The ties that capital has to a settler colonial project is yet another grave reason to respond to the call of resistance and rejection.

The views of the writer do not necessarily reflect the views of Dunya Digital. We value diversity of opinion and believe in giving space to a variety of voices.