Polarity 1: No More

MULTI-PLATINUM PAKISTANI BAND, JUNOON, HAS RECORDED A SONG BASED ON A POEM BY Polarity/1's POLAR LEVINE

After September 11, Polar wrote a poem called PULVERIZED: I'M BREATHING. He sent a copy to his friend Salman Ahmad of Junoon. Salman wrote NO MORE, the lyrics based on Polar's poem. The song is the first of what, hopefully, will be many collaborations.

Junoon, South Asia's biggest rock band, has returned to America with a message of peace and their first English-language single "No More". Standing alongside 9/11 tributes from a host of American musicians, "No More" is the only song denouncing terrorism to come from the region of the world where terrorism has thrived, a unique expression of empathy and solidarity from the other side of the globe.

Junoon was the subject of a VH1 News Special which aired last fall entitled "Islamabad: Rock City". They have been welcomed by audiences around the world from China to England to the US to South Africa and are the first rock band to have performed in the General Assembly of the United Nations. The nucleus of Junoon are the Pakistani-American Muslim Salman Ahmad, the New Yorker - and devout Christian -- Brian O'Connell, and lead singer Pakistani Ali Azmat.

Band leader Ahmad explains how the band came to record their first English language song: "Junoon performed a couple of peace concerts in the States right after 9/11. I needed to do something to heal my own wounds and the show we gave near Ground Zero was one of the most deeply moving concerts I've ever experienced. After the show I met Polar Levine, a New Yorker who'd brought his nine year old son to the show. I told him that this Junoon concert had shown to me what America was really all about: unity in adversity."

Ahmad continues, "A few days later, Polar presented me with a poem that he had written right after the 9/11 attacks and said, 'you're free to do whatever you want with it'. Until that moment, Pakistan's long history of terrorism, violence and poverty had focused me on writing only in Urdu and Punjabi. 9/11 brought a huge paradigm shift to my consciousness. I now have a reason to write English songs. I want to comment on the flood of paranoia, grief, and crisis of identity that the world is collectively experiencing and No More is like a first painting." Ahmad used Levine's poem as the basis for No More.

A music video of "No More" will be available in September. Also in September is the DVD release of "Junoon for Peace", a live concert filmed in New York on October 27, 2001.

See an interview with Polar Levine by Hinjustani Times journalist, Vatsala Kaul.

BBC Radio has included NO MORE in a radio series about cover tunes that brought new meaning to the original. See a BBC interview with Salman Ahmad and Polar.

JUNOON: "No More"
For a taste: Click HERE to HEAR

View video: loFi hiFi

FREE DOWNLOAD

PULVERIZED/I'M BREATHING - 9/11/01
©2001 Polar Levine

Pulverized
The innocent
The magnificent
To a cloud of dust
And I breathe it in
I'm here
I'm still breathing
But we'll never be the same
This utopian game
Gods and markets
But later for blame

We've been pulverized
Steel and stone
Gypsum and bone
Now dust
Drifting homeward
Over New York skies
The dead
Alive
In the dust
In my lungs
Ash on my head
Through my windows
On my floor
They say you're missing
You're missing no more
No more

I'm Breathing
Breathing you in
I'm here
Still breathing
Breathing you in
I can't believe this
I'm breathing you in

In my lungs through my windows
on my head on the floor
ashes of falling hope
choking me inside these doors
stormy winds seduce the night
over new york and karachi skies
sinking in a sea of time
mourning since 11/9

No more, I'm breathing you no more,
I'm missing you no more, No more

God and money take the blame
for suicidal video games
if all that lives is born to die
love remains I wonder why

on black and white tv
red is all I see
I'm sick of spying eyes
wearing suits and secret ties

(Repeat) No More

the dream is not yet over
keep yourself alive
hold on
we may survive

(Repeat) No More

Lyrics by Polar Levine and Salman Ahmad
Music by Salman Ahmad

VK: That is a really touching poem Salman turned into song. When did you write it? Much after 9/11 or just after? Or did you write the poem at Salman's behest?

PL: Thank you. I live ten blocks from Ground Zero. So when we hear about the attack on America, I also experienced it as an attack on my neighborhood, about two blocks from the field where my son plays soccer. When the dust from the collapsed towers started to collect on my window sills and on my floors it was upsetting in a mundane kind of way. Even war has its mundane side. The ongoing TV coverage had a report on the composition of the dust I'd been inhaling for days that was giving me some respiratory problems. It was mostly crushed concrete and wallboard. Along with that there was plastic from computers and the bones of the people who were in the towers when they collapsed. I'd been inhaling the remains of the victims of September 11. My lungs were filling up every day with underpaid firefighters, police officers, cafeteria workers, secretaries, mail room workers, word processors, graphic designers and overpaid executives. I had, in my body, Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists, liberals, conservatives, women and men from hundreds of countries, heterosexuals and homosexuals. I was together with them. We had nothing to disagree or fight about. They were part of my body and came in with the air that keeps me alive. The planet Earth is one body that houses us all in the same way.That realization gave added texture to the whole nightmare. I wrote the poem then, a few days after the attack.