As Noisey drops Adil Omar’s latest song, Instep takes a closer look.
Adil Omar has always had the understanding that music videos – in this day and age particularly – need to have some edge, a narrative that connects the song to the video. You can’t just throw anything out there and hope people will buy it. From ‘Paki Rambo’ till today, he’s done it but his newest work may well be his strongest.
New music videos from Adil Omar are regular and almost always like an introspective audio-visual sonic landscape that is aware of what it is hoping to achieve, showing us pieces of the artist, his art and the man Adil Omar has evolved into.
The Islamabad-based rapper and music producer Adil Omar’s newest single ‘Mastery’, to start, was dropped by Noisey – Vice Media’s musical arm – earlier this month, which in itself says that Adil Omar’s talent goes beyond borders and is good enough that it is getting noticed. Not everybody from Pakistan gets picked up by Noisey often.
Adil dropped a full-length album, along with a film, just last year called Transcendence. ‘Mastery’ in some ways is a follow-up to that. Adil raps about it on the song at one point and the lyrics note, “As I’m writing this, I’m still working on Transcendence/Here’s a time capsule to swallow/Pay attention to the next rhyme you should follow/I put it all on me and never bet partial/I wrote my song with Eminem before I met Marshall/My light obliterates an open threat/It’s funny as I’m writing this and I don’t even know it yet/To the future slash the present, when you hearing this/Never heard a thing as sexy, fresh and f***ing weird as this/Before I’m done here, I’ll be onto my next one/Evolve daily, I ain’t even shown you my best guns”.
This guy is on a real roll, writing new songs even as he is finishing work on present/future releases and Adil says so in his new song. Now for the music video, at first, you won’t be able to make a lot of sense of it, and Adil is aware, saying within the number that it is “fresh” and “weird” and both of those things are true. It is maybe the point.
Finding the real Adil Omar is never easy but it is present in his music; one showcase was Transcendence, the second and even more complex is ‘Mastery’. He won’t show everything like it’s a pop bubble-gum video.
Adil is also a polymath, having written, produced and directed ‘Mastery’, which is a single off his next album. There goes the ominous view that nobody is making records. Adil just made one; now he’s moved onto his second one. As for the music video, it opens with Adil getting ready to run but he has a blind fold on, which echoes how he sonic trains in real life; the next scene takes us to a calm Adil sitting, meditating while another Adil Omar, in a military-esque uniform appears controlling what appears to be an army under his rule and so takes off the video.
A great deal of effort is present in the video and by that I mean he’s battling his inner and outer self – the shadows and demons that many carry but not many have the courage to show in a music video.
A grim reaper is also present within the video, even as Adil raps in what seems to be a dilapidated building. A picture of his late father comes into focus, which explains the guns and tryst with near death and its presence in his writing and video(s). The video also jumps timeline and that is experimentation with science.
When he enters a record label’s office, the label runner is shown to be ‘The Man’ or ‘The Establishment’ – what a swing – and as the beats slow down, Adil emerges as king, action hero.
“This is a hero’s journey, going the distance/The meeting point of art, science, flow and precision/The bleeding point of heart, life and growth in an instant/Even though I can’t define it, b****, I know what it isn’t”.
Within ‘Mastery’, Adil through his writing also takes on those who have an issue with those who sing/rap in English. He raps at one point: “Asking why I ain’t rapping in my own language/Man, I’ve seen things worse than a brother’s Urdu/C******,ye hai aik bohat veshi kism ka standard”.
Oh, snap.
There are also elements of Adil Omar’s childhood so in a sense it is a re-visitation to the past. In the end though, it covers everything from scientific experiments to personal loss to seeing a shadow self as dictator, an action hero, an explorer, a scientist and a grieving son, which results in a naked personality – showcasing struggles, dreams, nightmares and a will to fight, albeit in a way never seen before in local music videos. There isn’t a dull moment in the music video; the crimson shades that run through the video only add to its vision while the beats that accompany it are just as slick. If this is the beginning of ‘Mastery’, I can’t wait to see what Adil Omar conjures next.
