KARACHI: Pakistani singer Ali Zafar released a cover of John Lennon’s iconic song titled Imagine on Friday. The song was re-purposed and re-written to fit in the digital age i.e. the era of social media. In the song, the singer hints at imagining a perfect world without the presence of social media.
The song was originally written in 1971 by The Beatles member, John Lennon, as a response to the Vietnam war that caused severe casualties. The song brought sentiments of hope, peace and love back into the minds of the leftist American people. Lennon intended to unite people through a common message of living life in peace and devoid of war. Now, it is being rewritten by Ali Zafar in an almost trivializing manner by making the entire song about social media.
The song starts off with him saying “this is a public service message, to the world.” The lyrics of the song followed along the lines of “imagine all the people living in the real world”, “imagine there are no cellphones, it isn’t hard to do”, “imagine there’s no Twitter“ and so on.
Since it’s release, the lyrics of the song have been received with praise by those who understand his message of detaching oneself from our digital addictions – yet, on a larger scale, the song is extremely confusing as the preacher doesn’t seem to practicing what he’s preaching!
The singer, who has been accused of sexual harassment and has received plenty of backlash and criticism on social media as a result, used all forms of social media/digital devices to promote this song that has people on Twitter calling him out and finding the attempt labelled as a “public service message” by him to be both ironic and funny.
