DJ Shahrukh on music, identity, taboo culture, and returning home after a decade abroad
For years, electronic music in Pakistan existed on the fringes. It was misunderstood, associated with nightlife stereotypes, and disconnected from mainstream cultural conversation. But over the past few years, a visible shift has taken place.
Underground events have evolved, younger audiences are indulging, and mainstream brands are starting to endorse the movement.
Few people have witnessed that evolution as closely as DJ Shahrukh.
Long before electronic music became culturally acceptable in Pakistan, DJ Shahrukh was experimenting with blending traditional Pakistani melodies, folk influences, and rhythmic structures into modern electronic production. Starting as a student at the National College of Arts, he entered a scene that barely existed at the time.
“There was no roadmap,” he says. “People did not even understand what a DJ actually was. Electronic music culture in Pakistan had no infrastructure, no acceptance, and almost no long-term vision attached to it.”
What began as curiosity eventually grew into an international career. Over the years, DJ Shahrukh performed across clubs and festivals in London, Berlin, Ibiza, Dubai, New Delhi, Australia and other global music circuits. In 2013, he moved to Sweden, where he later performed for over 5,000 people, including members of the Swedish royal family.
But despite the international recognition, much of his recent attention in Pakistan has come from his reinterpretation of Pakistani music. Over the years, his remixes have ranged from iconic voices such as Abida Parveen and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to contemporary collaborations including Ali Zafar. Most recently, however, it was his remix of the Punjabi mujra classic “Button” that sparked widespread debate online.
The reactions revealed more than musical disagreement. Supporters viewed the remix as a bold cultural reinterpretation, while critics accused it of glamorizing vulgarity. For Shahrukh, the controversy reflects a deeper contradiction embedded within Pakistani society.
“I grew up around contradictions people were not supposed to acknowledge,” he says. “Songs like Mera Aisa Button Daba De and the world they came from were always pushed to the margins. Consumed within the theatres and judged outside of them.”
According to him, mujra is often reduced to morality debates while its larger social reality is ignored. “Mujra is not just performance,” he explains. “It contains labor, class negotiation, survival, and social hierarchy encoded into rhythm and movement. The discomfort around it is often less about morality and more about control. Who gets to be visible, under what conditions, and for whose approval.”
He draws parallels between the treatment of mujra culture and the early history of electronic music globally. “Rave culture in Europe was once dismissed as chaotic and immoral too,” he says. “Then cities like Berlin institutionalized it, archived it, and exported it as culture. Once the framing changed, the behavior evolved.”
That idea of cultural reframing sits at the center of his recent work. When mujra visuals are placed over electronic soundscapes, he argues, the connection is not artificial. “Both spaces are built around repetition, rhythm, collective release, and temporary disappearance of hierarchy,” he says. “One became internationally branded as culture. The other remained something society prefers to manage quietly.”
He believes Pakistan has repeatedly failed to recognize parts of its own visual and musical identity until they are validated elsewhere. He points to Pakistani truck art as one example, dismissed locally for years before being reframed internationally as heritage and design language. Bollywood has capitalised on their ‘Item Numbers’, but we are still going back and forth – we can neither fully accept it, nor kill it.
“The risk is that we only begin valuing culture after it becomes sanitized or exported,” he says. “At that point, what survives is not the original culture itself, but a version reshaped to feel acceptable.”
Rather than presenting clear moral conclusions, he describes his work as documentation of contradictions already present within society. “This work is not asking people to celebrate or condemn anything,” he says. “Mujra culture did not suddenly appear because someone remixed it. It has always existed. The difference is that when you place it openly inside a modern artistic framework, people are forced to confront their discomfort with it.”
He argues that younger Pakistanis are beginning to engage with culture differently than previous generations. Instead of separating traditional and modern influences, many are combining them naturally through music, fashion, language, and digital media.
“The next phase of Pakistani electronic music will not come from copying Europe,” he explains. “It will come from translating our own emotional and cultural identity into contemporary sound.”
That tension between identity, migration, and reinvention also forms the foundation of his newly released book, Out of the Frying Pan into the Ice. The memoir documents his departure from Pakistan, his experiences rebuilding life in Scandinavia, and the psychological realities of living between cultures.
“Distance changes your relationship with home,” he says. “I can now see Pakistan from a Swedish perspective, and understand both its beauty and its contradictions more clearly.”
The book moves beyond music and performance, focusing instead on displacement, survival, artistic identity, and personal transformation.
As Pakistan’s creative industries continue evolving, he believes the country is entering a transitional cultural phase. One where younger artists are no longer satisfied with imitation and are beginning to build hybrid identities that feel simultaneously local and global.
For Shahrukh, that evolution was inevitable.
“Every culture evolves through reinterpretation,” he says. “The question is whether we shape that evolution consciously, or pretend it is not happening.”
