Bhutto Daughter’s Rap Tribute Hits YouTube

A year after her mother’s assassination, 18-year-old Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari wrote and performed a rap ballad in memory of Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto, which was packaged as a music video, aired on state television, and has since found its way to YouTube, where at least one upload has been viewed upwards of 30,000 times.

I Would Take Away The Pain combines video, art and photos of the fallen leader with a scrolling lyrics crawl. It’s a heartfelt piece, although perhaps a little heavily produced and stylized — there also could have been more structure to how the clips of Bhutto were assembled. But before you jump down my throat for offering that minor piece of criticism, you might check out The National Press’s Ampersand blog, which reviewed Bhutto’s efforts much more harshly:

But can her daughter, a student at Edinburgh University in Scotland, rap? Well, not really. Her lyrics are so on the nose as to be polemic and the beat, which she apparently made herself, is a simple hand clap, piano loop and cymbal crash with a sped-up soul hook chorus that sounds like 2002 Kanye West. Her heart is absolutely in the right place, and we love that Pakistani television is airing the clip, but Bhutto would’ve been better off getting an all-star group to record a tribute single.

However you might feel about the actual execution of the piece, it’s an undeniable only-in-the-21st-century sort of moment. Bakhtawar is 18, after all, part of a generation for which sharing emotions like grief in public via the Internet is second nature. One can only imagine what will happen when Malia Obama, now 10, is old enough for MySpace.

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