Musician Taha G thinks award shows need to see what an ‘actual performer’ is
A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Thursday’s Lux Style Awards, including musician Taha G who shared his two cents about the performances at the event.
In a series of stories posted on his Instagram account on Friday, the singer said, “I think award shows need to see what an actual performer and performance is.” Before you say he could’ve been speaking very generally, he didn’t just stop there.
Taha continued to say he wasn’t sending any hate to the winners and nominees and had love for them all. He also called awards shows out for “[undermining] the best performer in the country every time]”. The healthy helping of emojis afterwards makes us think he was referring to himself here.
He then turned his guns to the artists who were performing and said he was “done with the same sad tunes and same four-chord y’all play with a afrobeat”. The musician said his colleagues need to “bring some difference” and “spice” to their work to “make people dance”.
After all that, he got even more specific, calling out “every artist who pre-recorded [their] songs” for the night. He told artists they had “one job” and needed to “fight for [their] performances and [their] art”. Taha said it was a shame to see pre-recorded songs at such a stage.
The Lux Style Awards this year had multiple performances including ones from Abida Parveen, and Asim Azhar along with a joint performance by Aashir Wajahat. Afusic, Nayel Wajahat, Nehal Naseem and Hasan Raheem also performed.
To his credit, Taha — whose stage name is Lover Boy, according to his website — is quite the performer himself. His Instagram account has a number of videos of him onstage and even some of him practicing dances behind the scenes.
He isn’t the only person who has called out the industry’s practice of pre-recording and heavily editing songs instead of just singing them live. Ibrar Shahid, one of the top 16 contestants on Pakistan Idol, dropped out of the competition on Tuesday, accusing organisers of editing his voice when putting out clips of him singing.
The team at Pakistan Idol called the claims “false, misleading, and defamatory,” claiming the contestant had “voluntarily withdrawn” and that everything was “under full control”.
This also isn’t the first time the Lux Style Awards have come under fire in recent years. In 2023, actor Sajal Ali called out organiser for giving awards to the only the most popular actors; she said many ”stellar performances” had been ignored that year.
The year before that, Meesha Shafi and Momina Mustehsan called the awards out for the lack of female representation among nominees for the Best Musician award.
