Mustt Mustt found its widest audience through a remix nobody involved in making it had planned for. In 1991, the Bristol group Massive Attack, then working on their own debut album, reworked the title track into what became known as the Duckpond Dub Mix, laying their own dub and trip-hop production underneath Nusrat's unaltered vocal. The result became a club hit across the United Kingdom and the first song in the Urdu language ever to reach the British singles charts, a genuine crossover in an industry that had rarely made room for South Asian devotional music in any form.
The commercial numbers that followed were unusual for a record built around Sufi devotional vocals rather than pop songwriting: more than 600,000 copies sold outside Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent, and eventual use in a Coca-Cola television advertisement, about as far from a devotional gathering as a piece of music can travel. Critic Nitin Sawhney later credited the record with changing the face of British music, and Nusrat himself, who had built his reputation performing hours-long traditional qawwali sessions at Sufi shrines and concert halls across the subcontinent, described his approach to the crossover work plainly: "I made my own style. We update qawwali with the times."
That update came at a real cost worth naming honestly: the traditional ensemble format, the shrine setting, and the participatory devotional context of qawwali as it is actually practiced are largely absent from Mustt Mustt, replaced by a studio arrangement built for an audience encountering the tradition's vocabulary for the first time.