Whose liberation? Iranian popular music and the fetishization of resistance

ABSTRACT

This article explores a number of issues concerning the representation of Iranian popular music outside Iran, and specifically the somewhat romanticized discourses of “resistance” and “freedom” that have tended to characterize both journalistic and scholarly writings. The article discusses a number of examples, but focuses primarily on the case of the music video “Happy in Tehran,” which was posted on YouTube in 2014 and which challenged certain local cultural and legal boundaries on behavior in public space. As a result, those responsible for the video were arrested, prompting an outcry, both within Iran and internationally; they were released soon after and eventually received suspended sentences. The article discusses the ways in which the “Happy in Tehran” incident was reported in the media outside Iran and offers alternative readings of the video and its meanings. Ultimately, the article considers how such reductionist views feed into wider regimes of orientalist representation and asks whose agenda such fetishization of resistance serves.

Notes

¹ The campaign color that was allocated to Mousavi.

² Examples of such writings include Varzi (2006), Khosravi (2008), and Mahdavi (2009).

³ Iran was the second country in the region (after Israel) to gain Internet technology, in 1992, and by the late 2000s an estimated 23 million people (out of a population of 75 million at the time of the 2011 census) had Internet access (Sreberny & Khiabany, 2010, p. 13). The history and growth of Internet coverage in Iran is discussed in a number of publications, including Graham and Khosravi (2002) and Sreberny and Khiabany (2010). As I have noted elsewhere, the alternative “underground” music movement was only able to develop as it did through the availability of the Internet as a channel of communication between musicians and between musicians and audiences, given that such music was not generally available legally in the public domain (see Nooshin, 2005b, pp. 472–474).

⁴ Although mention should also be made of work on the regional rural traditions and traditional popular musics. While the absence of Iranian popular music from the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, widely regarded as the touchstone of musicological scholarship (and the first significant update of the dictionary since the 1950s), clearly reflects the more general absence of popular music within musicology at that time, its continued absence in the 2001 edition is quite striking. In both cases, there are two sections: “I. Art Music” (Farhat, 1980) and “II. Folk Music” (Blum, 1980). The latter includes some mention of rural “Popular Entertainment and Dance Music” (section 6).

⁵ See Nooshin (2005a 2005b), Robertson (2005), Breyley (2008), Johnston (2008), Nooshin (2009), Breyley (2010), Robertson (2010), Nooshin (2011), Robertson (2012, 2013a, 2013b), Breyley (2013), Siamdoust (2013), Steward (2013), and Breyley (2014b). The work of Auliffe (2011), Shay (2000), Kamangar (2004), Hemmasi (2010, 2011), and Breyley (2008, 2014a, 2014b) focuses on diaspora pop music; Hemmasi (2013) and Breyley (2010) are two of the only scholarly articles on pre-1979 Iranian pop. This list includes a number of doctoral dissertations. It is interesting to note that a good proportion of this work is by female scholars and I have often wondered at the reasons for this. Certainly, anecdotal evidence suggests that women feel more at ease researching Iranian popular music than the comparatively exclusive and still (despite changes in recent years) largely male-dominated classical music culture.

⁶ See also Moreno-Almeida (2017) for similar issues in Moroccan hip-hop.

⁷ See, for example, Kimball (n.d.), Wadhan (2014), and other chapters in Werbner, Webb, and Spellman-Poots (2014), and a special panel at the 2012 meeting of the American Anthropological Association on “Aesthetics, Politics, and Religion: The Role of (Performing) Arts in the Arab Uprisings,” including four papers on music: https://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2012/webprogram/Session5312.html (accessed November 12, 2016). The introductory chapter of Werbner et al. draws particular attention to the centrality of performative aesthetics in recent protest movements. It is interesting to note two further edited volumes focused broadly on cultural resistance in the MENA region, both published in the preceding year: Laachir and Talajooy (2013a) and Sreberny and Torfeh (2013).

⁸ The original song was a best-selling single in the United States and the United Kingdom and in September 2014 became the most downloaded song to date in the United Kingdom; it was in the official United Kingdom top 75 chart listings for over a year. The song was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and won the 2014 Grammy Award for Best Pop Solo Performance.

⁹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg5qdIxVcz8 (dated May 20, 2014; accessed June 20, 2016).

¹⁰ Sassan Soleimani, a filmmaker and animator who also worked as a photographer for Hassan Rouhani’s Presidential election campaign in 2013.

¹¹ As Leone (2012) notes, “Windows, balconies, and rooftops can be considered as semi-private, or semi-public space [in Iran], since they represent a threshold between private and public spaces … It should not be forgotten that the Iranian ‘semiotics of roofs’ is different from the ‘semiotics of roofs’ of other cultures, for example in the ‘Western world’: whereas in the ‘West’ roofs are mostly a non-inhabited surface that covers the spaces inhabited by people, in Iran roofs are themselves an inhabitable surface, for instance in the hot nights of the Iranian summer” (p. 15).

¹² Traditional Iranian architecture further spatializes domestic areas into the birooni (“outside”) for visitors and others outside the immediate family, and the more private andarooni (“inside”), accessible only to family members. There is a strong gender dimension to this divide, discussion of which lies outside the scope of the current article. For a more detailed consideration of the public–private divide in Iran, see Graham and Khosravi (2002).

¹³ For further discussion of the Internet as an alternative public sphere in Iran, see Nooshin (2017).

¹⁴ For two examples, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-T8vOk1NIw (posted May 20, 2014; accessed June 16, 2016. The credits are as follows: “Director: Ehsam Azimi. Idea: Hooman Khalatbari. Sponsored by Maseer e Zaman (Store Watches). Special thanks to: Mahdi Jafary, Mahsa Totia, Sevin Azimi”); and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OWYCgGOSMA (accessed June 18, 2016).

¹⁵ It is worth noting that almost any topic of conversation in Iran can seemingly “flow” from very specific complaints to much broader expressions of discontent with the regime. For example, I witnessed a casual conversation in the summer of 2015 among disgruntled (female) commuters on a crowded and slow bus in Tehran that slid easily from complaints about the provision of transport services to criticism of the regime (for not caring enough about its people to provide better transport); from there to comments about how much better the transport system was under the Shah; and on to criticism from young people on the bus directed to older women whose generation had, in their view, been responsible for bringing about the Revolution. The move from crowded bus to recriminations about the Revolution took no more than a few minutes. Interestingly, many of those engaged in discussion seemed more concerned about what visiting foreigners might think, evidently assuming that crowded buses are a problem specific to Iran.

¹⁶ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2MCo98Cr7k (“New Cut ‘Happy’ in Tehran,” posted May 22, 2015 by Ehsan Fardjadniya; accessed September 19, 2016).

¹⁷ There is a mild irony here—given the accusations of misogyny directed against Williams following the release of the single “Blurred Lines” in 2013—that a song by him should become a central discussion point in relation to the rights of women to dance in public or uncover their hair.

¹⁸ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y35NKNCsPzs (accessed June 5, 2016).

¹⁹ https://twitter.com/HassanRouhani (accessed September 15, 2016).

²⁰ Another example of this kind of narrative trope can be seen in the coverage of the Immigrant Song Contest hosted by the BBCs current affairs program Newsnight in May 2009, and which was won by the Iranian band Font. The headline of one article by Susannah Tarbush reads, “From a Tehran jail to victory in the BBCs ‘Immigrant Song Contest’”; http://thetanjara.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/iranian-band-font-win-bbc-newsnights.html (accessed October 3, 2010).

²¹ I have been struck by the number of times that friends and associates who know little about Iran have responded to my visits with questions such as “So, is Iran safe to visit now?” Given that most of their information on Iran is gained through the media, it is clear that the kinds of discourses discussed here feed into a general idea of Iran as a dangerous place to live or visit. Ironically, at the time of writing, Iran was probably one of the safest places to be in the Middle East.

²² Steward (2013, pp. 72–82) offers a detailed discussion of censorship practices in a number of countries, including the United Kingdom, and particularly after the events of 9/11, focusing on the highly “convoluted relationship between the censor and the censored” (p. 73). An understanding of this relationship is entirely absent from the newspaper articles discussed here.

²³ http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/section/63 (accessed October 20, 2016).

²⁴ There are examples of this outside Iran, of course, such as U.S. rapper Kanye West’s deliberate creation of what he knew would be an offensive album in order to court publicity (Steward, 2013, p. 77).

²⁵ For a more typical tabloid report on the events, see http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/5640966/iranian-pals-arrested-for-fun-video-dancing-to-pharrells-happy.html (accessed March 12, 2015).

²⁶ Tangentially, it is worth noting the strand of postcolonial thought (found in the work of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, for instance) in which mimicry can be understood as a form of resistance. In such cases, however, it is usually the culture of the “oppressor” that is appropriated and subject to mimicking.

²⁷ I paraphrase here from the work of Lila Abu-Lughod on the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin of western Egypt (1990).

²⁸ Note that it is more than likely that Olszewska’s “A.” is just one such “penguin-looking dark-veiled” woman.

²⁹ Steward (2013) notes that such articles tend to appear “whenever there is a peak in political activity in Iran, which usually coincides with a crackdown by the government that results in arrests and further punishment. This leaves long periods of silence, where music and the arts continue to grow, but remain unreported by such publications. Sometimes a report on one markedly tragic event, can create the sense that all musicians are suffering under terrible, irreversible conditions” (p. 27). For discussion of musical responses to the disputed 2009 elections, see Leone (2012), Siamdoust (2013), and Steward (2013, pp. 166–194).

³⁰ Such reporting can also be regarded as part of broader regimes of representation by which the Middle East has historically been “produced” in the “West” through orientalist discourses (following Said) and which, according to Laachir and Talajooy, are “still prevalent today in the way the region is reported as a hotspot for conflict, radicalism, terrorism and backwardness, while it continues to be the site of contesting global powers over its domination because of its considerable reservoir for energy resources” (2013b, p. 2).

³¹ “Exile” evoking very different associations from “diaspora.” In the case of some musicians, the term “self-exile” would be more appropriate (see Leone, 2012, p. 12).

³² Concerned about the implications for my work in Iran, I complained to the editor, who pointed to the contract I had signed and that allows the Rough Guide to make changes without consulting authors (there is a lesson here in reading contracts!). Only when faced with potential legal action did the publisher agree to issue an apology in the next print run of the book, but the damage was done. Essentially, I found myself caught between pragmatic self-censorship and a popular press apparently unconcerned for the consequences of editorial non-specialists making ill-informed changes to texts and often unaware of the implications of such changes. Judging from my informal discussions with others, I am not the only ethnomusicologist to have had this kind of experience.

³³ In part, the book seeks to interrogate the very notion of “totalitarianism,” so often used in an uncritical way. As Breyley notes, referring to Johnson’s introduction to the book, “Contemporary totalitarianism studies have largely shifted from the formal political structures in themselves, to the point of tension between them and everyday life … for some, the totalitarian framework might be experienced in daily life as no more oppressive than in any democratic society regulated by law … for those in positions privileged by their particular political structures, daily life and musical possibilities might appear freer and more expansive” (Breyley, 2017).

³⁴ Steward (2013) discusses a similar case, that of the Czech rock band “Plastic People of the Universe,” which under communist rule operated underground. She observes that “while the band’s achievements resulted in headlines such as ‘Communism Brought Down By Rock “n” Roll!’ its members saw themselves in a less political light. Bassist Mejla Hlvasa freely admits, ‘We just loved rock “n” roll and wanted to be famous …’. The resistance of youth culture continues to be an assumption” (pp. 105–106).

³⁵ Behna (interview, September 2, 2015, translated by the author) commented on this scene in the film: “and the musician practising in a cowshed is actually quite wealthy—the farm belongs to his father. Sometimes I think that our artists and filmmakers create something that those on the other side [‘oonvarihā’ i.e. those outside Iran] will like.” Again, the orientalizing dimensions of this are clear.

³⁶ Steward (2013) quotes from an interview with Freya Petersen published in the New York Times in which the lead singer Raam claimed that “We’re jeopardizing our lives every show we play” (p. 111). There is a sense in which such claims to danger make the music more “authentic” to audiences outside Iran. Robertson (2012) has also written at length about Hypernova. Interestingly, the same musician has elsewhere asserted that “I think a lot of people over here [in the United States] are unfortunately misinformed about the realities that exist in Iran. Not to be an apologist for the current regime there, but Iran really is not as bad as they make it out to be in the media” (quoted in Steward, 2013, p. 111).

³⁷ Almost the exact same wording is reported by Polly Withers from Ramallah-based musician Jad, who also resists such orientalizing: “the way that I see myself is that … I am a musician, or artist or whatever you want to call it, but I happen to be Palestinian … Because I am from here … [but] I am not a ‘Palestinian’ artist.” He continues: “Our goal is not to show the world that we are humans like them, because we already know that, and they already know that. If they don’t already know that that’s their problem! Not my problem” (2015). See Swedenburg (2013) for similar observations in relation to Palestinian hip-hop. I am reminded of the following line from “My Sweet Little Terrorist Song” by the Iranian band 127: “We appear on their TV shows like creatures from another planet” (see discussion in Nooshin, 2005b). Steward (2013) quotes from Raam, lead singer of Hypernova, after the band left Iran: “We’d meet people who’d never seen an Iranian or something. And after they hear our music, they’re just so shocked and they become fans” (p. 162).