3-5 paragraph on music article

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Oh devout ones, devout ones . . . If you’re on the road to Heaven and I’m on the path to Hell, It’s none of your business . . . If I am drunk, it’s none of your business If I am sober, it’s none of your business! “be to che” ( “none of your business” )

by ha ssan shamaizadeh, 20041

Above are the words to a song by Hassan Shamaizadeh, a well-known Ira- nian vocalist, instrumentalist, and composer who has lived in Southern Cal- ifornia since the Iranian Revolution, which took place some three decades ago. These lyrics are set to a rollicking, driving rhythmic instrumental ac- companiment that recalls urban musical styles linked to dance and Tehran’s cabarets of the mid-twentieth century. After the establishment of the Is- lamic Republic of Iran (IRI) in 1978– 1979, such cabarets and nightclubs were closed, mixed-sex social dance was banned, and popular musics were restricted as the country’s religious leaders sought to bring state, culture, and society into line with Islamic and revolutionary principles. In “Be To Che,” Shamaizadeh speaks back to the “devout ones” (zāhed-hā)2 who wish to regulate his personal life, while he employs sonic references, and their contextual connotations, that fl out the Islamic state’s cultural regulations.

Produced in Los Angeles—far from its implied clerical addressees—Sha- maizadeh’s musical statement is representative of much more than a sin- gle exile’s grumbling taunts to a country in which he is no longer welcome. Rather, the singer is one of hundreds of musicians and media producers ac- tive in the Iranian culture industries that coalesced in Southern California after the Islamic Republic heavily restricted popular culture and media. Fed by the mass exodus, beginning in the early 1980s, of many of the country’s most famous musical stars and most skilled media producers, these exile

chapter 3

iranian popul ar music in los angeles: a transnational public beyond the isl amic state

farzaneh hemmasi

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<i>Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater : Artistic Developments in the Muslim World</i>, edited by Nieuwkerk, Karin van, University of Texas Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucr/detail.action?docID=3443581. Created from ucr on 2019-11-07 01:39:35.

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culture industries have produced music and media to serve the area’s local Iranian community, the largest in the world outside of Iran. Much exile- produced popular music takes the Iranian homeland as its main focus, a typ- ical orientation for fi rst-generation migrants that helps situate diasporic sub- jects by simultaneously referring to place and aiding in emplacement.3 But this exilic preoccupation with Iran serves another function as well: it pro- vides different forms and avenues for Iranian identifi cation than are available either in Western or offi cial Iranian media.

Whether inside or outside the country, music plays a special role in de- bates about Iranian identity, engaging Iran’s relationship with Islam and the West, and raising questions regarding rights to expression, sexuality, youth, and gender, making it an ideally situated cultural form to examine in order to understand the confl icts facing the Iranian nation. Today, LA-produced music and media, and the national concerns expressed therein, are not only diasporic but transnational, reaching dispersed Iranian communities around the world, as well as audiences in Iran, where they are illegal but widely consumed. As I show in this chapter, Iranian exile popular music’s home- land orientation is driven by its creators’ fi nancial and emotional motives, but also by a desire to extend Iranian culture, identity, and political expres- sion beyond the ideological and territorial bounds of the Islamic Republic. From their positions abroad, Iranian exile popular musicians contribute to what I argue is a transnational public containing views and representations of Iranian-ness that deviate from dominant state-approved discourses. What versions of Iranian identity are explored in this music, and how might these contrast with those identities and practices promoted in the Iranian Revolu- tion or by the Islamic state? Further, how effective is exile popular music in reaching widespread Iranian audiences both inside and outside of the coun- try, and how can we evaluate its infl uence?

The chapter begins with a brief overview of the salient postrevolution- ary Iranian state policies regarding expression and culture that provide the context for both the initial establishment of the LA-based Iranian exile cul- ture industries and the particular forms Iranian popular music and media have taken in Los Angeles. Drawing on ethnographic fi eldwork conducted in Southern California in 2007, I outline the LA cultural industries and fo- cus on popular music’s transnational circulation to Iranians abroad and in their homeland, a topic that has not been covered in the few previous ac- counts of Iranian popular music in Southern California (Nafi cy 1993; Shay 2000). Sketching out some of the main functions and themes of both pre- revolutionary pop preserved and reproduced in Los Angeles and the newly created Iranian popular music known locally as musiqi-ye pop-e los ānjeles (henceforth MPLA),4 I show some of the ways these musics present alter-

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native versions of Iranian culture and identity, especially through their rep- resentations of women and female sexuality, notions of cultural authentic- ity, and uses of Iranian history in song and video. The chapter concludes by evaluating the impact of MPLA in Iran as contributing to an alternative, transnational public in a context where the national public sphere is already contested.

media, politics, and culture in the isl amic republic of iran

Recent literature has emphasized the growing signifi cance of Muslim publics and counterpublics in Muslim-majority states where secular governments are in power (Hirschkind 2006; Salvatore and Eickelman 2004; Eickelman and Anderson 2003; Van Nieuwkerk 2008). Iran presents a very different case than Egypt, Lebanon, and other countries represented in these studies, as it possesses an Islamic state that controls the majority of media outlets. While state media dominance and censorship also characterized Iran’s prerevolu- tionary monarchical government (Baraheni 1977; Sreberny- Mohammadi and Mohammadi 1994), since the revolution civil society and the public sphere have been circumscribed by a combination of religious and instru- mental political state power that presents signifi cant obstacles for alternative viewpoints in media (Khiabany 2007, 2008).5 In addition, after 1979, public space, education, and economic and foreign policy were all transformed to align with the particular combination of Shiʿite Islam and populist and anti- imperialist philosophies embodied in the revolution.6

If political expression has been curtailed in postrevolutionary Iran, so has artistic expression. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, per- forming arts have been carefully monitored by the state through a number of permit-issuing organizations—chief among them the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance7—that regulate performance, recording, broadcast- ing, and dissemination. Music and dance have been the most challenging art forms to reconcile to the pious, revolutionary vision of Iranian culture, both because they have long histories of being considered morally suspect in Iran and because of their prominence in prerevolutionary Iranian popu- lar culture.

While the Pahlavi monarchy that had ruled Iran prior to the revolution had promoted Iranian popular music as part of its national modernization and Westernization projects (Nooshin 2005a), popular music was rejected entirely in the early years of the revolution. In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini unambiguously stated his disapproval of music in general in the Islamic Republic:

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Music [musiqi] is like a drug; whoever acquires the habit can no lon- ger devote himself to important activities. It changes people to the point of yielding to vice or to preoccupations pertaining to the world of mu- sic alone. We must eliminate music because it means betraying our country and our youth. We must completely eliminate it. (Quoted in Youssefzadeh 2000, 138; originally in the newspaper article “Radio and Television Must Strengthen the Young,” Keyhān, 1 mordād 1358/1979)

Following this pronouncement musical activity was dramatically curtailed and heavily restricted on state radio and television. Vigilante groups and rev- olutionary guards sometimes took matters into their own hands, harassing instrument makers, burning cassette tapes in the streets, stopping cars play- ing pop music, and breaking up parties with music and dancing (Youssefza- deh 2000; Nooshin 2005a).

Despite the unequivocal tone of Khomeini’s statement, these restric- tions did not apply to all kinds of sound art, but to musiqi, an Arabic term of Greek derivation that refers to nonreligious sonic forms of questionable morality.8 Among those forms and styles initially considered irreligious, pro- fane, or otherwise incompatible with the ideals of the fl edgling Islamic Re- public were Iranian art and folk music, as well as urban entertainment musics played by motreb, or professional entertainers, music associated with cafés and cabarets, sometimes called kāfe-i (“of the cafés”—see Fatemi 2005), and Westernized, mass-mediated popular music (musiqi-ye pop) from both inside and outside of the country. In keeping with conservative interpretations of Muslim law regarding interaction between the sexes, women were forbid- den from singing before men and from making solo vocal recordings. Also prohibited were songs containing debauched or sensual themes.

But music policies were not only inspired by Muslim law, the Koran, or hadith; in some cases, these were also resonant with long-standing and widely held negative attitudes toward performers of entertainment musics. For instance, prior to the revolution, the motreb profession was dispropor- tionately the province of Iranian Jews, because many Muslims did not want to be associated with such unethical employment. While Iranian Jews did not share the same religion-based prejudices toward musiqi as Muslims, Jew- ish motreb nonetheless occupied a low status in their own communities as well, ranking only above beggars, butchers, and corpse washers (Loeb 1972, 8– 9). In other cases, the objections to certain musics and musicians were the result of revolutionary aims of political and cultural transformation. For instance, singers and instrumentalists whose reputation was “judged incom- patible” with postrevolutionary moral and political values were barred from professional musical activities (During 1992). Likewise, cultural “inauthen-

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ticity” in popular music, much of which bore heavy Western infl uences char- acterized during this period as “Westoxifi cation,”9 was also important to its restriction during this period of ideological consolidation.

Those genres initially allowed for public performance by men included unaccompanied Shiʿite vocal genres such as nowheh (responsorial sung verses) and rowzeh (sung narratives about the martyred imams); these were a major part of television and radio broadcasts, especially during the 1980s. Another form promoted in this period was the sorud-e enghelābi, or “revolu- tionary march-hymn,” a marchlike choral piece often using Western harmo- nies and accompanied by Western and Iranian instruments that celebrated the revolution.10 The fact that the term sorud was sometimes used as a eu- phemism for other types of musiqi gives an idea of the sensitive atmosphere surrounding music during the early years of the Islamic Republic (Chehabi 1999; Youssefzadeh 2000).

Dance likewise became a very problematic category of cultural practice for the state after the revolution. The National Ballet Company was shut- tered after 1979, and the country’s dance schools were ordered closed (Mef- tahi 2005). Social dance in mixed-sex private settings like parties and wed- dings was not permitted, and private gatherings were regularly interrupted by morality police who heard dance music from outside and who could ar- rest (or seek bribes from) partygoers on grounds of immorality. Dance was later permitted on stage after the fi rst decade of the revolution as a subcat- egory of theater, but only by the euphemism of harikat-i mawzun, a phrase that is usually translated in English as “rhythmic movement” (see Zeinab Stellar, this volume). Harikat-i mawzun in fact constituted a new, generally slow-tempo concert performance form that was devoid of the many sensual shoulder and hip movements (called qir) commonplace in Iranian urban so- cial dance, staged cabaret dance, and fi lms. In keeping with the restrictions on dance, musics with danceable rhythms—especially those recalling urban entertainment genres like motrebi musics associated with morally ambiguous performance—were also restricted.

The limitations on music loosened somewhat at the end of the fi rst de- cade following the revolution. Just months before he died in 1989, Khomeini issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, that explicitly allowed the sale of instru- ments and the performance of music so long as they were for “ethical” pur- poses (Movahed 2003– 2004). This opened the way for an explosion of tra- ditional art and folk music activity in the country, which, once sanitized of any offending sensual or romantic elements, was rationalized as both “ethi- cal” and “learned” and was seen to support the ideals of cultural authentic- ity promoted in the revolution (Youssefzadeh 2000; Movahed 2003– 2004; Nooshin 2005a). However, even after the fatwa many restrictions were still

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in place. In addition to limitations on sexual and romantic topics and crit- icisms of the state and Islam, which were also in effect in fi lm and publish- ing, those musics or works considered mobtazal (trite or banal) remained offi cially unacceptable (Adelkhah 1991). Encompassing moral, political, and aesthetic values, the term mobtazal implies banality, cliché, lack of creativity and worth, and cheapness, but also suggests a cultural form that disorients a listener and can promote disengagement with the world through harmful distraction. In a period when state culture—including military marches— was developed with the express purpose of inculcating revolutionary Islamic ideology, those cultural forms that took the listener out of a revolutionized or pious state of mind were inappropriate.

Then in 1997, during another period of liberalization, popular music was also approved for local production and broadcast. As Nooshin (2005a) has suggested, pop’s reappearance at this moment was engineered to appeal to the country’s growing youth population and to provide a politically correct alternative to the torrents of illegal Iranian exile pop from LA widely con- sumed inside Iran. At present, a wide variety of government-approved pop- ular music bearing a strong resemblance to contemporary Western styles, prerevolutionary musiqi-ye pop, and Los Angeles Iranian pop is sung by male vocalists and is also broadcast heavily on state television and radio. This mu- sic is subject to oversight by several permit-issuing boards that monitor lyr- ics, style, and other elements and have frequently prevented musicians from performing, recording, or disseminating their music. The combination of bureaucratic obstacles and the use of popular music as a “political football” by battling factions within the Iranian government has made producing mu- sic within offi cial channels challenging (Nooshin 2005b). This situation has led many musicians to make their music “underground” (zirzamin), per- forming in private spaces and circulating their music hand-to-hand or on- line, which allows them to circumvent governmental hurdles, but also means they cannot be broadcast on state-controlled radio or television and are therefore limited in the audiences they can reach (Nooshin 2005b, 2008).

While many younger musicians and a few lesser-known prerevolution- ary performers could work within the parameters of postrevolutionary Iran, the musiqi-ye pop celebrities of the 1960s and 1970s—many of whom were widely considered emblematic of the Pahlavi state’s now dismantled pro- grams of Westernization and secularization—were in a much more diffi - cult situation, since their risqué roles and performances and often scandal- ous personal lives were well known. As a result of fear of persecution and the practical impossibility of continuing to work in Iran, great numbers of the country’s celebrities and skilled industry personnel fl ed during the 1980s, eventually landing in Los Angeles, where they began their musical activities

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in exile. This generation of established musicians, composers, lyricists, and producers was joined by others who entered the entertainment fi eld after immigrating, and eventually, by younger 1.5 and second-generation Iranians. It is to their activities in exile that we now turn.

loc al and global iranian popul ar music in l a : transnational recordings, tours, and television

Los Angeles County is home to the most Iranians anywhere in the world outside of Iran. While Iranians lived in Southern California in large numbers prior to 1978, it was the revolution and the ensuing war with Iraq (1980 – 1988) that drove hundreds of thousands to fl ee the country. Many of the na- tion’s wealthy elite—including large numbers of those who were involved with the overturned Pahlavi government—landed in Los Angeles. Today, Iranians live in large numbers from San Diego to Ventura County, with es- pecially visible populations in the western Los Angeles neighborhoods of Westwood, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica, and throughout the towns lin- ing LA County’s San Fernando Valley. Shiʿite and Sunni Muslims, Jews, Christians, Bahaʾis, and Zoroastrians are all represented here, as are Iranians of Persian, Azeri Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish, and Arab ethnicity (Kelley, Friedlander, and Colby 1993; Bozorgmehr 1997).

While this diversity extends to political viewpoints as well, Iranians in Southern California, and in Los Angeles in particular, have a reputation for opposition to the current Iranian state and for keeping the fl ame of the Pahlavi era alive. Here, the fl ag of the Islamic Republic never fl ies: at lo- cal events, in Iranian establishments, and in the media produced in Los An- geles, it is nearly always the prerevolutionary fl ag bearing the lion, sword, and sun that is present, an enduring symbol for the refusal of many in this population to accept the Iranian government as their own. This continuity with the past is also manifest in the large number of businesses and organi- zations bearing the names of well-known and now-defunct establishments from Tehran in the 1970s (Adelkhah 2001).

Arts and entertainment are central to producing an Iranian identity dis- tinct from that promoted in the Islamic Republic. Much of this cultural pro- duction refl ects the secular values and Westernized aesthetics linked to the Pahlavi past. Cabaret Tehran, a posh supper club in the San Fernando Val- ley, is a popular spot where prerevolutionary star vocalists come to perform their classic songs for an almost exclusively Iranian audience. Working-class and upscale cabarets were important venues for public life in Tehran from the 1920s to 1979 (Fatemi 2005), but Cabaret Tehran would not fi t in today’s Iran, with its bans on alcohol consumption, mixed-sex social dance, and

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solo female vocalists and proscriptions on many prerevolutionary perform- ers. Instead, Cabaret Tehran is a remnant of the past that seems to high- light its difference with Iran. The Music Box, a small shop in Westwood well stocked with albums and fi lms from the 1950s to the 1970s, along with newer products of the LA music industry, is one of several stores that give local audiences access to prerevolutionary popular culture. A number of dance schools in the LA area teach urban and folk dance styles to classes of Iranian women and girls, who perform at parties and in cultural festivals. Taken with the ever-present sound of dance music at Iranian social events and the prev- alence of Iranian “club nights” (one-night parties), in which social dance, mixed-sex interaction, and alcohol consumption are the primary activities, the version of Iranian culture and sociality one can experience in Los Ange- les is very different from what is permitted and promoted in Iran.

But the Los Angeles version of Iranian culture is not limited to South- ern California, or even the United States in its geographical reach. Instead, it travels to the rest of the Iranian world through a variety of transnational mediated means, of which music, television, and the Internet are the most important. The San Fernando Valley is the seat of a thriving music and me- dia industry, with many magazine offi ces, music stores, record labels, and re- cording and television studios situated within a few miles of each other in strip malls and offi ce parks along Ventura Boulevard, the Valley’s main thor- oughfare. Music is central to LA’s Iranian culture industry, and Los Ange- les has been likened to a “Persian Motown” (Nafi cy 1993, 54), with between fi ve and ten record labels putting out dozens of albums and music videos ev- ery year since the early 1980s. These albums are sold in Iranian music and book shops and in Arab and Iranian groceries in cities around the world, and they are also widely available via bootlegging and smuggling within Iran (Adelkhah 1991). These recordings are readily accessible online through le- gitimate electronic music stores such as iTunes and on a plethora of illegal download sites that have a similar global reach.

Live performances are another important means for making LA popular musics available to transnational audiences. In Los Angeles, well-known per- formers play shows at the Shrine Auditorium and the Greek Theater, as well as in smaller venues like Cabaret Tehran, but successful LA stars also regu- larly embark on international tours. These tours take well-known perform- ers to cities across North America and Northern Europe with large Iranian populations, including Houston, Chicago, New York, Vancouver, Toronto, Amsterdam, Gothenburg, London, Cologne, and Goa. During the Christ- mas season, a large number of LA-based pop singers give annual concerts in hotel nightclubs in Las Vegas, when Iranian vacationers from across the United States take over the city. Concerts by exiled musicians are, of course,

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impossible within Iran, but annual music festivals in nearby Dubai featur- ing LA-based performers reportedly regularly attract audiences of thousands who fl y to the Emirates for the occasion.

Persian-language television provides many possibilities to access LA- produced pop music. The LA Iranian music industry was highly integrated with television throughout the 1980s (see Nafi cy 1993). Though their num- bers fl uctuate, as of 2009 there are between ten and fi fteen Iranian televi- sion stations that regularly program Los Angeles popular music, many of which are owned by Iranian exiles and are headquartered in Southern Cal- ifornia. On some channels, such as the Persian Music Channel (PMC, lo- cated in Dubai) or PEN (Persian Entertainment Network, located in Wood- land Hills, California), the programming is almost entirely music videos and commercials. Even on television stations that air other sorts of programs (health advice programs, news, or political discussions are all popular for- mats), music videos and music-related advertising and programming make up a large percentage of air time, and can include variety shows with musi- cal performances, interviews with singers, commercials for new albums and concert tours, and call-in shows hosted by singers themselves.11 Record la- bels and stations are often located in close physical proximity to one an- other; for instance, during my fi eldwork the television station Jam-e Jam and the record label Avang were on the same fl oor of a Ventura Boulevard offi ce building, while the record label Taraneh and the television station Omid-e Iran were located in the same industrial park.

As with the Iranian music industry, these television stations initially served the local LA Iranian community, but since the early 2000s many stations broadcast internationally via free-to-air satellite12 and online. Satellite dishes are illegal in Iran, where they have frequently been blamed for ushering in the “cultural invasion by the West” that governmental offi cials have referred to since the end of the war with Iraq (Kian 1995; Alikhah 2008).13 They are, however, widely available on the black market and prevalent in Iran, as well as in the diaspora. Likewise, many foreign and exile websites are blocked by state-implemented Web fi lters, but fi lter-breakers are also available within the country. Advertising on these satellite stations promotes products and services from urban diasporic hubs around the world, from Persian carpet stores in Houston, to legal services for emigration to Canada, to real estate in Dubai. Advice programs, music video request shows, and political discus- sion programs that use the call-in format also reveal this transnationality, as viewers identify themselves as dialing in from Shiraz, Muscat, Berlin, and San Francisco.

For generating audiences within Iran, satellite television station owners’ main business strategy is to give viewers access to what they cannot have on

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local state-run television stations. According to Kourosh Bibiyan, who with his father runs the Jam-e Jam satellite and cable television stations in the Los Angeles area, popular music was the primary product he believed his station and others in LA could provide Iranians inside the country. He explained this through a point-by-point comparison with what Iranian state television had on offer:

At the end of the day, music is the key because [the Iranian government] cannot compete [with those of] us [in LA]. They have a big budget for se- rials. They have all the access to sports. We are stealing the feed from them most of the time [and replaying it on our channel], but they have better ac- cess [to sports], and more money. For movies, okay, all the movies made in Persian are in Iran . . . The only thing we’ve got is music. (Interview with K. Bibiyan, May 2007)

Bibiyan acknowledged he enjoyed much of the post-1997 pop music and said that his station broadcast this government-approved music in addition to exile videos. But his perception was that LA pop’s appeal was not (only) at the level of sound, as he made clear elsewhere in our conversation: “We are not better than them [the IRI] except in music because they cannot have [Iranian exile pop singer] Andy with ten half-naked girls singing and danc- ing!” Audiovisual titillation is a marked attribute of many pop music vid- eos produced in the Iranian (and American) culture industries and is likely a draw for audiences inside and outside of the country, but it is not the only aspect that separates LA pop from its counterparts in Iran. Equally impor- tant is MPLA’s focus on the prerevolutionary past, which further consoli- dates forms of Iranian identity not sanctioned by the state.

preservation and c anonization of alternative histories in los angeles

Preservation and canonization of prerevolutionary music and media are a central function of the Los Angeles culture industries in which recordings and performance play central roles. Many music and media producers in Los Angeles believe that they are responsible for preserving for posterity Iranian music and culture that the revolution would have destroyed. This threat of destruction was quite literal in the case of recording-session mas- ters and fi lms that some smuggled out of the country during the early days of the revolution, when vigilante groups reportedly looted homes for cas- sette tapes. In the handful of Iranian music and video reproduction com- panies that sprang up in Los Angeles, these recordings were carefully pre-

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served and transferred to cassettes, and then were remastered for release on compact disc in the 1990s. While prerevolutionary popular musics were mostly illegal in postrevolutionary Iran, among exiles in Los Angeles and in Iranian migrant communities elsewhere, they were treasured remnants of their past and, as I learned from my interviews with music industry person- nel, remain some of the most profi table aspects of the Iranian music busi- ness. For Iranian migrants to Southern California, who are physically sepa- rated from their homelands and largely ideologically opposed to their home state’s postrevolutionary government, these musics allow sensory and emo- tional access to a homeland that, because of irrevocable transformation, is gone, but also frozen and repeatable via recorded media.

Many of these prerevolutionary sound recordings are released in “Best of . . .” collections. While these rereleases provide exile audiences contact with their past, they also provide a new script through which to compre- hend these preserved fragments by explicitly designating the collections as valuable. The grounds for this value can be mass popularity, as implied in the title of the collection 52 Melodies from the Most Popular Kucheh Bāzār Songs, or a suggestion of enduring signifi cance, as in The Golden Hits of Homeyra.14 As in any case of canonization, the collections claim to consti- tute those parts of Iranian culture worthy of preservation. While the rere- lease format and accompanying laudatory language are commonplace in US music markets as a way of boosting sales from old catalogs, in the Iranian market these take on additional valences tied to the revolutionary condem- nation of popular music, its creators, and the sentiments and activities to which its stars, styles, and imaginaries were thought to give rise. The collec- tions do not only manifest the preservationist instinct and search for conti- nuity seen among exile and diasporic cultures; they also represent a counter- discourse to the revolutionary revision of history that would exclude these singers and musicians from the Iranian past.

Covering prerevolutionary songs and song forms in updated arrange- ments is an extremely common practice on Iranian pop albums recorded in Los Angeles that contributes to their canonization. To name just a few ex- amples recorded in the 2000s, the singer Leila Foruhar covered the beloved prerevolutionary tasnif (light classical song) “Shab-e Mahtāb-e” (“Night of the Moonlight” by the composer Sheida) in a house music style, while an- other singer named Mansour has transformed the famous slow-tempo ro- mantic song “Marā Bebus” (“Kiss Me” by Gol-Naraghi) from a sad piece about separation (and including what many believed were political under- tones) into an optimistic song about the beginning of a new relationship. The prerevolutionary patriotic sorud “Ey Iran” (“Oh Iran” by Khaleqi), of- ten described as the unoffi cial Iranian national anthem, has probably been

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covered more in the diaspora than any other single piece. “Ey Iran” was fi rst a choral piece with orchestral accompaniment, but it has been recorded in a variety of styles from soft instrumentals on acoustic guitar (Babak Amini) to ballad (Andy) to techno (Kiki). These new arrangements often change the original spirit of the songs considerably through faster tempos, intensifi ed percussion, and other additions to make them palatable to younger genera- tions who seem to relate more to the dance pop format. This stylistic trans- lation may contribute new memories for younger generations, while also educating them (perhaps without their awareness) in Iranian popular music history. This is another way in which Iranian musiqi-ye pop—one of the key symbols of cultural degradation and depravity in revolutionary discourse— is claimed and elevated by Iranians in Los Angeles as a way of marking off their version of Iranian culture and history from that of the Islamic Repub- lic they left behind.

new popul ar music in los angeles: epitomizing qualities rejected in the revolution

Not all of the music produced in Los Angeles is from the prerevolutionary era; there are also hundreds of new songs recorded and released through the exile culture industries every year. The majority of the new music produced in LA is known as musiqi-ye pop, or musiqi-ye pop-e los ānjeles (MPLA). However, there are many similarities between prerevolutionary popular mu- sic and those new albums produced in Los Angeles. This sense of continuity is communicated most clearly through the large number of prerevolution- ary singers, composers, and lyricists—many of whom are now in their six- ties and seventies—who are still actively producing music in Los Angeles. As in its prerevolutionary iteration, the popular music produced in Los An- geles is oriented primarily toward songs rather than instrumental music, and solo singers with anonymous studio or live musicians rather than groups or ensembles. While much MPLA is devoted to nostalgic refl ections on the lost homeland (see Nafi cy 1993), most MPLA is dance music with uncomplicated lyrics that shows strong Western musical infl uences, leading its disparagers inside and outside of Iran to consider it both “Westoxifi ed” ( gharbzadeh) and mobtazal. In MPLA music videos, male and female singers wear the lat- est American and European fashions while groups of women are frequently on display, both conventions that comport with both contemporary West- ern music videos and Iranian pop visuals from the 1960s and 1970s. This sec- tion considers those qualities in Los Angeles productions that depart from postrevolutionary Iranian music and media guidelines.

MPLA continues the predilection for cultural borrowing and Western

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emulation that characterized musiqi-ye pop in the prerevolutionary era. In LA, the gentle cha-chas and disco infl uences of the Shah’s era have been re- placed over the years by a swirling mixture of contemporary global dance musics, including salsa, Hi-NRG, house, and trance combined with identi- fi ably Iranian musical instruments and samples and Persian lyrics. This hy- bridity is perhaps enhanced by increased contact with the world of musical styles available in Southern California. Throughout the 1980s and for most of the 1990s—before the Iranian state permitted the renewed production of popular music—the LA industry’s embrace of stylistic diversity and Western trends represented a vision of Iranian culture sharply contrasting with that offi cially permitted in the Islamic Republic. It was, after all, these Western elements of Iranian musiqi-ye pop and the political and historical context in which it emerged that made it simultaneously attractive to the Pahlavi state and—initially, at least—a pariah for the revolutionary government.

Much of the popular music produced in LA is fast-paced, upbeat dance music with light, simple lyrics on romantic themes. Many of these songs employ a mixture of the diverse non-Iranian contemporary musical styles mentioned above, Persian texts, and a narrow range of rhythmic patterns, mostly in a 6/8 meter derived from established Iranian musical styles such as motrebi (urban entertainment music), bandari (Persian Gulf music), and the reng, or dance-inspired instrumental pieces, that typically close perfor- mances of a dastgāh (a set of pieces similar to a suite) in Iranian art mu- sic. While dance rhythms became one of the most predominant features of MPLA, they were largely absent from music produced within Iran until the late 1990s because they were considered “sensually arousing” (Youssefzadeh 2000, 39). When combined with frankly amorous lyrics that often focus on the physical attributes of female objects of desire, MPLA dance songs pro- duce a sonic experience focused on sensuality that runs counter to the pious dispositions encouraged by Iranian state policy.

But LA pop songs do not only work at the level of sound; their treatment in music videos amplifi es their communicative power.15 A look at Armenian- Iranian MPLA singer Andranik Madadian’s song and video “Āreh Āreh” (“Yeah Yeah”) reveals these tendencies. Known simply as Andy, the singer is now in his fi fties and has been active in the Los Angeles music indus- try since the early 1980s. His music retains a youthful edge by incorporat- ing contemporary Western, Arabic, and Indian musical trends along with the aforementioned Iranian dance rhythms, and by sticking to uncompli- cated romantic lyrics. Following this pattern, “Āreh Āreh” has extremely simple lyrics (the chorus: “Yeah, yeah / He loves you / Every day and ev- ery night / He thinks of his beloved”16) accompanied by synthesizers and a continuous thumping beat. The video underscores the cultural hybridity

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and youthful sound by taking place in a quintessentially 1950s American set- ting of a diner, which is fi lled with attractive, fashionably attired, plausibly Iranian dark-haired young women.17 Andy appears in the restaurant and fl ips a coin into the air that lands precisely in a jukebox that begins playing his song. This brings on a stampede of even more young women who suddenly appear outside the diner, screaming and beating on the windows in a man- ner that recalls the hysterical crowds of teenage girls who swooned over El- vis during his early years. The women rush into the restaurant and dance to the song as they lip-sync the song’s chorus. Throughout the video, the cam- era cuts between shots of Andy in wraparound mirrored sunglasses, white T-shirt, and varsity letterman’s jacket as he dances among the women, and close-ups of the smiling women’s faces and their scantily clad, shimmying hips and posteriors. These shots are interspersed with scenes of the diner’s parking lot, where an all-female dance corps of young women and girls ex- pertly performs a coordinated choreography blending American video dance and Iranian dance styles.18

How should one evaluate this example in light of MPLA musicians’ of- ten oppositional stance toward the IRI? On the one hand, Andy’s video for “Āreh Āreh” epitomizes the combination of cultural hybridity and un- checked sensuality that was targeted in the revolutionary revision of Ira- nian culture. Further, the video relentlessly focuses on uncovered, sexual- ized female bodies and seems designed to put as many women on display as possible—every corner of the diner and parking lot is absolutely packed with them, while Andy is the only male present throughout the video. Given the fact that some government offi cials and clerics have espoused the no- tion that women’s veiling can act as a counter to “cultural invasion by the West” (cf. Ayatollah Azari-Qomi in Mir-Hosseini [1999]) and long-standing Iranian clerical attacks on dance and dancers (Stellar, this volume), Andy’s video could be taken as suggesting the inverse position: it revels in the de- light of unbridled female sexuality inspired by a Westernized soundtrack in an American diner.

At the same time, the combination of male musicians and a silent, desir- ing female dance corps is a tried and true formula in American music vid- eos, where women are frequently used as “props” to emphasize the sexual desirability of the male vocalist (Andsager 2006). The formula’s ubiquity in American videos from rock to hip-hop is evidence of its fi nancial suc- cess, and Andy has also employed female dance corps repeatedly in his other videos.19 Attempting to decipher whether Andy adopts this convention out of a desire to emulate American fashions, for monetary gain, or to under- mine the IRI’s strictures on women and culture (or all three) points to the ambiguity of statements made through such aesthetic choices: they cannot

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be simply read as “resistant,” but neither are they purely innocent. How- ever, no matter the intentions, two facts remain important: fi rst, as in Amer- ica, viewers in Iran seem to be attracted to videos in this format (or at least LA cultural producers believe this to be the case—recall Kourosh Bibiyan’s statement on Andy, above); and second, Iranian policy-makers have consid- ered such videos an affront to the country’s territorial sovereignty and have dealt harshly with perpetrators. We will turn to the consequences of exile cultural production shortly, but fi rst, we must consider a far less ambiguous category of exile communication: songs that deal directly with topics sensi- tive to the Iranian state.

finding a voice through mpl a : female singers, women’s issues, and opposition to the state

In MPLA, women do not only appear as sexual objects; they are also politi- cal subjects who sometimes take positions in song that can be diffi cult to as- sume publicly within Iran. Prior to migration, Iranian poets, composers, and professional entertainers working in both high and low cultural forms had also crafted songs and performance pieces that addressed political events and cultural issues (Chehabi 2000; Fatemi 2005), but such topics appeared only occasionally in the mass-mediated, state-supported popular music of the 1960s and 1970s. While romantic love is the primary focus of MPLA song texts, a number of Los Angeles– based artists have treated song and video as public forums in which they make critical statements about the Iranian state at a safe distance from any physical consequences. Given the global scope of MPLA, and particularly its penetration into Iran, these songs are also a means for sharing these views with compatriots, and, in their medi- ated transnational forms, they have the potential to overcome government attempts to monitor expression within the country.

One of many areas in which MPLA musicians have explicitly countered the state is regarding female singers and women’s rights. Men outnumber women in every segment of the LA Iranian music industry, but women are successful and well known in MPLA especially as vocalists and lyricists. The most famous Iranian pop vocalist in both the prerevolutionary era and to- day is Googoosh, the diva of Iranian pop who remained in the country un- til 2000, when she moved to Toronto and then to Los Angeles and restarted her career in exile to worldwide acclaim. With twenty-odd other female singers in Los Angeles recording albums and videos, performing for mixed- sex audiences, and almost never wearing veils, Googoosh’s and other LA- based female vocalists’ activities are highly visible (and audible) examples of noncompliance with postrevolutionary law. Thus, women in MPLA sing-

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ing otherwise innocuous love songs are something like Andy’s female dance corps: they appear to be making a statement about Iranian laws without ut- tering a (critical) word. But some male and female vocalists and lyricists have made their sentiments obvious through songs that deal with gender is- sues, often in tandem with criticisms of other cultural restrictions in post- revolutionary Iran.

One such issue is the Iranian state policy of compulsory veiling, which has been addressed a number of times in MPLA songs in both direct and in- direct fashion. In Iranian Islamic revolutionary thought, female veiling was conceptualized not only as a means of complying with Islamic practices, but of releasing women from the tyranny of Western cultural imperialism and empowering them to enter public spaces unencumbered by the male sexual gaze.20 However, among many non-Muslim and secular Iranians, of whom there are many in Los Angeles and especially within the culture industries, compulsory veiling is often viewed as Islam’s or the Iranian state’s sanction of women’s oppression or as a traditional cultural vestige to be cast aside by “modern” (read Westernized) women. When veiling is addressed in MPLA, it is usually to criticize it.

One song, called “Lady Sun” (“Khorshid Khānum”), sung by the female vocal trio Silhouettt is an example that exploits the common Iranian charac- terization of the sun as female.21 Using poetic metaphor in an upbeat pop song, the young vocalists sing the following opening line in three-part har- mony, “Lady Sun, come out again, let fall your veil (hejāb) of clouds and come into the middle of the sky,” repeating it throughout the piece. Some lines later, the notion of women as captive emerges as one of the vocalists asks Lady Sun to “come out of [her] cage.”22 Another song, by the male vo- calist Ebi, also called “Khorshid Khānum,” makes use of the same sun-as- woman poetic formula, but in a more direct manner: “Lady Sun doesn’t want a black scarf.”

A more direct approach to women’s issues is exemplifi ed in Googoosh’s song “Oh People, I’m Dying” (“Āy Mardom Mordam”), with lyrics by male lyricist Shahyar Ghanbari.23 This song is crystal clear in its condemna- tion of women’s suffering at the hands of men, as the song’s chorus makes plain:

Oh people, I’m dying I’m disappointed again I’m dying because of these cowardly men Not only me, but all women, have suffered

The lyrics paint a grim picture of Iranian women’s lives; in one line, veiled women are portrayed as being wrapped “in twisted felt, rotting without air,”

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a far cry indeed from the emancipatory depiction of veiling in revolutionary rhetoric and by many pious Muslim women. Elsewhere in the song, the lyr- ics compare women’s bodies to “white sofreh” (a cloth laid on the ground upon which meals are served) that “burns where the belt buckle hit,” link- ing two objects associated with the domestic sphere to depictions of female subservience and physical abuse.

This outspokenness stretches back to Googoosh’s fi rst songs after she emerged from Iran in the early 2000s. This is most evident in “Zartosht” (“Zoroaster”), named for the founder of Zoroastrianism, the dominant re- ligion in Iran prior to the introduction of Islam, and also the name of her fi rst album since the revolution. At the song’s opening, Googoosh sings, “If I sing it is a crime, if I don’t sing it is a crime,” succinctly communicat- ing her disagreement with Iranian policy on musical expression and its per- sonal challenges for her, a professional vocalist who is compelled to sing by her own desire and perhaps by a sense of responsibility. The following lines further elaborate Googoosh’s dispute by calling on an ancient past imagined to be hospitable to music:

In the body of this good, green kingdom Which is older than history When could singing have become a sin When Zoroaster planted this earth with hymns? 24

Here the lyrics’ assertion of the importance of hymnody in the Zoroastrian religion presents a contrast to the comparatively negative treatment of mu- sicians and music in the Iranian state’s version of Islam. This declaration of the ongoing legitimacy of Iran’s Zoroastrian lineage and the attitudes to- ward music supposedly contained therein becomes a means of undermin- ing the authority of the Islamic texts, practices, and interpreters setting pol- icy in Iran. The fact that Zoroastrians presently make up only a tiny fraction of Iran’s population does not diminish the signifi cance of this association, which is not in any case related to actual Zoroastrians but to the idea of a deeply rooted Iranian identity and culture that stretches back thousands of years and, in its lastingness, also transcends the present. This is not a new strategy by any means; the symbolic invocation of Iran’s pre-Islamic past was a long-standing tactic for disassociating Iran from Islam (and partic- ularly clerical political infl uence) throughout the Pahlavi period, which ex- tends throughout Iranian modernity (Tavakoli-Targhi 2001) and back even further, to the poet Ferdowsi’s celebrated and highly infl uential Iranian epic the “Shāhnāmeh” (“Book of Kings,” AD 1010), which chronicles ancient Iran’s heroes, kings, and cultures prior to Islam.25 This symbolic identifi ca- tion resembles Thomas Solomon’s (this volume) description of contempo-

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rary Turkish youth’s selective appropriation of Muslim signifi ers in their at- tempts to carve out a nonsecular identity in their Berlin- and Istanbul-based hip-hop productions, but instead grows out of Iranian exile musicians’ de- sires to counter the Islamicization of Iranian national identity. In exile, the long-standing trope of pre-Islamic Iranian authenticity and national culture is employed to counter the Islamic state on yet another level.

As we see, MPLA singers have at times adopted stances on Iranian women and cultural and religious identity that compete with those projected in Ira- nian state media and policy. This activity has been ongoing since the in- ception of the LA culture industries and extends to new political issues as they arise. Most recently, musicians in Los Angeles have continued this role by releasing a number of songs addressing the violence following the con- tested reelection of President Mahmood Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009, with contributions coming from Googoosh, Andy, and many others.26 Mea- suring the reception and impact of these songs within the United States is diffi cult, but one can point to their frequent airings on satellite television and numerous page views on websites like YouTube, where these videos are also available, for some idea of their reach. But far more challenging—and far more charged—is the task of determining the effects of these MPLA in Iran, where so many musicians and media producers in Los Angeles insist they are infl uential and revered. It is to this question that we now turn.

evaluating the l a cultural industries’ transnational reach

Despite its best efforts, the Iranian state has never had a complete monop- oly over its citizens’ media consumption. Access to nonapproved media has been especially documented among upper- and middle-class secular, urban youth (cf. Rouhani 2001; Basmenji 2005; Alikhah 2008; Mahdavi 2009), and consuming these media is frequently portrayed as an act of dissent against the state. Shahram Khosravi, whose research also focused primarily on these privileged populations, has asserted the importance of unoffi cial media for Iranian youth in this way:

How young Tehranis imagine themselves and their nation is infl uenced by their access to the media. While ignoring entirely Iranian state media prod- ucts, they are avid consumers of alternative media—satellite TV channels and radio programs, the Internet, and video—in which they can fi nd alter- native representations of what it means to be Iranian. (2008, 173– 174)

Some of these media, such as blogs, websites, and underground music, are produced inside the country outside of offi cial channels and suggest the

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presence of a vibrant, varied public sphere with both local and transnational components.27 But Khosravi goes on to suggest that “the popular culture industry in the diaspora” is paramount in providing those “alternative repre- sentations” of Iranian-ness.

My own experiences in Iran in 1997, 2000, and 2004 among similar ur- ban populations revealed myriad instances of Los Angeles cultural indus- tries’ penetration into the country, especially through popular music. I wit- nessed MPLA recordings, along with other Western and Arabic pop music brought in from abroad, being played in taxicabs, in private cars, and at parties in homes. Home television sets were often tuned to Persian Enter- tainment Network and Persian Music Channel, both satellite stations that play mostly music videos from LA. These were often left on all day like a radio, receiving the latest emanations from exiles abroad. In one home without a satellite dish, I observed residents playing a purchased bootlegged VCD of a satellite television feed that featured exile and Western music vid- eos. Over the course of my visits, MPLA was an unremarkable part of daily life, an entertainment option that happened to be slightly more diffi cult to obtain than some others, but which was enjoyed along with government- approved pop, traditional musics, and “underground” MP3s without any apparent moral or political controversy. However, as Khosrokhavar (2007) has demonstrated, listening to MPLA or other forms of music (approved or not) is not so simple for pious residents of the religious city of Qom, who sometimes struggle to justify their enjoyment. All the same, Khosrokhavar shows that those observant Muslims he interviewed often reject the notion that “Los Angeles music is banned by religion,” as some conservative cler- ics assert (2007, 461), and develop their own interpretations of appropriate behavior. As he suggests, this personal decision-making around music—an area of culture that many conservative clerics have forbidden even despite governmental support—may contribute to the gradual secularization of Ira- nian society (ibid.).

Besides accounts of individual reception in Iran, perhaps the greatest evi- dence for MPLA’s impact is state responses to MPLA and the fi gures associ- ated with it. The most notable of these reactions was the legalization of pop- ular music after 1997, which was intended to counter the fl ow of exile and Western music into the country by providing a local, government- approved alternative. These approved singers have not infrequently competed with LA exiles by borrowing melodies from prerevolutionary or MPLA songs and changing their lyrics to meet oversight board approval and to further dis- tance them from the original versions. Some singers even possess voices that strongly resemble those of popular exiled singers who now work through LA-based music companies. For instance, the Iran-based singer Khashyar Etemadi sounds remarkably like the prerevolutionary exiled icon Dariush,

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Nader Meschi’s voice resembles that of the LA-based singer Mansour, and Mohsen Chavoshi is incredibly similar to prerevolutionary vocalist Siavash Gomeishi. Such moves have the effect of denying the legitimacy of MPLA while tacitly acknowledging—and attempting to capitalize on—its popular- ity. The government’s adoption of pop music also undermines its subversive potential and is an attempt to remove its secularist associations (Nooshin 2005a).

MPLA musicians I spoke with were aware of their infl uence in Iran and sometimes pointed to their impact on offi cially approved pop as an example of, rather than a challenge to, their popularity there. Again and again I was told by well-known vocalists—many of whom had begun their careers be- fore the revolution—that they regularly received e-mails and even telephone calls from fans within Iran who emphasized how important exiled musicians were to Iranians inside the country. In their efforts to maintain and grow these connections, many MPLA singers reach out to audiences in Iran by af- fi rming in interviews in transnational Iranian media that they “never forget those in Iran,” by using lyrics written by Iranians within the country in their songs in order to “give them a voice,” and by producing songs that refer to Iranian current events. As suggested in this chapter’s introduction, songs fo- cusing on the homeland also serve an important function for diasporic au- diences, who often seek out connections to Iran and to different represen- tations of Iranian culture than those they fi nd projected in either offi cial Iranian or Western media. These music and media may thus do double ser- vice, fi rst by appealing to diasporic audiences who can purchase recordings and concert tickets and thereby support the LA industry, and second by at- tracting Iran-based audiences, from whom LA musicians receive more in- tangible—but still signifi cant—rewards.28

Ironically, whether or not MPLA musicians intend their productions to reach Iran or wish to take a stand on Iranian issues, their participation in ex- ile cultural industries opens them up to potentially serious consequences that underscore the lingering subversive potential of MPLA. This is evi- denced in the state’s sharp response toward those LA-based musicians and fi gures that have returned to Iran for a visit. The majority of Iranian musi- cians and media personnel working in the Southern California Iranian cul- ture industries do not travel back to Iran, because they fear repercussions, especially if they are well known. These fears are not unfounded, as Babak Amini, a young guitarist and composer who led Googoosh’s band on her fi rst tour and composed songs for her fi rst album, learned when he returned after their tour. On his fi rst and only visit back to Iran, he was questioned for several days about his relationship to Googoosh and his activities outside of the country. Ultimately, Amini was fi ned, held in Iran for six months, and

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forced to sign a statement promising never to work with Googoosh again. A similar incident was the arrest and imprisonment of Iranian-American aero- bics instructor and dancer Mohammad Khordadian, who was charged with propagating corruption via his dance and exercise videos that had been cir- culating back into Iran from Los Angeles (Papan-Matin 2009). Khordadian has protested that he was unaware of the restrictions on dance in Iran and that, as with Babak Amini, his arrest came as a complete surprise to him. These consequences were not surprising, apparently, to the passengers on Amini’s fl ight, who, he said, warned him that he should expect problems en- tering the country. These performers’ claims to naïveté complicate the no- tion that exile cultural producers necessarily intend to undermine IRI media, but at the same time, since the Iranian government has sometimes consid- ered those involved in LA media hostile to its sovereignty, they are nonethe- less implicated in this alleged transgression.

But MPLA and its performers are not always taken so seriously in Iran, even in media approved by government oversight boards. A 2005 Iranian co- medic feature fi lm called MAXX parodied exiled pop musicians through the story of a fi ctional cabaret singer named Maxx who has been living in Los Angeles since the revolution.29 In the fi lm, Maxx, a ponytailed New Ager given to outlandish outfi ts, mistakenly receives a letter of invitation for a classical musician and returns to Iran in the artist’s place to receive a warm welcome by government offi cials. Maxx’s subterfuge slowly becomes appar- ent through his performances of prerevolutionary songs and LA-style dance pop and his use of American-slang-infl ected Persian that, together, com- municate his complete unawareness of cultural shifts in postrevolutionary Iran. In this way, the fi lm pokes fun at exile musicians (and diasporic Irani- ans more generally) who are nostalgically focused on Iran but are not at all familiar with life in the Islamic Republic.

At one level, MAXX appears to be an acknowledgment of exile musi- cians’ illegal penetration into Iran, which can be recognized in the state’s ap- proval of a fi lm in which exiles are ridiculed. On another level, however, the fi lm also levels implicit criticism at the government’s sensitivity to exile mu- sic and musicians by portraying Maxx as utterly harmless. While some char- acters fi nd Maxx’s performances offensive and the story ends with the singer being ejected from the country by an intelligence offi cer, those characters closest to Maxx fi nd his personality, many foibles, and sincere love for Iran amusing and even admirable. Perhaps even more provocatively, throughout the fi lm Maxx’s audiences are shown knowingly demonstrating their enjoy- ment of his music, smiling and shyly sketching the outlines of Iranian dance movements with their bodies to the beats of his undeniably mobtazal musi- cal numbers. The fi lm seems to ask, what is so threatening about this hap-

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less lounge singer and his pop songs? And what is so wrong with our enjoy- ing them?

conclusion

Evaluating the importance of alternative media for youth in Iran, Khosravi asserts that “[f ]or many Iranians the ‘authentic’ Iran comes, ironically, from Los Angeles” (2008, 174). This may be true for some audience members, but as the examples above show, responses to exile popular music within Iran are diverse and often contradictory. Rather than attributing authentic- ity to exile cultural producers, the Iranian state, or any other group, I have tried to show here that producers of MPLA are expressing multiple iden- tities, viewpoints, and practices that extend beyond those represented in state-supported culture and media. These include assertions of the endur- ing relevance of both ancient and prerevolutionary periods of Iranian his- tory, in which Islam is imagined to have played a diminished or non existent role in Iran and in which music is presented as having been a valued part of Iranian culture. The pleasures of dance, sexuality, and cultural appropriation are also on display in MPLA music and video in ways that depart from the moral dispositions and cultural attitudes that have been promoted by the Islamic state. Taken together, the ways MPLA engages gender, sexuality, involvement with the West, and Iranians’ complicated relationship to their own history and culture do not make it more authentic, but rather allow it to serve as an alternative to state visions of Iran.

MPLA’s focus on the homeland has the possibility of serving both dia- sporic Iranians and Iranians within the country in search of expanding their aesthetic and expressive horizons beyond what is available to them in ei- ther offi cial Iranian or Western media. While undeniably constrained by eco- nomic pressures and exiles’ own internal politics and predilections, MPLA also contributes to a transnational, multimedia alternative public in which criticisms of the Iranian state and of Iranian culture more generally can be aired within a readily accessible, yet politically and morally disputed, popu- lar musical form. Whether LA cultural producers’ foremost intentions are to counter the IRI through these statements and aesthetic choices or whether these themes emerge as a result of primarily commercial or artistic impulses is less the issue than the fact that by virtue of their participation in this pub- lic, MPLA and its producers ultimately become implicated in struggles over Iranian cultural and national sovereignty. That this music has produced a contest of legitimacy and power between exiles and state actors speaks to the importance of the issues Iranian popular music engages and to its infl u- ence, which, while ambiguous, is also undeniable. As our understandings

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of the forms and activities constituting emergent publics extend to include cultural production and transnational media (cf. Warner 2002; Hirschkind 2006; Fraser 2007; Wedeen 2008), popular music should also occupy our at- tention.30 And as Iranians on both sides of the border debate the shape and contents of their national identities and the arc of their future, MPLA will likely continue to play an important role.

notes

Research for this chapter was supported by grants from Columbia University and PEO Sisterhood International. I would like to extend my thanks to Karin van Nieuwkerk and the two reviewers for the University of Texas Press for their helpful suggestions. Sev- eral colleagues and friends also generously provided me with feedback on this paper, es- pecially Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aaron Fox, Chris Washburne, Sandhya Shukla, Ty- ler Bickford, Morgan Luker, Ida Meftahi, Anna Stirr, and Lauren Ninoshvilli. Special thanks to Mohammad Hemmasi. My transliteration approximates spoken Persian.

1. Lyrics and music by Hassan Shamaizadeh. Discographic information appears in the discography.

2. Zāhed is also sometimes translated as pious or ascetic. 3. For more on the relationship of music, place, and emplacement, see Feld and Basso

(1996); Leyshon, Matless, and Revill (1998); and Diehl (2002). 4. Los ānjelesi and musiqi-ye los ānjelesi are terms also sometimes used to refer to this

music in Iran, but are not generally employed by LA-based musicians themselves. Some- times the borrowed muzik is used in place of the Persian musiqi. MPLA is an abbrevia- tion I derived for convenience. It is not a term used by Iranians in everyday speech.

5. Khiabany calls the state Iran’s “dominant media capitalist” (2007, 487) and asserts that “[b]y any standard and any defi nition it is hard to suggest that the press in Iran is distinctly located outside the realm of the state” (2008, 31).

6. See Abrahamian (2008, Chapter 6) for a succinct overview of these changes. 7. Vezārat-e farhang va ershād-e eslāmi, often referred to simply as Ershād. 8. Lois Ibsen al-Faruqi (1985) has described a number of sources and rationales sup-

porting the general permissibility of certain aural forms among Muslims, such as un- accompanied religious chants, which are not musiqi, versus the impermissibility of in- strumental music or sung poetry, which are generally considered musiqi. However, the question of whether a “musical” form is or is not musiqi does not solve the issue of its ul- timate legitimacy; in practice as well as in jurisprudence, delineation of halāl (permissi- ble) from makruh (disfavored, disapproved) sonic arts varies widely between time peri- ods, locations, and interpretive communities.

9. Iranian intellectual Jalal Al Ahmad popularized the term gharbzadegi, which is translated variously as “Westoxifi cation,” “Occidentosis,” and “Plagued by the West,” in an infl uential essay written in the 1960s (Al Ahmad 1982). This eventually became a key term in Iranian revolutionary discourse.

10. The sorud, or “march-hymn,” is not itself a postrevolutionary genre, however; it was developed in the mid-twentieth century and often featured texts celebrating the sec- ular Persian-centric nationalism espoused by the Pahlavi monarchs. See Chehabi (1999) for a detailed history of the prerevolutionary national sorud, or sorud-e melli.

11. The Los Angeles– based Iranian pop stars Dariush and Shahbal Shabpareh both

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had television shows on the Reseda-based television station Omid-e Iran (“Hope of Iran”) in 2007.

12. Free to air means that no subscription service is needed to access the channels—a dish pointed toward the correct coordinates will open viewers up to an array of Iranian- owned and -oriented channels, as well as to others from Europe and the Middle East. Alikhah (2008) counted thirty-seven such stations available in Iran.

13. “Cultural invasion by the West” (tahājom-e farhangi-e gharb) is a slogan that re- fers to Western plots to overtake Iran by cultural means.

14. 52 Tarāneh az Mardomitarin Āhang-hā Kucheh Bāzār and Āhang-hā Talāi Homeirā, both on the Southern California– based label Taraneh Records. Homeyra was a beloved female vocalist who specialized in pop and light classical songs.

15. For more on LA Iranian music videos, see Nafi cy 2002. 16. Lyrics by Paksima Zakipour and music by Mohammad Moghaddam. On Plati-

num, 2004. As Persian pronouns are genderless, these lyrics could also be interpreted in the feminine.

17. Many women who appear in Iranian music videos are not in fact Iranian. For an interesting reading, see Nafi cy 1993, 180– 181.

18. For a description of Iranian “solo improvised dance” as performed in Iranian Southern California, see Shay (1999).

19. See also Andy’s videos for the songs “Che Khoshgel Shodi Emshab” (“How Pretty You Are Tonight”) and “Khoshgelā Bāyad Beraqseh” (“The Pretty Ones Must Dance”).

20. See Moghissi 1994 on Ayatollah Motahari and the intellectual Ali Shari’ati, whom she credits with delineating hejāb as central to revolutionary ideology.

21. Silhouettt is spelled with three T’s to represent the three vocalists. 22. Lyrics by Homa Mir Afshar and music by Farzin Farhadi. 23. Music by Mehrdad. 24. Lyrics by Nosrat Farzaneh and music by Babak Amini. 25. See Chehabi 1999 for texts of patriotic art songs and anthems from the early and

mid-twentieth century that also glorify pre-Islamic Iran. 26. For instance, see Googoosh’s song “Man Hamun Iran-am” (“I Am That Very

Iran,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBSrYEwN44, and Andy’s 2009 perfor- mance of the 1961 hit American song “Stand By Me” with Jon Bon Jovi, http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=RASKaZFZtS8.

27. Some of these alternative media are radio (e.g., Voice of America, BBC Persian, and Radio Zamaneh), websites, and satellite television stations produced and funded by Western governments and staffed by Iranian journalists and media producers, many of whom were well known in Iran prior to emigration. Music also plays an important role in these media outlets. This is a very interesting area of Iranian cultural production that should be investigated further.

28. Several record label owners in Los Angeles told me that they had accepted that they couldn’t receive any profi ts from sales in Iran, though “that is where our biggest au- dience is,” as one put it. On the other hand, several LA musicians I spoke with suspected that industry personnel were profi ting from sales in Iran and being dishonest about it. More research is necessary to confi rm either suggestion.

29. MAXX, directed by Saman Moghaddam, 2005. 30. See Gautier (2006) for another take on the aural public sphere as constituted by

Latin American popular musics.

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discogr aphy

All titles are US pressings unless otherwise noted.

Ebi. 2000. “Khorshid Khānum” (“Lady Sun”). Khorshid Khānum. Avang Records [CD]. 52 Tarāneh Mardomitarin Āhang-hā Kucheh o Bāzār (52 of the Most Popular Songs of the

Street and Bazaar). 2001. Taraneh Records [CD]. 40 Golden Hits of Homeyra. 2000. Taraneh Records [CD]. Foruhar, Leila. 2000. “Shab-e Mahtāb-e” (“Night of Moonlight”). Tasvir (Image). Cal-

tex Records [CD]. Googoosh. 2001. Zartosht (Zoroaster). Label unknown, produced in Canada [CD]. ———. 2005. “Āy Mardom Mordam” (“Oh Men, I’m Dying”). Manifest. MZM Rec-

ords [CD]. Kiki. 2002. “Ey Iran” (“Oh Iran”). Persiatronica. Pars Video [CD]. Madadian, Andy (Andranik). 1998. “Ey Iran.” Jādeh-ye Abrisham (Silk Road). Taraneh En-

terprises [CD]. ———. 2004. “Āreh, Āreh” (“Yeah, Yeah”). Platinum. Caltex Records [CD]. Mansour. 2005. “Marā Bebus” (“Kiss Me”). Farāri (Escapee). Taraneh Enterprises [CD]. Shamaizadeh, Hassan. 2002. “Be To Che” (“None of Your Business”). Miss. Caltex Rec-

ords [CD]. Silhouettt. 1995. “Khorshid Khānum” (“Lady Sun”). Āb, Ātash va Khāk (Water, Fire, and

Earth). Caltex Records [CD].

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