In a 1988 television interview on one of Southern California’s Iranian channels, host Nader Rafiee sits with Shahram Shabpareh and Sattar, two prominent Iranian singers, as they are forced to hear and respond to video-recorded comments from viewers critiquing their work.Footnote ¹ The criticisms run along familiar lines: music should be committed and socially responsible, reflecting political and social upheaval and pulling society forward with it; however, today it has become superficial, revolving more around momentary pleasure and money, and is detached from social realities. I watched this interview on YouTube roughly 40 years later, yet those expectations feel so familiar that the conversation could have been recorded today. To varying degrees, Iranian artists (singers) are still often expected to produce socio-political works. On the flip side, just as Shahram Shabpareh and Sattar did in that interview, artists must respond and convince the public, arguing that if they were to sing politically, the audience would not listen to their work or attend their concerts, and that for survival and making a living, they need the audience’s money, which is provided through the very songs the audience ostensibly criticizes. Amidst these discussions, Sattar responds to one such critique by stating that people do not like songs like “Khaak” and no one requests its performance. “Khaak” is precisely one of the tracks compiled on Tehrangeles Vice, a song shaped by themes of exile, displacement, political disillusionment, and emotional exhaustion, placed alongside other recordings that were similarly under-requested, not especially popular, and, in some cases, unknown. Yet, since only “Khaak”—and, more implicitly, “Man va Tou”—engage political themes, another logic seems to bind these selections in this compilation together.

Tehrangeles Vice is a 12-track collection drawn from the early years of the Iranian diaspora music industry in Southern California—an industry that, during the years when the production and distribution of pop music were banned in post-revolutionary Iran, served as the primary source of popular sound for Iranians at home and in the diaspora. These recordings have now aged to the point where they can be approached with a curatorial and cultural-heritage perspective. Numerous compilations of Los Angelesi Iranian pop have appeared before, but they have typically gathered greatest hits or assembled dance-oriented collections built around fast tempos and the familiar 6/8 rhythm (shesh-o-hasht). Tehrangeles Vice deliberately includes only one 6/8 track: “Nazanin,” performed by Susan Roshan, and composed by Navid Nahvi, with lyrics by Jaklin Derderian Munns. The album’s executive producer, Zachary Asdourian, acknowledges that a large portion of Tehrangeles output consisted of “cheap” and “repetitive” songs, the very kind likely targeted in the interview mentioned earlier. Yet his aim here is to demonstrate that Los Angelesi music was much more varied than being just upbeat 6/8 tracks. By selecting what he calls “deep cuts,” he turns towards creative and innovative works shaped by the technical resources of American studios, engineers, and production environments of the 1970s and 1980s, challenging the conventional perception of Los Angelesi pop music.

The tracks themselves bear this out with striking consistency. Shahrokh’s “Man va Tou” unfolds through the interplay of Ardeshir Farah’s electric guitar and a remarkably forceful bass line by Vigen Davoudi. The arrangement also features string lines with unmistakably Iranian melodies, set against a dark, almost ominous disco backdrop. The track’s sonic density mirrors its thematic weight, acting as a brooding metaphor for the breakdown of society and a call to solidarity. Shahram Shabpareh and Shohreh Solati’s “Ghesmat,” meanwhile, deploys a brass section alongside drumming by Walfredo Reyes Jr., known for his work with Santana, producing a heat and energy entirely comparable to the global disco-Latin hits of that decade; the lyrics, written by Jaklin Derderian Munns, add a further layer of cultural resonance by drawing on familiar tropes of Persian popular song—unspoken love, regret, and ghesmat (fate)—thereby contrasting the track’s exuberant disco-Latin sound with a narrative of emotional restraint and romantic loss. Aldoush’s “Vay Az In Del” takes a different path altogether, driven by electric guitar, arpeggiated ostinato, a powerful saxophone, and a rock atmosphere. The track is a reinterpretation of a song by the pre-revolutionary rock group Ojubeha, whose original carried a compound rhythm; Aldoush rearranged this into a simple rhythm, and the result is one of the collection’s most viscerally immediate moments.

The album’s name is inspired by the 1980s crime series Miami Vice. As highlighted in the producer’s note, just as the show “had a dynamic impact on sonic, visual and cultural trends in the United States and around the world,” Tehrangeles media created a similar cultural shockwave. The word “vice” cleverly nods to the forbidden and corrupt nature of this music from the perspective of the Islamic government—music that was simultaneously dangerous and yet highly popular and seductive. The album’s cover design and graphics are also striking. According to the liner notes, the artwork is inspired by Patrick Nagel’s 1984 lithograph Couple with Yellow Sportscar but features modifications such as “exchanging the skyline of New York with that of Santa Monica” and changing the car model. The historical accuracy in designing the city skyline, where “reference photos were taken from a real-life vantage point,” is notable. The album’s packaging (issued on vinyl) includes images and scans of the original cassette covers from that era, some of which reached Asdourian with difficulty, traveling by bus from Tehran to Armenia before arriving in his hands. While the Persian typography on the cover and inside the album could have been executed with greater care, the overall visual presentation is eye-catching. Furthermore, providing detailed production credits about these songs—such as the composer, arranger, musicians, sound engineers, studios, and so forth—is invaluable for tracks that were rarely consumed with adequate information, leaving the people behind their creation largely unknown. The album further includes an extensive liner note of more than 20 pages by Dr. Farzaneh Hemmasi, an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Toronto and the author of a book and numerous articles in this field. Hemmasi’s essay far exceeds the scope of a conventional album booklet, and its value lies in identification and documentation, addressing a music about which most listeners know little beyond the names of the singers. This contextualizing writing is in a tone that is academically precise yet fluid and engaging, and maps out a complete ecology of Iranian pop music, addressing multiple topics, including the brief history of entertainment music in Iran, the impact of the Islamic Revolution, and the cassette tape as both a revolutionary medium (in circulating Khomeini’s speeches) and a tool to bypass the borders of the Islamic Republic and resist musical censorship. Furthermore, Hemmasi discusses the pivotal role of Armenians in shaping modern Iranian music both before and after the revolution, inside Iran and in diasporic communities, as well as this music’s coexistence with the American industry. She also highlights crucial behind-the-scene figures who built the skeleton of Tehrangeles music but whose names are less frequently heard among the public, such as Farokh Elton Ahi and Ardeshir Farah.

This compilation is released by Discotchari, a record label operated by Zachary Asdourian and Anaïs Gyulbudaghyan with the goal of promoting music produced by Armenians, both in the diaspora and in the homeland. As executive producer, Asdourian has curated this collection from a unique positionality and multifaceted identity. An Armenian raised in California, with family roots in Pahlavi-era Iran, he has never lived in Iran, nor does he speak Persian. Yet his connection to this music goes beyond language or nostalgia. Through the “shared experience of exile,” Asdourian sees an emotional and historical bond between the history of his Armenian ancestors’ displacement and the forced migration of Iranian artists to Los Angeles post-1979. He approaches this archive astutely to highlight the historical role of Armenians as engaging in “cultural stewardship” through preserving and cultivating Iranian pop music in exile.

The album invites listeners to engage with Tehrangeles music not merely as nostalgia or memory in exile, but as a sonic and aesthetic project in its own right. This is exactly where the research value of this album is apparent. In his broad studies on music and migration, Martin Stokes (Reference Stokes2020) warns that in evaluating diaspora art, one must escape the trap of tokenism—a trap where social sciences ignore the aesthetic values of works and reduce immigrant music merely to issues like race, politics, the trauma of exile, or nostalgia. Stokes claims that to truly understand migration, one must confront the work itself as art. This is precisely the void evident in Iranian pop music studies as well, where critical attention has been largely confined to textual or sociological analysis of lyrics, neglecting the examination of technical and musicological elements, such as rhythm, arrangement, and instrumentation. Tehrangeles Vice can be read as a response to these predominant patterns. The artists who contributed to these songs did not want to be merely an exotic other for the world music industry. By producing complex electronic arrangements, modern instrumental textures, and by blending American music industry facilities with Iranian elements, they secured their sonic agency, establishing a self-sufficient and forward-looking industry at the heart of Los Angeles—one that, by standing firm on formal and technical grounds, resists the danger of being reduced to a purely nostalgic or tokenistic symbol.

At first glance, perhaps the most apparent weakness of Tehrangeles Vice is its list of major absentees. Any listener familiar with Iranian pop will immediately notice the missing heavyweights such as Hayedeh, Mahasti, Dariush, Moein, and significant diasporic composers like Sadegh Nojouki, Farid Zoland, or Siavash Ghomayshi. This may create the impression that the selections are arbitrary. One can, however, understand these absences as deliberate. The album is not interested in assembling a greatest-hits package or reproducing the heavy nostalgic shadow of the pre-revolution “golden age.” Instead, it seeks out “outliers”—tracks that embody the seductive, rhythmic, and distinctly 1980s Los Angeles sound, shaped more by synth-pop, disco, and the assertive synthesizers of Manouchehr Cheshmazar than by the orchestral string arrangements of composers like Sadegh Nojouki. That said, the exclusion of composers who played an enormous role in bridging Iranian melody with modern, electronic arrangements in that same period remains an open question and suggests that the compilation offers only a particular, subjective slice of the Tehrangeles musical ecology. In this sense, the compilation participates in a broader tendency within archival and record-collecting cultures to value the obscure and underheard over the familiar and widely popular.

I cannot finish this review without reiterating that Tehrangeles Vice, in its effort to dust off the image of Tehrangeles music and demonstrate its innovations, deliberately distances itself from the 6/8 rhythm—the backbone of Los Angelesi pop music—in order to foreground works that, as Asdourian notes in the interview section of the album notes, “sounded nearly as American as they did Iranian.” Yet this strategy inadvertently reproduces a hierarchical assumption: that legitimacy, value, and innovation in diasporic music depend on proximity to Western pop and electronic forms, while the native 6/8 rhythm and genres close to motrebi music carry only “cheap,” commercial value. This approach overlooks the dynamism and cultural significance of shesh-o-hasht—a rhythm that not only symbolized vitality and survival both in exile and within Iran but also shaped the sonic DNA of later generations. Its influence is traceable in Iranian pop and even the rap of later decades, both inside and outside Iran. Thus, while this album succeeds in rediscovering the capacities of Iranian synth-pop and disco, perhaps it misses an opportunity to rehabilitate a rhythm that arguably did the most to keep the pulse of this diaspora alive. What is certain, however, is that Tehrangeles Vice is a valuable intervention. By foregrounding one strand of the Tehrangeles soundscape, the compilation also highlights how much remains to be explored. This music deserves far more sustained scholarly and curatorial attention—its arrangements, instrumentation, and structural dialogues with both Iranian classical music and pre-revolutionary pop, and its place within broader global pop industries, remain fertile ground.