Called an “instant classic,” “revelatory,” and “groundbreaking,” Nahid Siamdoust's monograph on four prominent Iranian artists, captures the sea change in the musical scene in Iran between the years 1996 and 2011.
In the context of the new, “pure” postrevolutionary society, it was music that was seen as that cultural art form most complicit with the moral corruption of Iranian youth under the previous regime. Music was thus one of the first official casualties of the Iranian Revolution. Eliminated almost entirely from radio and television, it was in the mid-1990s, when the long war against Saddam's Iraq had finally become history, that music returned to the Iranian scene.
Music has since played a critical role in the national conversation. Because of the Islamic Republic's fraught relationship to music, the latter has become the site for the construction and performance of identity in the public sphere. Even with the progressive loosening of the rules around musical performance, the absence of the female voice has remained constant. Given the key role played by music in the political discourse of the postrevolution era, this absence has relegated the parameters of female identity and its political voice to alternate spheres. In the book, Siamdoust thus considers four male artists and their diverging styles in music as examples of the political conversation generated around music in the Islamic Republic of Iran following the 1979 revolution: Mohammad Reza Shajarian's classical folk, Alireza Assar's pop music, Mohsen Namjoo's rock, and Hichkas's social justice–oriented rap.
Organized in pairs, in a total of ten chapters, the first of each couplet provides the necessary historical and political context for the chapter that follows. The second thrusts the reader into a close reading of the work of the specific artist.
In the first of two chapters on Shajarian, for example, Siamdoust establishes this artist's biographical formation in a provincial, traditional context where a prerevolutionary, cosmopolitan, and highly centralized geosocial structure denigrates the artist's nonurban dialect and customs. While this chapter shows how precisely these markers made Shajarian's identity, music, and voice emblematic of the early revolutionary soundscape, Siamdoust's interviews and attentive reading of the artist's work, in the second beat, validate Shajarian's own rejection of terms such as “revolutionary” and “political,” to associate the artist and his music, instead, with the “populism” of the Green Movement during the postelection crisis of 2009.
Siamdoust's writing is elegant, accessible, and grippingly journalistic, capturing the mood, the scene, the lighting, even the posture of her subjects in their rare performances in Iran and abroad. Her most powerful insights emerge as she situates, in close readings of Namjoo's and Hichkas's music, the clash of the political currents that came to a head in the 2009 post-election crisis in Iran: in these readings, the Iranian public emerges haram-like, submitting to the whims of the Supreme Leader. Through its political tussle with music, it is this human wasteland that eventually arrives on the scene of a populist revolt in 2009, with demands for civil rights and liberties that, in the language of Hichkas's rap, awaken God to the realities of widespread corruption in Iran.
