Attend an Iranian wedding, party, or celebration virtually anywhere in the world and you are likely to hear the rhythmic groove of a form of dance music known as 6/8 (shesh-o-hasht). Were you to ask around about this highly danceable pop music that seems to have everyone singing along, you may learn much of it was produced not in Tehran but in Los Angeles, and that a deeply nostalgic affection for these songs mingles with sharp dismissals of them as cliched, trivial, and even trashy. Such dismissals are expressed not only by their multi-generational audiences or musicians in competing genres, but even by some of the Iranian musicians, producers, and vocalists who created these tracks.
This widespread ambivalence serves as a central problematic in Farzaneh Hemmasi's Tehrangeles Dreaming. An ethnomusicologist, Hemmasi draws on interviews with the founders of Los Angeles–produced Iranian pop culture alongside analyses of music, videos, and media to examine how the 6/8 sound came to dominate Iranian diaspora music in the 1980s and into the 2000s. By laying bare the transnational networks of production and circulation that created and consumed it, Hemmasi also builds a compelling defense against dismissals of Tehrangeles pop music as “nothing besides a bit of distraction from the seriousness of revolution, war, economic hardship, and displacement” (p. 37). On the contrary, the music that served as the soundtrack to several generations of Iranian life both in Iran and in its diaspora is revealed as an important site of collective memory and shared identity that is “vital to Iranian social life” (p. 58).
While there has been a growing number of ethnographic studies of music in Iran in recent years, Tehrangeles Dreaming shifts primary focus to the Iranian diaspora and, more specifically, to Los Angeles. Home to the largest population of Iranians outside of Iran, Los Angeles is also home to the prerevolutionary artists and producers responsible for building the Tehrangeles pop scene from their positions of exile in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps as further evidence that 6/8 has been a source of “rueful embarrassment,” most previous ethnomusicological research on Iran has focused attention on classical, traditional, and art music, or later, underground rock and hip hop. Hemmasi's focus on Tehrangeles pop thus gives overdue serious attention to an understudied field of Iranian music.
Despite a commonly repeated belief that Los Angeles is overrepresented in the social scientific literature on the Iranian diaspora, I would suggest that, prior to Hemmasi's book, Tehrangeles actually has not been given the ethnographic attention it deserves. Earlier volumes collected the experiences and emotions of exile in the first decade following migration, but these early oral histories and essays still remain the key sources for scholarship about a community entering its fifth decade. Tehrangeles Dreaming thus takes on added importance as historiography, focusing in the first several chapters on “the founding cohort of Iranian music and media producers in Southern California” who “became champions of salvaged and alternative versions of national culture precisely as they met with rejection in their home country” (p. 8). These figures, many now retired and aging (several have unfortunately passed since Hemmasi began her fieldwork), reflect on their founding roles and offer insights and recollections of the forty intervening years. In tones ranging from exasperation to resignation, we hear the once-titans of the Iranian recording industry describe the struggle to create Iranian pop music, and later, to adapt to the obsolescence of cassette tapes, CDs, and single-location studios. Drawn together, they persuasively offer a needed corrective to histories of Iranian culture that might seek to marginalize not only forms of music like mardomi or motrebi (seen by some as “low-status”), but also diasporic culture and politics.
A central thread of Tehrangeles Dreaming is Hemmasi's argument that the very fraught relationship that emerged between the newly-formed Islamic Republic and the Iranian exiles who fled it became a surprisingly synergistic one in the music industry. Political events and laws enacted during and after the 1979 Revolution (e.g., effectively banning women's solo singing and “western-influenced” musical genres, including 6/8 pop) turned most pre-Revolution celebrities and artists into personae-non-gratae, leading those Iranian musicians, producers, songwriters, singers, and dancers who could manage it, to flee. But these same forces also (and one assumes, quite inadvertently) created a renewed raison d'etre for this form to flourish. Rather than heralding the death of 6/8's popularity, Hemmasi shows that the government's strict censorship at a time of war-induced fear, mourning, and depression left an Iranian populace thirsting for sources of sonic joy, a desire that now only its exiled musicians could satisfy. Technological affordances like easily dubbed cassette and video tapes made transnational circulation feasible. As a result, even if musicians and producers in Los Angeles sought to innovate new sounds, the ban on public dancing and popular music in Iran increased demand for the now-illegal groove of 6/8 and the women's voices and bodies who performed to it. Meanwhile, exiled musicians struggling to make a living in a new country found a source of survival in fulfilling the need for upbeat music for local Iranian social gatherings, which had themselves taken an added urgency in exile. These diasporic demands joined homeland demands born of repressive policies, leading to the reign of quickly produced 6/8 tunes and chintzy music videos. As Hemmasi's interlocutors recalled, exiled “musicians played at their patrons’ pleasure, and their experiments with other forms of art were neither appreciated nor compensated” (p. 57). The result was the dominance of a groove that became inextricably associated with Tehrangeles, and enduring stereotypes of LA in Iran and of Iran in LA built upon a “synergistic relationship of domestic prohibitions [and] expatriate business strategies” (p. 7).
Among the key theoretical frames of the book, Hemmasi draws together the “dreaming” of the title with questions of how public and private intimacies are created in a diaspora so often at odds with its homeland. Like other segments of the Iranian diaspora population who feel both ideologically and physically separated (“doubly estranged” [p. 24]) from post-revolutionary Iran, the founding generation of Tehrangeles cultural producers relied heavily on imagination to build and maintain connections to home. Through musical transcriptions, song lyrics, music videos, and artist interviews, Hemmasi shows how fantasy, desire, and dreams are central to Tehrangeles pop culture, in part as an effort to mediate what she calls a “dialectic of physical and temporal distance and music-, media-, and communications-enabled closeness” (p. 26). The result is a set of transnational social imaginaries made audible (and visible, as the book's nostalgia-provoking cover beautifully demonstrates) through cultural practices that build on and create common understandings, experiences, memories, and sociality—what anthropologist Michael Herzfeld called “cultural intimacy” (p. 28). Hemmasi examines a range of desires and paranoias shared by many Tehrangeles musicians—from fears about the power of the Islamic Republic, to assurances of their own popularity among Iranians, to a shared “rueful embarrassment” about shesh-o-hasht—that build these common social imaginaries.
The centrality of politics to a genre that is often dismissed as shallow and apolitical is made evident in the organization of the book, where the first several chapters draw out the easy-to-(dis)miss political subtexts and contexts of the people, music, and audiences under study, while the last two chapters focus on two celebrities with explicitly political aims. Chapter 1 describes the 6/8 groove and shows how Tehrangeles became its capital by connecting the artists, producers, and audiences of what became los anjelesi music to its roots in early and mid-20th century Iran. As the chapter demonstrates, despite popular assumptions, this music was never apolitical, and the contentious relationship to morality and political consciousness of 6/8 and mardomi music(ians) only became heightened post-Revolution. Chapter 2 offers a historical narrative of the founding of the Tehrangeles music industry through ethnographic observation and interviews with key figures. But Hemmasi is careful not to assert an authoritative history, nor to allow any one of her interlocutors to do so; rather, she insists on recognizing the often messy, conflicting, and unverifiable accounts as part of the challenge of historical memory.
Chapter 3 turns attention to issues of gender and sexuality by applying Mankekar and Schein's “transnational media erotics” to the Tehrangeles case (p. 99). Through analyses of non-heteronormative representations of men, and of women's experiences navigating competing notions of respectability, the chapter demonstrates the challenges of Tehrangeles artists to negotiate global, overlapping audiences and their often-conflicting expectations and moral regimes (p. 120). This setup provides firm ground for Chapters 4 and 5 to zoom in on two celebrity vocalists—one woman, one man—with broad, global, and loyal fanbases: Googoosh and Dariush. While Googoosh's career is analyzed to show how she has come to “fuse female singing and political expression in newly audible ways” (p. 123), Hemmasi argues that it is a shared suffering that underpins Dariush's popularity, creating a public intimacy built on common experiences and emotions.
The concluding chapter sketches out several of the important changes that have taken place since 1979 and offers brief outlines of their impact on the diaspora music industry. In these final pages, there is a sense that the Tehrangeles scene has experienced a decline. Hemmasi's fieldwork and interviews began in the mid- to late 2000s, a critical turning point for the music industry writ large as a digital revolution changed the way music was made, accessed, and circulated. It is clear that the Tehrangeles pop music industry especially thrived in a pre-internet time when recording studios and the artists who relied on them were clustered in the San Fernando Valley. One is left to wonder what happens to this industry in the digital age, and what new modes of production, circulation, and promotion by the second generation and newly-arrived immigrants have replaced those established by the founding generation. There are hints to answers in these final pages, but I am left curious as to how these changes have affected the cultural intimacy that Hemmasi outlines. Do the new sounds of Iranian music, produced in diverse global locations, produce new intimacies? And does Tehrangeles maintain its importance as a cultural anchor in the diaspora without the dominance of its music industry? An analysis of diasporic music production since the early 2010s and a broader history of Tehrangeles are just a few of the routes for new inquiry opened by Hemmasi's study.
Tehrangeles Dreaming offers a compellingly argued and accessibly written ethnography of exile cultural production and the politics of identity in the Iranian context. It no doubt will be useful for those in ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural studies, and Middle East Studies, and serves as a sorely-needed step towards building a fuller history of Iran and its diaspora.
