Some years back, in a singing contest aimed specifically for people with recent immigrant background in Finland, I heard and saw two male performers representing Iran. The songs they sang were a waltz-like one ‘by a famous Persian singer’ and another one with a more contemporary ballad quality – delivered in the Spanish language. The performances made it clear to me that there are various ways to express one's Iranian-ness musically, yet maybe more intriguing for me was the way in which the performances were greeted by the audience. While the former was accompanied with people singing along and waving their cigarette lighters in the air, as well as occasional loud whistling, the latter induced someone to yell ‘heil Hitler!’. Whether or not intended as a personal insult, the situation reminded me of the historical, political and religious tensions of Iran.

This personal flashback serves to point out that Bronwen Robertson's Reverberations of Dissent is first and foremost an educating read for those who, like myself, may be familiar with the broad societal and cultural changes in Iran during the past 30-or-so years but lack any detailed knowledge about the matter. This is to say that, while Robertson focuses on contemporary phenomena and a rather limited musical community, her treatment is never detached from the socio-historical context. The core of Reverberations of Dissent rests on portraits of central artists and their work as well as on topics like online music festivals and the identity politics of Iranian rock in general. But these are appropriately prefaced by considerations over the historical shifts in the country's regime and the implications of these for musical expression. There is an entire chapter reserved for the quagmires of Islamic interpretations of music, and the last chapter before the Conclusions completes the circle by highlighting the importance of the most recent presidential elections for the ‘potential futures for unofficial rock music in Iran’ (Chapter 9).

Robertson's explicit ‘principal intent’ has been ‘to provide an account of a rapidly evolving music scene as it was experienced by the researcher through an extended period of participation-observation fieldwork and during ongoing research through and with the internet’ (p. xiii), and this intent is fulfilled superbly. It needs to be stressed, however, that Reverberations of Dissent is no more than an account, and primarily a descriptive one at that. Those expecting a theoretically informed rigorous analysis need to look elsewhere. To be sure, there are fleeting passages with references to ‘temporary autonomous zones’ (pp. 49–50), general theories of identity formation (Chapter 6), and in particular the work of Laudan Nooshin on Iranian popular music (passim), yet these remain fairly perfunctory and isolated. For instance, much of the discussion on ‘inventing identities’ (Chapters 5–7) rests on second-hand references and with very little on the peculiarity of music in this respect.

What is more, the whole notion of ‘rock’ and its identity politics – and ‘political’ in general – are left unproblematised. As an ‘overarching intent’, ‘to prove that rock music is a global genre’ (p. 146) is outright trivial. I, for one, would have been more interested in reading about the implications of the labelling for, and by, the musicians in question. As things stand, these implications have to be inferred from the text by the readers themselves. On a positive side, though, the overlaps between the epithets ‘illegal’, ‘unofficial’ and ‘underground’ are discussed in a critical manner, especially the last one, in relation to Euro-American conceptualisations. In addition, there is a lucid self-reflexive stance postulated in the Introduction, yet I ended up asking myself why there was so very little on gender issues there. This question sprang up later in conjunction with what is certainly my favourite sentence of the whole book: ‘Mothers play an integral role in the unofficial rock music scene’ (p. 94) – in facilitating formal education and, indeed, feeding the musicians.

Despite the discussion on the ‘illegal’, ‘unofficial’ or ‘underground’ quality of the music, these designations are used somewhat indistinctively. This causes particular unclarity in relation to the vagueness of the use of the appellation ‘political’ and results in peculiar contradiction with respect to creativity. On the one hand, Robertson celebrates ‘the creativity and resilience’ (p. xiv) of the unofficial rock scene and, more generally, ‘Iranian ingenuity, which prevails during the most testing of times’ (p. xviii). On the other hand, however, she laments over the musical brain drain, as it were, that results from the arbitrarily oppressive administration of the public sphere. It is worth emphasising here that Reverberations of Dissent is not a book about music censorship per se but rather about the conditions of making music in highly ambivalent societal circumstances.

In the end, Robertson hopes that ‘this book has been successful in presenting a multi-layered description of the continuing evolution of unofficial rock music in Tehran from 2006–2009’ (p. 147). While I would replace ‘evolution’ with ‘change’, I have no doubts about deeming the task accomplished. Here, one of course notices that, in comparison to the book's subtitle, the truthful location of the phenomena in question is the capital of Iran instead of the whole country. But let this be the ever-so-welcome reminder that even the most multi-layered description, or analysis for that matter, is confined to various delimitations and restrictions. As is any form of musical expression, unofficial or not, rock or not, Iranian or not.