The Iranian government is attempting a fresh crackdown, but the underground music scene is thriving on the support of young fans fed up with 'living a lie', writes Simon Broughtonin Tehran
A RESPECTABLE high-rise housing complex in the west of Tehran with a porter in the lobby seems an unlikely location for “underground music”. Inside one of the flats, Maral, a 23-year-old singer and bass player, is rehearsing with her band, The Plastic Wave. There’s a thick blanket hanging over the door of the small rehearsal room to muffle the sound, and the space is lit only by a lamp and a computer screen. She is singing My Clothes On Other Bodies, a song about the frustration of other people getting the opportunities you’ve missed. Keyboard player Saeid wrote the music, and Maral wrote the words in English.
“I prefer to sing in English,” she says. “I don’t think Farsi suits the sound of rock music so well.”
She describes her music as “electronic psychedelic rock”, and it comes with grungey guitar. From thousands of applicants, the band have been selected to appear at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, in March, so they are practising hard. But they don’t want to risk performing in Iran before they leave.
There’s nothing political or oppositional in Maral’s songs, but in a country where women are obliged to cover their heads and are not allowed to sing lead vocals, the Iranian authorities condemn her music. She and her two band members spent time in prison after playing at an unauthorised festival in a Tehran park.
“For some people, music is a hobby,” she says, “but I have to find a way to do it. It’s my life.”
It’s often forgotten in the west that the 1979 Iranian revolution, which removed the West-leaning shah from power, was driven by leftists and communists as well as Islamists. Many of the top musicians in Iran were part of the revolutionary Chavosh (Herald) movement that sought a return to Persian musical traditions in the face of the Shah’s westernisation. Most of the premier league of Iranian musicians – Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Mohammad Reza Lotfi and Hossein Alizadeh – performed a celebrated concert soon after the revolution in Tehran’s Azadi (Freedom) Square. But the musicians’ hopes and celebrations proved shortlived. Within a couple of years, Ayatollah Khomeini’s conservative Islamic republic clamped down, and all music was forbidden.
The outright ban didn’t last long, but western music and western-style Iranian music became particular targets. In Marjane Satrapi’s animated film about the period, Persepolis, the young Marjane listens to Metallica as an act of rebellion, hungry for what’s forbidden.
MUCH HAS CHANGED since those days. The restraints on Iranian pop fell away during Mohammad Khatami’s more liberal presidency (1997-2005), though rock and rap remain banned today, as do solo female singers (unless they’re performing in front of a female audience). The traditional black chadors the young Marjane and her friends were forced to wear have largely been replaced by stylish headscarves. And last month, Tehran hosted the week-long Fadjr International Music Festival, now in its 24th year. In its early years, the Fadjr festival, celebrating the victory of the revolution, was confined to religious and traditional music. By the mid-1990s, it had started inviting major international artists such as Pakistan’s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and India’s Bismillah Khan. And in 2007, Iranian pop was included for the first time, with a hugely popular concert by Arian, the country’s most successful pop band and recent collaborators with Chris de Burgh.
Babak Rezayi, the festival’s executive director, doesn’t see a paradox in holding a music festival to celebrate the revolution, despite the restrictions it placed on music.
“The festival is an answer to that paradox,” he says. “Music has a great role in the victory of the revolution. The Chavosh songs reflected the people’s feelings about the revolution.”
Over seven days, the Fadjr festival included around 70 concerts in eight venues in Tehran. In the Grand Hall, the silver-suited Ehsan Khajeh Amiri sang his bland Middle Eastern pop to an audience of 3,000, who had to remain seated and could do no more than clap along to show their enthusiasm beneath the stern gaze of portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
There were female musicians performing for a women-only audience. There were performances from the Tehran Symphony Orchestra (playing Tchaikovsky), the Iran National Orchestra, and groups from Estonia, Italy, France and the Netherlands, including baroque fiddle virtuoso Johannes Leertouwer.
The musical highlights, though, were the regional folk artists and, for me, a concert by sitar player Massoud Shaari. The sitar is a small, long-necked lute, which has, in the hands of Shaari, a variety of tones. Here, he explored them in a gripping solo before being joined by a tombak (goblet drum) player, seven other sitarists and two women singers (accompanied, to meet the regulations, by a male sitarist).
The most high-profile concerts of the festival were by a veteran musician from the revolutionary Chavosh movement: Mohammad Reza Lotfi, white-haired and bearded like an Old Testament prophet. He and his musicians played Chavosh 6, composed in the run-up to the revolution in February 1979.
Lotfi left Iran in the early 1980s after revolutionary guards held a gun to his head while he was on stage and told him to stop playing. He only returned from exile three years ago, so his participation in a government-run festival seemed all the more remarkable. Certainly, aside from the reinvigoration of Persian music, it’s hard to see how any of the revolutionary hopes of the Chavosh musicians have been met today.
IT’S HARD TO separate music and politics in Iran. Concerts, even by approved musicians, have to be authorised by the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president in 2005, the government has tightened up on the underground scene. Unofficial concerts have been broken up by revolutionary guards, musicians imprisoned, and earlier this year a television programme equated underground musicians with drug-users and satanists.
“It was horrifying the way they depicted us,” says Maral, who is the daughter of an accomplished traditional singer. “But I prefer to be an ‘underground’ singer. Otherwise you have to do cheesy concerts, like Arian. But if I was in some other country, of course I’d love a contract with a good label.”
A number of other women singers find an alternative way to avoid the rigid restrictions, and have chosen to work only outside the country.
“It’s better for women to be able to perform for all-female audiences than not at all,” says Mahsa Vahdat, who performs and records with her sister, Marjan. “But I prefer not to take part, because it helps the government justify this discrimination against women. I don’t want to endorse that.”
The music of Mahsa and Marjan is beautiful. Their keening voices are perfectly matched, one starting where the other leaves off. “The restrictions we have are unnatural,” adds Mahsa. “It’s like saying you cannot laugh or cry in front of men.”
Ali, a journalist who has been documenting the underground scene, claims it has become stronger over the past two years.
“Most young people here are living a lie,” he says. “You can’t say, ‘I have a boyfriend/girlfriend’, you can’t say ‘I drink alcohol’ or ‘I’ve been to a party, or I’ve been watching satellite television’. But this underground music is a mirror of our society. are being honest, and they are putting that honesty into their music.”
One striking example is the singer Sahra, who was 16 when she recorded The Level of My Hotness, which in the underground world of Tehran approaches Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s classic track in its eroticism.
“Come and hug me./ Why are you looking at me?” she sings, with orgasmic gasps. “Come and f**k me./ I’m giving you permission.” This is the 2009 equivalent of Marjane’s Metallica cassette. The Level of My Hotness was recorded on a computer, posted on the net, downloaded in vast numbers and copied on to CDs. It’s now a favourite at parties to put Tehran’s youth in the mood.
Inevitably, what’s forbidden is even more desirable.
Guardian service
