Intimating Dissent: Popular Song, Poetry, and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran

Abstract

T interrelation of popular music with state and citizen politics is well documented in the Islamic Republic of Iran. For nearly two decades following the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, popular music was banned for its immoral associations and connections to the deposed monarchical regime. The postrevolutionary government began permitting popular music in the late 1990s, but has kept its production, performance, and dissemination under a strict yet shifting set of rules and policies based on a mixture of ideological and aesthetic criteria. Today, many musicians choose to make, perform, and publish their music “underground,” without participating in governmental channels, but doing so carries legal risks. These challenging conditions have led many popular musicians to leave the country and continue their careers outside of Iran.1 Popular music and politics were also intertwined in pre-revolutionary Iran. Both listeners and ethnomusicologists have associated musiqi-ye pāp, a genre that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with the Western orientation of the Iranian monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government (ruled 1941–79).2 Modern and predominantly Western in its instrumentation, featuring stars attired in the latest European and American fashions, and heavily broadcast on state media, musiqi-ye pāp reflected the Pahlavi government’s efforts to develop and Westernize its populace while also severely limiting citizen political activity. As such, musiqi-ye pāp of this period may not seem a likely milieu for the widespread political dissent that was brewing in Iranian society in the decades preceding the revolution. Nevertheless, musicians and producers who were active during this time, and listeners who remember the period, point to a growing number of songs that subtly challenged the political status quo even within this statemonitored popular culture. One prevalent method for conveying opposition under censorship was to produce songs whose ambiguous lyrics intimated, rather than declared, their dissent.

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