Dream of an Iranian music revival

It's absurd, they announce when the things go down only hours beforehand online, and they are usually held way out in the wilderness.

I'm of the opinion/hope that parts of the Middle East are about to go through a social/civil rights movement mirroring the one America went through in the last century...if'n they aren't bombed into oblivion before that gets to happen. About 75% of the populations of Iran & Saudi Arabia are people under 30, and we all know how young people are for some reason way into change.

Or they might all just get blowed up real good. Who knows...

nickalicious, I would like to hear whether they are doing Persian-sounding things with rave, or whether they are pretty much just imitating the western model.

(The current student protests in Iran are my excuse for bringing this up.)

like who? what does it sound like?

a little O.T., but has anyone heard Aisha Kandisha's Jarring Experience? they're a post-modern psychedelic band from Turkey (or Moroco?) that were covered in the first Unterberger book. the clip i heard from the cd included in the book (from the first cd) was soooo amazing, but then i heard a later full length produced by bill laswell that was gawd awful

Night Silence Desert sounds good to me. Other than that I have only heard one other Shahjarian recording, a cassette I bought at a Persian restaurant, without knowing anything about the recording.

I haven't gotten to seriously exploring Persian classical music yet. "Standard reason," as my father used to say; i.e., lack of funds.

Actually, Jess, this shouldn't really be a problem. The conservatism regarding music in Iran is of a very different bent than American-style religious conservatism. What's prohibited there isn't secular music but religious music. For example, you can clap, scream and dance like a holy roller at a wedding but any sort of movement at a mosque other than bowing and scraping towards mecca is verboten. My family is Iranian - though not Muslim - and my grandparents (who have been in America for 20 years) are still puzzling over gospel music at our religious observances.

As far as secular themes go ... I suppose as long as the sexual references are sufficiently coy it's OK. The classical persian love poems (Rumi, Hafiz, etc.) is all ambigiously addressed to God anyway. Like, "I just wanna B Wit U" could refer to God or your girlfriend/boyfriend...

One barrier to an Iranian music revival is the fact that most Iranians I know draw a big fat line between pop music and Persian classical. Most of Timbaland's productions sound closer to Persian classical (to my ears, which are very westernized) than most pop produced by Iranians. Most of the pop I've heard sounds like euro dance (think Haddaway) with an emphasis on toms instead of snares. I think there's a bit of a "sacred cow" complex about our classical music ... if you listen to Iranian radio in Los Angeles you can sometimes hear 60s Iranian soul - yodeling vocals, huge John Barry string sections and pounding psych drummers.

The classical persian love poems (Rumi, Hafiz, etc.) is all ambigiously addressed to God anyway. Like, "I just wanna B Wit U" could refer to God or your girlfriend/boyfriend...

I like this explanation.

(Ned speaks the truth.)

I didn't hear any other pop music but I was there in the build-up to Muhurram which is as grim a period as any you can imagine. On buses, on TV, on the radio, the same 'music' for a month: desolate, tear-stained mourning for Ali and the martyred Hussein, rboken only by the flailing of flagellants. Godspeed eat your heart out.

During this time people release a lot of pent-up grief and with the above 10 million a very raw wound, there was a lot of it about. One night, we sat in the middle of a mosque courtyard (the Shah mosque in Isfahan, no less) which had been completely wrapped in black so no one could see each other, while grown men around us simply wept buckets.

Said mosque by day is one of the most sensuosly beautiful structures on the planet, and like the heady poetry of Hafez, Rumi and Sa'adi it testifies to strong traditions in Iran that make me wish I could attend a mid-desert rave.

I've heard it said that Shi'ism - because it hands living authority down through Ayatollahs, and thus has a priesthood in a way that Sunnis don't - is actually an approach to Islam with more scope for 'modernisation' than many others; even that some Shi'ite Islamic scholars have said things about the nature of God and political life that would be unthinkable in Sunni countries. If the world needs a modernised, liberalised Islam it may even come from Iran.

With regard to music and film, I think there are very interesting comparisons with China in the 80s: there, too, the first cultural sign that things where changing was a crop of brilliant state funded films. Pop music only started to become both interesting and recognisably 'Chinese' five or so years later. But those where five years in which the political scene became gradually more and more liberal, whereas Khatami's agenda seems ot have been frozen in its tracks.

Not much about pop music, I know - I'd love to know mre too - but hopefully some interesting context.