Heavy Metal Islam (27 page)

The small studio, which was normally used by rock bands, was filled with posters of Pantera, Megadeth, and Cowboys from Hell, a cheap drum set, and a small amp, on which rested, of all things, a menorah with
Shalom
written in Hebrew and English in the middle of it. “What’s that doing there?” I asked incredulously. “I think it’s cool. It’s beautiful, and it pisses off the state,” said the owner of the studio, who prefers that I do not use his name because, while Iran’s 25,000-strong Jewish community faces little persecution in the Islamic Republic, thinking menorahs are cool is not something you want to advertise publicly.

Although he’s very young, Peyman enjoys a certain notoriety as a result of his music’s distribution over the Internet and a video of his being broadcast on Dubai or European channels. He doesn’t just see himself as a rapper. “I became interested in Persian poetry and Irfan—mysticism—and try to mix all of that into my raps and send it to the streets with a bit of Tupac thrown in. We’re like modern Firdusui or Rumi [the two most famous Persian poets],” he argued. He played me the rhythm of a new song he’s working on while he rhymed in a strange mixture of classical and postmodern Persian. “Eminem inspired by Rumi,” he said.

As I chatted with Peyman, I understood why rap was spreading so quickly and deeply in Iran: rappers have succeeded in reclaiming public space for themselves in a way that metalheads can only dream of. “There’s around 1,000 rappers just in Tehran,” Peyman explained, “and we constantly meet and have battles in the parks. One of the most important is [the appropriately named] ‘Joint Park,’ or ‘Cigari Park’ in Persian. Basically, when we want to meet and have a battle, the word goes out through SMS messages or announcements on Persian-language rap sites. At least two times a month we have these gatherings, and up to 200 rappers and fans show up. Once we have a critical mass of people”—and he took out his mobile phone to play me a video of one of these battles while he was talking—“someone takes out a mobile phone and plays a beat that’s stored on it, and we start rhyming. But it’s not just the park, we get together and rap on streets, sidewalks, corners, even though it’s illegal. Usually the
basij
check us out and leave us alone, and so do the cops, but we can disperse and regroup very quickly if the cops hassle us.”

Peyman is very focused on “doing something that will be loved on the streets.” But in Iran, street cred doesn’t come from the gangsta or thug life. Instead, it comes from writing a song that is an innovative combination of Persian and Western music and raps, and deals with real social issues without focusing the regime’s attention on you. “The problem is, nothing is underground in Iran. You can do a political song in a third-class studio in Tehran and you’ll be caught in a week. They have spies everywhere. My friend did a song called ‘Objection’ against everything that’s going on, and he was caught and put in jail for a week. He had to sign something saying he’d never do a political song again. I just drop some of Tupac’s more political lyrics into my songs. Those who know, get it.”

Despite the government’s overwhelming power, Peyman feels that “the only way to push the government is to grow the movement beyond the point it can easily be destroyed. That’s why I focus not on gangsta rap but on our problems here. Yet those rappers who rap about drugs and sex, or are hard-core nationalist, get more famous than those who rap about social problems. Kids today are much more interested in drugs and sex than in fighting to change society,” he said with disgust. “But if someone could give them the energy and inspiration to do something, things would change.”

Needing Each Other, or Needing to Defeat the Other?

I thought about how the Iranian government must view the growing popularity of rappers like Peyman-Chet and their metal counterparts as I sat in the Tehran office of Massoud Abid, a professor of philosophy and human rights at Mufid University in Qom (the center of Shi’i scholarship in Iran). Although he is a Hojatul Islam, the rank just below ayatollah, if anyone from the establishment would be sympathetic to—or at least tolerant of—the dreams of young music fans, it would be Abid, who is well known to Iranian scholars and activists as one of the more progressive religious scholars and officials in Iran.

Neither my spoken Persian nor his English was fluent enough to carry on a complicated conversation solely in either language, so we spoke in Arabic mixed with the other two. The trilingual texture of the conversation symbolized one of Abid’s key points, which is that Iran is becoming ever more globalized today, even as the United States seeks to isolate it politically and economically. And along with being globalized, Iranian young people are becoming more politicized, he felt, contrary to what Peyman-Chet had said. “Viewed from the outside, it might seem that young people are increasingly depoliticized and alienated from the state today,” Abid argued. Yet, from his position on the inside, things looked very different. The public sphere was neither absent nor deep underground: “It’s just developing in less noticeable ways, outside of mainstream popular culture. Just look at the large increase in the number of NGOs in Iran in the last last four to five years.”

But at an even more basic level, the universities are where much of the most interesting developments are taking place, according to Abid. He sees this especially in how students in seminaries and “secular” universities are combining religious and nonreligious courses of study. “Seminary students are taking courses in human rights or sociological theory, more women than ever are enrolled in universities; you can see the change in the personality of students, as the focus on politics of the post-Revolution generation has also given way to more of a focus on personal issues,” he explained.

Abid believes that most Iranians want better relations with the West. “We have to do two things: first, get rid of this conflict between Islam and the West; and, second, learn how to understand the West for both good and bad. The changing position of the religious establishment toward music is a good indication of the possibilities for such a rapprochement. Today most senior ulema [Muslim legal scholars] are opposed to rock not because of religious reasons as much as because it’s not part of Iran’s cultural heritage.”

The hope is that as Iran’s overwhelmingly young population expands the horizons of what is a legitimate part of Iranian culture, that too will change. Indeed, Abid expressed confidence that a rapprochement with the United States, and with the West more broadly, would ultimately occur. In the end, he told me as I got up to leave, “the two sides need each other a lot more than they need to defeat the other.”

Abid’s philosophy is certainly far from the politically dominant conservative philosophy of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. But there is a well-developed strand of relatively progressive theology and social and political thought in Iranian Shi’ism today, especially around the issue of women. As Ziba Mir Hosseini describes it in her book
Islam and Gender,
“If clerics want to stay in power they cannot ignore popular demands for freedom, tolerance, and social justice.” Whether it’s women working through sympathetic ayatollahs to reinterpret Islamic law in less oppressive ways, or metalheads using online zines to pry open their society’s public sphere, most Iranians refuse to yield to the repressive dreams of their leaders. This has produced a cultural tug-of-war that will continue for the foreseeable future, and metal and hip-hop will be an important part of its soundtrack.

Iran’s Unplugged Heavy Metal Heroes

During my last few days in Iran, I was lucky to meet up with two of the bravest and heaviest musicians in the country. The first was Mahsa Vahdat, one of the best young singers of traditional Persian music in Iran, who gained international notice with her beautiful duet with British singer Sarah Jane Morris on the celebrated 2004 album
Lullabies from the Axis of Evil.
Mahsa’s soft face, long dark hair, and captivating eyes draw people toward her the moment they see her, and her almost-whisper when she speaks brings you even closer. But when she starts to sing, her rich, sad, trembling voice is commanding.

“It’s not easy to perform in Iran today,” Mahsa explained, given the restrictions on women singing solo, and on live performances by women more broadly. “We are forced to perform outside the country if we want to perform our material as it’s supposed to be played.” But Mahsa has been lucky; at least she can write new music and record it in Tehran despite the cultural clampdown by the Ahmadinejad government. “The problem isn’t religion. Everything in Iran is in the end about politics; religion is just the excuse.”

It’s also about power—wielded by men over women—which frustrates her more than most any other dynamic. “On the face of it, it’s hilarious, their policy of restricting people and telling them that you can only sing for women. But it’s also humiliating.” Ironically, the very thing that limits her opportunities to perform in Iran—being a woman with an exceptional voice—makes it easy for her to get invited to international festivals and collaborations with artists from Europe and the United States. It’s far harder for most rock bands, the success of Tarantist and Hypernova notwithstanding.

One artist who should be getting lots of offers in and outside Iran is Mohsen Namjoo, one of the country’s most respected younger musicians. Mohsen plays the light and airy setar, though he looks like a weathered rock star of at least forty-five—a kind of Iranian Keith Richards with better teeth and skin. In fact, Mohsen is in his early thirties, but he’s been through enough pain, drugs, and suffering in the last few years to last a lifetime.

When we finally managed to arrange a joint performance, at the apartment of one of Tehran’s leading gallery owners, I understood just how heavy Persian rock could be, even unplugged. Most of the artists I’ve met in Iran believe, as one metal musician put it, that “you can’t make a career out of music in Iran unless you are willing to compromise.” Mohsen clearly hasn’t heard about that philosophy. He lives purely and only to play music, and couldn’t care less about the latest trends in pop music or the most recent three political crises. His years studying in some of Iran’s most prestigious conservatories have produced an improbably wild yet somehow controlled style of setar playing, with a voice that can change from growled whispers to howls to tearful falsettos in the space of a measure.

With his talent has come quite a bit of ego (as more than one musician who’s worked with him warned me); the best strategy I could think of halfway through our first song together was to play a simple rhythm on the guitar, or setar when we switched instruments for a couple of songs, and let him do his thing. This was certainly what everyone at this party had come to hear (several brought camcorders or mp3 players to record the “show,” which quickly made its way onto YouTube). As I quickly learned, Mohsen’s thing includes blues progressions seemingly shorn from Robert Johnson and heavy-metal riffs drawn directly from Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, interlaced with the intricate melodies of the
segah
mode, which he has transformed into an Iranian all-around blues-rock mode that left me, and most of the small audience, trying to figure out whether he was playing an Iranicized version of Western rock or blues, or a Westernized version of traditional Iranian music.

Mohsen might be an ex-junkie whose prodigious talent is matched only by his outsized ego. But he seems to have figured out the best strategy to defeat the mullahs and the repressive Iranian state that keep going after other musicians: ignore them. Rather than take them on with political lyrics, just get everyone high on your infectious music. Tear at the legitimacy of the regime with each
koron
and each three-stringed power chord strummed—when necessary, with a paper clip bent over a broken nail—with violent intensity on your setar. Get the metalheads and the traditional artists to give you props and support you, move from party to party and, when possible, from concert to concert, with a ferociously joyful music that links together almost every style heard in Iran, from the Zoroastrian era to the arrival of hip-hop.

As Mohsen explained in his very broken English, he just “lets the music do the talking, and the music will set you free.” It’s a sentiment that more and more members of Iran’s metal, rock, and hip-hop scenes are taking to heart. It’s not an easy task—at almost the same moment I was flying out of Tehran, an Iranian American colleague of mine at UC Irvine, Ali Shakeri, was arrested at the airport, and languished for months in jail or under house arrest with several other Iranian Americans on charges of being CIA agents and “velvet revolutionaries.” Yet only a few months later I was able to meet up with Farzad Golpayegani and his band in Istanbul, where we—three Iranians, a Brit, and an American—performed before 30,000 fans at the biggest (and perhaps the only) peace festival in the Muslim world. That’s the way life goes in Iran today, and however disheartening it can be, no one I know would risk the status quo for the risky and dangerous business of another revolution (“Look what happened last time we had one!” was the universal response I received every time I broached the subject).

Everyone agrees that the struggle for Iran’s soul will be long and hard, but if the activists, intellectuals, and artists I’ve met, religious and secular alike, can muster enough patience and strategic foresight, there’s a good chance that they’ll succeed in cracking open the public sphere a bit more each year. And soon enough, it will grow so wide that no one—be it Ahmadinejad, the
basij,
or the ayatollahs—can force it closed again.