Our Man in Tehran

I've recently started up a dialogue with an Iranian musician. I've been fascinated by Heavy Metal Islam, which tells the stories of rock musicians in Muslim countries and the struggles they endure just to play the music they like. For as much as American musicians complain about the hardships of touring or not making any money, we really have no idea what it's like to be actively persecuted by our government for making music. Here's an excerpt from one of his emails:

You asked about music in Iran, it has a long story. Iranian society is really complicated. First of all i think you should know that government is not representative of people. Islamic Republic is a dictator government and they disfigure everything. but there are every kind of people in Iran, religious, irreligious, modern and every kind that you could think. Iranian society is complicated because Tehran is different with other cities and we are on border. on the border of modernity and tradition. and about music, we have all of genres but some of them are underground like metal bands. the government doesn't care to art and music but people are very interested in art, cinema, music. and this is a big problem. last month my friend had a piano recital and Culture Ministry pestered him really. I mean bureaucratic problems. they don't care to artists. many musicians immigrate to other countries like England and Canada and if they can USA. my teacher is a composer but when he wants record his orchestral work he goes to european countries. why?...because of bureaucratic problems. artists, authors are open minded and it's a dangerous problem for a dictator government..do you understand? but it's one of our problem...most people in the world and specially in western countries are misunderstood about Iranians. even some of them don't know that we are not Arab, we are Persian. our culture is very different with arabs. did you hear president Obama's message about new year in Iran. do you know that first Human rights law wrote by Cyrus, Iranian king 2500 years ago? and now, Iran is one of the worst countries from human rights viewpoint?

My hope is that some day Iran might be able to follow the example of Czechoslovakia, which overthrew its hardline rulers in 1989's Velvet Revolution, a movement spurred by the the country's artistic community. Playwright and Czech President Vaclav Havel was involved in the 1970's with the Charter 77 manifesto, motivated in part by the arrest of members of a rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe[1]. The constant crackdown on musicians and artists in that country eventually caused the communist regime's overthrow. Maybe the Iranian people will be ready to do something similar. If history is any indication, America's exported culture (movies, music, and books) has a way of infiltrating even the most restrictive countries. Rock and roll, it would seem, still contains within it the seeds for revolution.


1.) "Plastic People" of course is a reference to a Frank Zappa song. There were a lot of Frank Zappa fans in Czechoslovakia, so much so that Havel himself invited Zappa to become an ambassador of culture for the Czech people in the late 80's, a move that then-US Secretary of State James Baker swiftly condemned and ultimately quashed.