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Oh devout ones, devout ones . . . If you’re on the road to Heaven and I’m on the path to Hell, It’s none of your business . . . If I am drunk, it’s none of your business If I am sober, it’s none of your business! “be to che” (“none of your business”) by hassan shamaizadeh, 20041 Above are the words to a song by Hassan Shamaizadeh, a well-known Iranian vocalist, instrumentalist, and composer who has lived in Southern California since the Iranian Revolution, which took place some three decades ago. These lyrics are set to a rollicking, driving rhythmic instrumental accompaniment that recalls urban musical styles linked to dance and Tehran’s cabarets of the mid-twentieth century. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) in 1978–1979, such cabarets and nightclubs were closed, mixed-sex social dance was banned, and popular musics were restricted as the country’s religious leaders sought to bring state, culture, and society into line with Islamic and revolutionary principles. In “Be To Che,” Shamaizadeh speaks back to the “devout ones” (zāhed-hā)2 who wish to regulate his personal life, while he employs sonic references, and their contextual connotations, that flout the Islamic state’s cultural regulations. Produced in Los Angeles—far from its implied clerical addressees—Shamaizadeh ’s musical statement is representative of much more than a single exile’s grumbling taunts to a country in which he is no longer welcome. Rather, the singer is one of hundreds of musicians and media producers active in the Iranian culture industries that coalesced in Southern California after the Islamic Republic heavily restricted popular culture and media. Fed by the mass exodus, beginning in the early 1980s, of many of the country’s most famous musical stars and most skilled media producers, these exile chapter 3 iranian popular music in los angeles: a transnational public beyond the islamic state farzaneh hemmasi 86 farzaneh hemmasi culture industries have produced music and media to serve the area’s local Iranian community, the largest in the world outside of Iran. Much exileproduced popular music takes the Iranian homeland as its main focus, a typical orientation for first-generation migrants that helps situate diasporic subjects by simultaneously referring to place and aiding in emplacement.3 But this exilic preoccupation with Iran serves another function as well: it provides different forms and avenues for Iranian identification than are available either in Western or official Iranian media. Whether inside or outside the country, music plays a special role in debates about Iranian identity, engaging Iran’s relationship with Islam and the West, and raising questions regarding rights to expression, sexuality, youth, and gender, making it an ideally situated cultural form to examine in order to understand the conflicts facing the Iranian nation. Today, LA-produced music and media, and the national concerns expressed therein, are not only diasporic but transnational, reaching dispersed Iranian communities around the world, as well as audiences in Iran, where they are illegal but widely consumed. As I show in this chapter, Iranian exile popular music’s homeland orientation is driven by its creators’ financial and emotional motives, but also by a desire to extend Iranian culture, identity, and political expression beyond the ideological and territorial bounds of the Islamic Republic. From their positions abroad, Iranian exile popular musicians contribute to what I argue is a transnational public containing views and representations of Iranian-ness that deviate from dominant state-approved discourses. What versions of Iranian identity are explored in this music, and how might these contrast with those identities and practices promoted in the Iranian Revolution or by the Islamic state? Further, how effective is exile popular music in reaching widespread Iranian audiences both inside and outside of the country , and how can we evaluate its influence? The chapter begins with a brief overview of the salient postrevolutionary Iranian state policies regarding expression and culture that provide the context for both the initial establishment of the LA-based Iranian exile culture industries and the particular forms Iranian popular music and media have taken in Los Angeles. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Southern California in 2007, I outline the LA cultural industries and focus on popular music’s transnational circulation to Iranians abroad and in their homeland, a topic that has not been covered in the few previous accounts of Iranian popular music in Southern California (Naficy 1993; Shay 2000). Sketching out some of...

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