Iranian Musicians Push Back Against the Islamic Republic
A Conversation with TarantisT, Justina, and DJ Ali Pink
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| Improv session. Tehran, Iran. 2013. Photograph: Jai Brodie. Courtesy Jai Brodie and The Guardian. |
by Lily Moayeri, Under The Radar Magazine
Imagine a society where music is forbidden. A society where listening to music is an offense punishable by imprisonment and lashings. Accessing music is only possible through illegal means. Sharing music is a risk you take with your life. This dystopian-like society is not the stuff of an extreme YA novel, it’s what’s been happening in Iran for the last 47 years, under the dictatorial rule of the Islamic Republic.
It hasn’t always been this way in Iran. An ancient civilization going back to the Persian Empire from 550 B.C., Iran was built on the arts. Persian poets Ferdowsi, Rumi, Hafez, and Khayyam have been translated and read in multiple languages for over 1000 years. Traditional Persian instruments tar (lute), santur (dulcimer), chang (harp), and ney (flute) have been played for centuries.
More recently, prior to the Islamic Republic’s takeover, popular Iranian musicians ruled the airwaves in the country, as did Western artists such as Donnie & Marie. Music stores stocked cassette albums from Europe and the U.S. and did excellent business. Nightclubs, cabarets, and discos featured live entertainment and the hottest tunes, both Western and Iranian. All were packed.
The extreme turnaround after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which bases its constitution, in large part, on the most fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia law, that is the religious law of Islam as commanded by God, came down particularly hard on music. Initially, all music was banned, but Iranians’ love of music, and the need for it, couldn’t be denied.
In the early ’80s, access to contraband music came in the form of bootlegged cassettes of albums purchased abroad and smuggled into Iran by Iran Air pilots. These circulated through an underground network of trusted clients who welcomed an affable fellow with an unmarked briefcase into their homes. Inside this briefcase were the latest albums from Culture Club, Duran Duran, Wham!, Spandau Ballet, and anyone else in the UK charts. Even better was the visual component with Betamax cassettes of Top of the Pops episodes taped off the BBC.
It was through these illegal means that I was first introduced to the music that would shape my teenage tastes. When I spoke to Andrew Ridgeley in 2023 about seeing Wham! for the first time in this fashion, he wasn’t surprised. He cited examples of other fans he has come across who have told him similar stories. In 2009, I shared with Pet Shop Boys that I clandestinely listened to “West End Girls” in Tehran, the capital city of Iran, in 1986. This was right before permanently moving to the United States, where I was born, in order to start college. They told me they received a lot of communication from fans in Iran and even looked into having a concert there.
The idea of a Western artist performing under the Islamic Republic is preposterous. But so is the idea of an Iranian artist performing music that has not been approved by the regime’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. This entity examines lyrics, music, and artwork to assure a song complies with the country’s moral laws. This is the murkiest of gray areas considering the tenets for these laws were established at the time of the prophet some 1400 years ago and their analysis is highly subjective.
While I can recall a pre-Islamic Republic time when I went to cassette shops and chose from a selection of, admittedly copyright-infringed options, Iranians born after the Islamic Revolution have never experienced music legally. Electronic music DJ Ali Pink, the founder of Techno Tehran Records, first discovered music through his parents’ tape collection. Pink Floyd, in particular, stood out to him—not unusual among Iranians. In fact, that’s where the “Pink” in his name comes from and what he used to tag the streets of Tehran with. In turn, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters has been very outspoken over the last three years since the protests that broke out in Iran and across the globe. These protests began after the murder of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s Gasht-e-Ershad, or morality police, in September 2022, which sparked the Women Life Freedom movement.
Pink didn’t know what Pink Floyd’s lyrics meant, but “the music would take me away,” he says, speaking in Farsi on Zoom from Tehran. A book was published, illegally of course, with all of Pink Floyd’s lyrics and their translations to Farsi. Pink believes he’s one of the first people to purchase it.
“The impact of their music became 100 times more after that,” he says. “I had been listening to Pink Floyd since I was five years old. I knew the book by heart. The Wall was my own life. It is so close to all our lives.”
During Pink’s teenage years, bootleg cassettes of Western albums were being sold undercover on street corners in the evenings. Through these, he discovered Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Scorpions. Pink had friends whose families would travel abroad over summer vacations and come back with a handful of smuggled CDs, which were quickly burned. These circulated even faster once personal computers became more prevalent. “CDs had cover art,” says Ali. “That made it so much more exciting.”
Pink was stopped many times by the Basij, the paramilitary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He was busted with cassettes or videotapes in his pockets. The Basij broke the tapes under their heels, assaulted Pink and his friends, demanded to know where they got the tapes and took them into custody. Pink got his nose broken resisting the Basij’s aggression.
In the early 2000s, Pink heard what he was told was “rave music.” He was exposed to Deep Dish, the Grammy-winning Iranian-American house music duo. This was an inspiration to him. “Is such a thing possible, Iranian people being this popular in America?” he recalls. “That was very attractive to us. If they can do it, maybe we can do it. We would see clips of people DJing and say, ‘How great would it be to have an event at Freedom Square [a major landmark in Tehran], and we would be behind the decks with headphones.’ It was a dream.”
He bought DJ equipment and started throwing small underground parties. These types of events are common in Iran. The word spreads through social media, WhatsApp groups and the messaging service, Telegram. The risk is ever present as the Islamic Republic’s cyber force is fearsome in its insidious power. Iranian heavy metal group TarantisT discovered this firsthand when they were throwing underground parties, literally, in the basement of their family home in Tehran.
Like Pink, the brothers at the core of TarantisT, Arash and Arsalan Rahbary, had their first music exposure at home through their parents’ collections. A client of the fellow with the briefcase of bootlegs, they discovered Metallica, Slayer, and other metal bands. They also heard Michael Jackson, Supertramp, and British boy bands. Their parents ensured the brothers had music lessons, participated in sports as well as learning English.
“We were angry, we were disturbed, we were panicked, we were facing traumas,” says Arash, who immigrated to Los Angeles in 2008, arriving there on an artist visa as an Iranian musician. He continues, “Heavy guitar tones have a soothing tone and a healing vibration. That sound was a cure for our anger, panic, trauma, for our limitations. Heavy metal saved my life. It also was my way to get out.”
The turn of the century brought digital formats and the internet to the forefront. With that, TarantisT began recording their performances and sharing them online. They built a major following on MySpace and caught the attention of Western media. Some journalists traveled to the brothers’ basement in Tehran to see them perform and interview them. SXSW invited TarantisT to participate and they were able to book tour dates, even as bureaucracy was working against them.
TarantisT are prolific in their music output, arguably releasing more songs, in both English and Farsi, than any other Iranian artist since the 2022 uprisings. Their songs speak to nationalism, the plight of the Iranian people and motivating them to unite, their fellow artists, and hope. “I’ve been an activist my whole life,” says Arash. “Everything is illegal in Iran. The electric guitar is considered a satanic instrument, which makes me a devil worshiper and an execution order would have been on the table for me.”
Arash feels certain he and his bandmates would have been imprisoned had they remained in Iran any longer. He says, “There was a chance of getting arrested because of playing music or because of carrying an instrument in the streets or having CDs or tapes of Western music or wearing metal heavy metal shirts or because of having long hair. So many times we got pulled over because of metal music playing in our cars.”
Pink was arrested in 2023, the charge being throwing underground parties, and posting videos of the parties on Instagram. He was imprisoned, released on bail, and finally freed after appealing, and paying a hefty fine, in other words, a bribe.
Technology has been a double-edged sword for people inside Iran. They are connected to the rest of the world. But this is not to say that the Islamic Republic allows unrestricted access to the internet. Sites based in countries with sanctions against Iran do not allow users who are based there. But Iranians are savvy with VPNs and have clever ways to work around restrictions. Teaming up with friends and family abroad, they are able to set up profiles on streaming platforms and access music a lot more easily than the days of physical-only products.
By that same token, Iranian artists can distribute their music to the world. It takes a few layers of smoke and mirrors to sign up with a digital distributor and even more layers to get paid since sending money to Iran isn’t an option.
Even if not through streaming services, Iranian musicians get their music heard and seen through social media. It was on Instagram that singer/songwriter Shervin Hajipour posted the song “Baraye,” which was viewed 40 million times before he was ordered to take it down by the Islamic Republic. “Baraye” is the unofficial anthem of the Woman Life Freedom movement and won the Special Merit Award for Best Song for Social Change Grammy in 2023.
Hajipour was originally arrested within days of “Baraye” being posted online, then released on bail. In March 2024, he was sentenced to eight months for “propaganda against the establishment” and three years for “encouraging and provoking the public to riot to disrupt national security.” He was ordered to present himself to prison at the end of July. While waiting for his fate to be decided by the arbitrary judicial system of the Islamic Republic, Hajipour continued to release music, including the songs “Ashghal” (“Trash”) and “Shabooneh” (“By Night”). As of September 2024, Hajipour has been pardoned, at least for now.
Perhaps the most imprisoned Iranian musician is dissident rapper Toomaj Salehi. Rap and hip-hop are particular thorns in the side of the Islamic Republic as the genre speaks of society’s dissatisfaction with the regime more so than any other. This is explored in detail in the documentary Rap & Revolution Iran, made by Iranian-German filmmaker Omid Mirnour who highlights Iranian rappers of all genders inside and outside Iran and Salehi is always at the top of that list.
An acolyte of Tupac Shakur’s, Salehi has been arrested multiple times since 2021 for his incendiary rhymes that poetically and unequivocally call out the Islamic Republic’s atrocities. After Mahsa Amini’s murder, Salehi was arrested again, tortured, kept in solitary confinement, then sentenced to six years in prison. He was released in November 2023, then re-arrested after releasing a video detailing his experience. In April 2024, he was sentenced to death. Two months later, this sentence was overturned, but Salehi remained in prison until December 1, 2024.
“The Islamic Republic prefers to keep Toomaj imprisoned so he is under their control,” says Justina, the preeminent Iranian female rapper, also a gifted singer and lyricist. She speaks in Farsi from her home in Sweden, where she has been living in exile since 2020. Justina has two collaborations with Salehi, “Pichak” and “Shallagh,” which they worked on remotely, years after she was pushed out of Iran in 2018. Justina’s songs speak in clear and certain terms about social issues in Iran. Her rapid-fire flow is articulate and unafraid, boldly illustrating uncomfortable topics. She was encouraged by her parents to sing—strictly at home as singing is forbidden for women in the Islamic Republic. But Justina found her courage and her musical taste through her open-minded father’s cassette collection, which ranged from Elvis Presley to ABBA and Michael Jackson. She laid down her first raps when she was in her late teens at a time when home studios had become commonplace in Iran.
“When I heard the first raps in Farsi, the language was different, the topics were different,” she says. “Rap was of the streets. It was more wide-reaching. It was new. It was accessible. It was easy to download a beat and record a rap song.”
Hip-hop is the most prevalent music genre of protest in Iran. This is because of the ease with which the backing track can be created, or obtained, and because of the nature of rapping. “Iranians are a people that even our protest slogans are like songs,” says Justina.
“Our classical literature is strong, especially in poetry. Farsi rap is a slogan and a song combined. Whatever you say in Farsi rap, the expectation is that the content must be good in addition to the rhyme, the flow, and the beat. Whatever you say in it is important. The audience wants to be impacted by it.”
Since rapping has less melody—or so she thought—Justina presumed it might be less problematic if she expressed herself through rhymes rather than singing. It took a few years of steady output before she became problematic enough for the Islamic Republic’s security forces to come for her, posing as the mail carrier and illegally entering her parents’ home. They tried to strongarm Justina to cooperate with them by changing the subject matter of her songs to Islamic Republic-friendly topics. She refused, and six months after getting caught up in the court system, she left Iran permanently.
“Islamic Republic sees that it cannot get rid of rap, that’s why it has tried to make it go in their direction,” says Justina. “The permitted environment of rap in the Islamic Republic is male-centric and anti-women. The Farsi rap audience is mainly teenage boys and the music is helping form their minds in the way the government wants. If you are an artist who wants to do your own thing, they won’t let you, just like they didn’t with Toomaj. They prefer people who don’t want to be under their control to leave the country. The number of times they have arrested Toomaj, it was to force him to go, and he will never leave Iran.”
The list of musicians inside Iran who are, or have been, imprisoned is long. Mehdi Rajabian, who was with Salehi when he was arrested in 2023, served a three-year prison stint, three months of which were in solitary, and he was on a hunger strike for 40 days. Like Salehi, Rajabian resumed making music as soon as he was released. This year, Mercedes-Benz used Mehdi’s music to soundtrack the teaser for their Pebble Beach Concours 2024 race cars.
Even though he knows the eyes of the Islamic Republic’s cyber force are on his social media, Ali Pink continues throwing underground parties in the outskirts of Tehran every Thursday and Friday night. Just after we spoke for this story, his party was raided. He sent me a video of his escape through a dense forest. Since then, Pink has been receiving “no caller ID” calls regularly. Still, Techno Tehran Records had its fourth anniversary and continues to regularly release music from artists inside Iran and make waves in the global electronic music community.
“If the Islamic Republic finds out there is a record label in Iran, we will all disappear,” Pink says.
Yet he perseveres, as do all musicians inside Iran. “Battle isn’t only going into the streets and setting off bombs and fighting and shouting slogans,” Pink says. “This is our way of battling, with the music that we release. We dedicate the music to the kids who were killed in the streets of Iran. We’re continuing to do it. This is our protest against the Islamic Republic.”
[Note: This article originally appeared in Issue 74 of our print magazine, The Protest Issue 2025, which is out now. This is its debut online.]
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