5 Video Clips from Iran: The Sound of Resilience

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This delightful list looks at Iran and the diaspora, who are often in a state of self-imposed if not state-imposed exile. We listen to the heartbeat of the resistance of artists through self-awareness and creativity. From rappers to singer-songwriters, Iran’s rich cultural history of Persian empires and millennia of civilization reaches us in composition, costume, musical and lyrical innovation, scenography, and overall style, not to mention the creative means of bypassing the intended cultural isolation by the current regime. Through sheer willpower, these voices find each other and the exiled diaspora across the mesh of wifi signals that hold them together and transcend censorship.

Music: Jarshaa
Video: Jarshaa
Track: Khanevadegi 2 (Familial 2) (Iran, 2022)

If any video captures the width and breadth of Iranian rap music today it is Jarshaa’s monumentally epic magnum opus «Khanevadegi 2» (Familial/Family 2). In a stunning tag-team-style project, 39 different rappers represent each of the 31 provinces of this huge country, each wearing a shirt with their location on Iran’s map. The markedly different musical forms and indigenous instruments, costumes, iconic locations, and regional vocals make this video the musical journey of a lifetime. The sheer effort put into the video edits, the seamless musical transitions, and the mind-blowing concept make this forward-thinking creative feat a classic that any music lover and ethnomusicologist today should be aware of and return to time and again.

Music: Eendo
Lyrics, Music, Production, Video: Ardalan Payvar (Shaadbaanoo)
Track: Fekresho Kardi Taa Be Haal? (Has It Ever Crossed Your Mind?) (Iran/USA, 2023)

Despite all of the efforts to suppress the voices of women in Iran, the image of singer Shaadbaanoo’s kick-ass lyrics being thrown in your face with all the force of the duo Eendo’s creative power defies all odds. While her hair billows in the background, she sings «Free my locks in the air, now the power is all mine». With its driving bassline and gathering beat, this track is dedicated to all the lovers of Iran, asking if we, the listeners, are free of blame. «They call me ‹The Sinner›, the ‹corrupter of humankind›, what’s your crime? Has it ever crossed your mind?» A powerful manifesto for the continuing revolution against the oppressive regime of Iran: «I’m a comrade of Iran, my codeword is Mahsa Amini, my voice reaches far and wide, beyond boundaries.» Mahsa Amini is a code word since the murder of 21-year-old Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini kicked off the women’s revolution in Iran and its diaspora in September 2022.

Lyrics: Shapur
Music: Mahdyar
Track: Marg Bar Kolle Nezam (Down With the Whole Regime) (Iran/France, 2023)

Few raps spit bars like this one, let alone include the actual sound effect of the rapper spitting! This track literally lines up the ammo and spits battle lyrics aimed at the regime of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (like their CIA, called the IRGC which is divided into the Sepahi and Basiji, as mentioned in the lyrics). Not only are the track’s words full of exemplary bile but this rapper’s voice is perfectly pitched to make that particular «kkhhaaack» sound at the back of his throat to shoot, machine gun-like, the appropriate bile aimed back at the IRGC. He flings insults in Persian that are unparalleled in sonic and poetic impact! «We will fight with stones, sticks, power cables and spit» (and then spits).

A woman is the mother of all men
We fight even with stones and sticks
Electric wire and saliva
We all shout together
You brought shame to Iran,
Down with the whole regime!

Music: Sadegh «Booghi» & Soor
Video: Sajjad Ahmadzadeh Track: Ow Ow (Iran, 2024)

This song and video is a spin-off of a clip in which aptly named 70-year-old pensioner and taxi driver Sadegh «Booghi» literally boogies for a crowd in a market in the Caspian Sea city of Rasht. Known locally as Uncle Sadegh, he earned the nickname booghi (megaphone), because he went for years to the football stadiums with a megaphone to cheer on his team. The globally viral video became a symbol of resistance as people all over the world remixed the dance with that catchy song that required no instruments. The lyrics sing of being from Rasht, telling onlookers to «cheer up» as the singer professes their love for them. The Asia Football Confederation’s (AFC) official online page posted a video of the Iranian team players, male and female, dancing to the song, remixed by musician Sajjad Ahmadzadeh.

The regime tried to censor Booghi’s videos as he quickly amassed thousands of followers, because dancing in public, as well as men and women dancing together, is outlawed by the regime in Iran. The men from the video were blindfolded and beaten and made to sign a pledge that they would never sing or dance again. Booghi’s page content was deleted, yet the regime’s cyber army was forced to reinstate it after mass outrage, and «Ow Ow» went as far as Africa!

Music: Labyrinth
Video: Priscilla Kounkou Hoveyda
Track: Etehad (Unity) (Iran/Turkey, 2023)

In the south of Iran, a strong tradition of Black culture and music is rooted in Gulf spiritualism, naval culture, and Bushehri identity. The band Labyrinth from Bandar Abbas identifies as such, producing music and videos with this woven into their work. Afro-Iranian identity surfaces as instrumentation, makeup and hair, choreography, and musical style (traditional trance) in urban coastal settings. Now, in exile in Turkey due to their music, projecting into a self-aware «post-women’s revolution Iranian reality», their powerful music takes on the politics of the enduring Woman, Life, Freedom movement since Mahsa Jina Amini’s murder.

Biography

Fari Bradley is an artist and researcher (born in Iran) based in London, U.K. Bradley focuses on sound, society, and awareness with a long research-based arts practice that includes broadcast, performance, experimental music, sculpture, installation, interventions, and writing. Follow her journey into sound on her website, Instagram, or X

Published on May 29, 2024

Last updated on May 29, 2024

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5 Videos from Kosovo: Post-War Indie

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by Brilant Pireva

A wild mix of flavors, from limbo and madness, melancholy and fervor, as well as a self-deprecating humor. Watch a list of independent music videos from post-war-struck Kosovo.

With the end of the 1999 war in Kosovo, an interim UN administration, and the beginning of the new millennium, the music industry in Kosovo saw itself flooded with American and European popular culture trends – hip hop, RnB, etc. – that would dominate and define the local commercial industry musically and visually. Club bangers, summer anthems, and flashy, blingy videos to suit. This would be the predominant model for commercial music & music videos that is still more or less prevalent today, where we see tropes of wealth, status, and sex rise to the top. The independent scene that did not conform to this model was often self-financed and explored ideas and themes that were not as marketable to mass audiences. Hopelessness, longing, and many other such currents often pushed out of sight. If these can be considered in a sense a counter-culture in relation to the dominant cultural trends of the day, then it’s interesting to reflect on what they also represent about the history of Kosovo.

Five videos is of course not enough to do the independent scene any justice, and there are countless others out there, but for now these are five interesting ones we can propose for a short introduction.

Music: Retrovizorja
Track: 1999 (Kosovo, 2003)
Video: Klejdi Eski

Hazy vignettes of the city. Despondent and aimless characters inhabit gray and washed out landscapes. A child’s dreamworld is interrupted and terrorized by figures in suits. Faces, bodies, and silhouettes pass by in frenetic double-time. The mood for the new millennium here is one of pessimism. The figures in suits obviously point to the bureaucracy of the day, rife with corruption and shady dealings. Shadowy figures and whispers, rumors, connections to get you in the door, things of this sort are what the UN is associated with here.

Music: Cute Babulja
Track: Kolateralisht (Kosovo, 2004)
Video: KOPERATIVA

A desolate bazaar and an air of torpor leads us to a theater. Where are we? An absurdist comedy or horror? Nightmarish scenes with just enough whimsy carry us along. A frog falls from the sky! A funny commentary on the bizarro aspects of life that dysfunction brings. There is something about the mood of the 1999–2008 period (the period of UN administration after the war and before Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence) that I personally feel is captured wonderfully here. The mixed flavors of limbo and madness, melancholy and fervor, as well as the self-deprecating humor.

Music: NR
Track: Filma Turqisht (Kosovo, 2007)
Video: Puntor’t Social

Outside of the earth’s atmosphere, extraterrestrials beam a ray and latch onto a signal from Kosovo. From here on, we are taken on a ride across a fourth-wall-breaking parody of the tropes dominating the commercial music and video industry. The aliens find it funny. A satirical commentary on the state of the commercial industry that hasn’t changed all too much since then. The music industry today is still dominated by club-friendly anthems that are annually released around the same time, to fuel the summer concerts and club performance circuit. The indie scene here doesn’t have the same options for funding, so this limits it in a way, but also frees it from conforming to the clichés to which the mainstream has to pay lip service.

Music: Aku
Track: Cactus (Kosovo, 2014)
Video: Brilant Pireva

The protagonist explores the spaces and identity of Pristina in an accusatory way, literally pointing the finger at them. Buildings from different periods of its history each contribute in their own way to the mosaic: some damaged, some unfinished, some rushed. The post-war period saw a certain type of lawlessness that also added to the character of the city, where there were over 46,000 illegal constructions. These too are now a part of its character. The track was produced with both sampling and instrumentation, part of an ongoing music project of mine.

Music: Edona Vatoci
Track: Hala (Kosovo, 2015)
Directed: Noar Sahiti
Editing: Lum Çitaku

The countryside, greenhouses, and the flora contrast with the harsh strobes, gusts, jolts, and contortions. The antagonism and contradictions are plenty. A seed, the sun, sowing and reaping. A more personal reflection of social and emotional life in Kosovo. I think here we also see in the mood and affect of the work the progression into a different phase of the history of Kosovo. At this point, it had been seven years after the declaration of independence and a new dynamic was unfolding quite different from the early 2000s.