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Can Techno save Iranian Pop ?
Can Techno save Iranian Pop?
So here we are. For 30 years, some might even say 35 years, Iranian pop music has been stuck in a rut of sorts. You know my drill on this, in many previous articles on music, I have alluded to it with a, "Death to 6/8!" battle cry.
For I am of a generation that feels as though Iranian popular music has moved little from the time when we were teenagers. One could say that if Pop music is in some ways a mirror of a culture, this seeming stagnation is explained by our current identity crisis. Are we the eslam embracing culture we are painted as today? Or are we the modernist Iranians of the pre eslamic-revolution era?
In the past few years, a healthy movement towards alternative music, by bands such as Kiosk or The Abjeez. They and others have made valiant attempts at shifting the curve. But their ability to change a whole pop-culture blissfully dumbed down on the obsessive compulsive 6/8 fog, is primarily hampered by the sheer size and energy of the seemingly lost "LA music machine" firmly standing against them. Often run by people older than me, primarily in Los Angeles and primarily supported by unsavvy small mom and pop Iranian shops that ironically nobody shops at anymore, and satellite TV stations that no one watches. These dinosaurs haven't the slightest idea of where to go, and are just feeding off of and into an imagined frenzy that they continuously create. Because like themselves, they think people are still hungry for the same old 6/8 they've been churning and re-churning. So much so, that all we really have now is nothing more than a fairly refined cheese. And judging from the letters and comments I get whenever I go on one of my anti 6/8 rampages, there are a lot of cheese lovers out there!
Don't get me wrong, cheese- I mean 6/8 used to be good. Once in a while, even these days even I will admit that I will occasionally smile at a small spark of good old 6/8. With all the cards stacked against it, good old 6/8 is infectious, soothing to the pain, even. But mostly, most of the 6/8 is now just so much crap. Iranian hillbilly music. No wait, Bandari is hillbilly music. 6/8 has become Iranian Mariachi music! And I have nothing against Mariachi music. It has an even longer tradition than 6/8! But the comparison is not a bad one, if you think about it.
And don't get me wrong, Iranian alternative music is no peach either. It has a lot of perception and maturation problems. Often they suffer from their own inability to get beyond their elegant homages to established western styles (Kiosk and their continued mis-association with Dire Straits, and Abjeez with Ska), they appear incapable of carving out a distinctive new form that is fun and attractive enough to unseat 6/8. Kiosk and Abjeez are making some great quality music these days, but being a self promoted (and therefore under funded) band, certainly has limitations in it's potential reach. Kiosk on it's own, part time, after work, on the weekend, as it fine tunes, and works out all of it's kinks and bugs on each successive album, can't possibly save Iranian pop anytime soon.
But just when all hope appears to be lost, or at a minimum reaffirms just how stuck we are in our post-revolution limbo, enter the "$50 Mix Drive" phenomenon. Recently, Iranians traveling for vacations and visits to Tehran, have discovered that if you ask your young cousin, to take you to a certain part of town, at a certain time of the day, and talk to a certain young man, you'll eventually be asked for your $50, your pocket drive, and to "come back at 3 tomorrow".
I recently got my hands on one such drive and to my amazement, found what might possibly be the first signs of new life in long-thought-dead Iranian pop music. Leave it to the "Forgotten Generation" to find their own ways to entertain themselves. On the contrary, as I now recall, just like I was when I was young, this generation too, is blissfully happy to be ignored by the older self-centered, "Voy Voy Manam Manam Lost Generation". An all too sad generation too busy lamenting what they "could have" or "should have" become, "... if only the revolution hadn't happened." ... Sigh... Deeper Sigh.
The drive I received "a copy of", is filled with new and fresh hard beat, what I will call "Techno-Iroony". While Techno infused Iranian pop music in itself is not a new phenomenon, the sheer amount of application of it to Iranian music, and modifying or "Iranianizing" Techno to fit the new form, is the new thing. A strong enough new movement? Probably not, but it is definite. And it is good!
These guys are "BRINGING COCKY BACK!"
What you get copied onto your drive for $50 US, is an obscenely large amount of MP3s. Like 3,000 songs obscene. As much as 300Gb if you give the pirate a large enough drive. CD Cover art included! Burned from all sorts of smuggled in CDs, and mostly lifted from Iranian social networking and file exchange sites before they become blocked by the authorities. But a good amount of them appear to be local home-grown original electronic mixes.
Imagine 3 or 4 over-cologned, hair-gelled, young Iranian guys with bandages over their noses huddled over a rudely equipped off-brand laptop overloaded with scrap RAM and serial-lifted copies of the latest Acid loops and mix software they can scour off of friends, or the net, as they lay track upon track of high quality complex rhythms and effects, late into the Tehran night, adding the crooning nasal young-man/boy vocals here, a precise computer generated 2-part harmony there, and always a touch of the ever present voice-box or any other filter effect, just to to give it some "Haal".
One trademark of this new direction is the announcement of the arranger, producer and singers' names during the intro theme. Iranian youth knowing that the song will be passed around electronically or at parties and clubs, demand the notoriety that comes with a hit, even if they mostly use their first names. The only problem is that using only your first name in Iran these days makes that "Ali" guy an amazingly talented person, because inevitably there is an "Ali" on almost all the songs! Which I think is an adorable miscalculation. Adding your last name is still apparently too risky a choice.
Sure, the Techno is often obvious variations lifted from the latest "Ibiza '08" or the harshest versions coming out of southern and eastern Europe these days. But even this makes sense. That this sound in spite of the obvious government, dead set against it, has still made it all the way to Tehran, even through simple shortwave radio. The thing to notice when you listen, is an almost purposeful absence of the 6/8 beat. The melodies are anthematic like a good techno song should always be, but the words, and beat combinations are often entirely new and fresh. At least for us and what we're used to hearing.
Although there is still a lot of the boring lamentation of lost or spurned love going on lyrically, for the most part, thankfully gone are the usual sad sorrowful wimp lyrics. The kind where the singer's entire liver, both kidneys and pancreas are going to be set on fire, if only YOU will look at me with those big beautiful Iranian eyes. If you even so much as cock one of those famous eyebrows at me in scorn, I'll literally kill myself. Again. And I mean it this time!
So here we are. For 30 years, some might even say 35 years, Iranian pop music has been stuck in a rut of sorts. You know my drill on this, in many previous articles on music, I have alluded to it with a, "Death to 6/8!" battle cry.
For I am of a generation that feels as though Iranian popular music has moved little from the time when we were teenagers. One could say that if Pop music is in some ways a mirror of a culture, this seeming stagnation is explained by our current identity crisis. Are we the eslam embracing culture we are painted as today? Or are we the modernist Iranians of the pre eslamic-revolution era?
In the past few years, a healthy movement towards alternative music, by bands such as Kiosk or The Abjeez. They and others have made valiant attempts at shifting the curve. But their ability to change a whole pop-culture blissfully dumbed down on the obsessive compulsive 6/8 fog, is primarily hampered by the sheer size and energy of the seemingly lost "LA music machine" firmly standing against them. Often run by people older than me, primarily in Los Angeles and primarily supported by unsavvy small mom and pop Iranian shops that ironically nobody shops at anymore, and satellite TV stations that no one watches. These dinosaurs haven't the slightest idea of where to go, and are just feeding off of and into an imagined frenzy that they continuously create. Because like themselves, they think people are still hungry for the same old 6/8 they've been churning and re-churning. So much so, that all we really have now is nothing more than a fairly refined cheese. And judging from the letters and comments I get whenever I go on one of my anti 6/8 rampages, there are a lot of cheese lovers out there!
Don't get me wrong, cheese- I mean 6/8 used to be good. Once in a while, even these days even I will admit that I will occasionally smile at a small spark of good old 6/8. With all the cards stacked against it, good old 6/8 is infectious, soothing to the pain, even. But mostly, most of the 6/8 is now just so much crap. Iranian hillbilly music. No wait, Bandari is hillbilly music. 6/8 has become Iranian Mariachi music! And I have nothing against Mariachi music. It has an even longer tradition than 6/8! But the comparison is not a bad one, if you think about it.
And don't get me wrong, Iranian alternative music is no peach either. It has a lot of perception and maturation problems. Often they suffer from their own inability to get beyond their elegant homages to established western styles (Kiosk and their continued mis-association with Dire Straits, and Abjeez with Ska), they appear incapable of carving out a distinctive new form that is fun and attractive enough to unseat 6/8. Kiosk and Abjeez are making some great quality music these days, but being a self promoted (and therefore under funded) band, certainly has limitations in it's potential reach. Kiosk on it's own, part time, after work, on the weekend, as it fine tunes, and works out all of it's kinks and bugs on each successive album, can't possibly save Iranian pop anytime soon.
But just when all hope appears to be lost, or at a minimum reaffirms just how stuck we are in our post-revolution limbo, enter the "$50 Mix Drive" phenomenon. Recently, Iranians traveling for vacations and visits to Tehran, have discovered that if you ask your young cousin, to take you to a certain part of town, at a certain time of the day, and talk to a certain young man, you'll eventually be asked for your $50, your pocket drive, and to "come back at 3 tomorrow".
I recently got my hands on one such drive and to my amazement, found what might possibly be the first signs of new life in long-thought-dead Iranian pop music. Leave it to the "Forgotten Generation" to find their own ways to entertain themselves. On the contrary, as I now recall, just like I was when I was young, this generation too, is blissfully happy to be ignored by the older self-centered, "Voy Voy Manam Manam Lost Generation". An all too sad generation too busy lamenting what they "could have" or "should have" become, "... if only the revolution hadn't happened." ... Sigh... Deeper Sigh.
The drive I received "a copy of", is filled with new and fresh hard beat, what I will call "Techno-Iroony". While Techno infused Iranian pop music in itself is not a new phenomenon, the sheer amount of application of it to Iranian music, and modifying or "Iranianizing" Techno to fit the new form, is the new thing. A strong enough new movement? Probably not, but it is definite. And it is good!
These guys are "BRINGING COCKY BACK!"
What you get copied onto your drive for $50 US, is an obscenely large amount of MP3s. Like 3,000 songs obscene. As much as 300Gb if you give the pirate a large enough drive. CD Cover art included! Burned from all sorts of smuggled in CDs, and mostly lifted from Iranian social networking and file exchange sites before they become blocked by the authorities. But a good amount of them appear to be local home-grown original electronic mixes.
Imagine 3 or 4 over-cologned, hair-gelled, young Iranian guys with bandages over their noses huddled over a rudely equipped off-brand laptop overloaded with scrap RAM and serial-lifted copies of the latest Acid loops and mix software they can scour off of friends, or the net, as they lay track upon track of high quality complex rhythms and effects, late into the Tehran night, adding the crooning nasal young-man/boy vocals here, a precise computer generated 2-part harmony there, and always a touch of the ever present voice-box or any other filter effect, just to to give it some "Haal".
One trademark of this new direction is the announcement of the arranger, producer and singers' names during the intro theme. Iranian youth knowing that the song will be passed around electronically or at parties and clubs, demand the notoriety that comes with a hit, even if they mostly use their first names. The only problem is that using only your first name in Iran these days makes that "Ali" guy an amazingly talented person, because inevitably there is an "Ali" on almost all the songs! Which I think is an adorable miscalculation. Adding your last name is still apparently too risky a choice.
Sure, the Techno is often obvious variations lifted from the latest "Ibiza '08" or the harshest versions coming out of southern and eastern Europe these days. But even this makes sense. That this sound in spite of the obvious government, dead set against it, has still made it all the way to Tehran, even through simple shortwave radio. The thing to notice when you listen, is an almost purposeful absence of the 6/8 beat. The melodies are anthematic like a good techno song should always be, but the words, and beat combinations are often entirely new and fresh. At least for us and what we're used to hearing.
Although there is still a lot of the boring lamentation of lost or spurned love going on lyrically, for the most part, thankfully gone are the usual sad sorrowful wimp lyrics. The kind where the singer's entire liver, both kidneys and pancreas are going to be set on fire, if only YOU will look at me with those big beautiful Iranian eyes. If you even so much as cock one of those famous eyebrows at me in scorn, I'll literally kill myself. Again. And I mean it this time!
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