Tag: the-art-of-protest

Another recurring theme in Hichkas’s work has been the increasing censorship of artistic expression in Iran, where artists are required permits under the narrow rules of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which ensure that cultural works are inoffensive in the eyes of the clerical establishment. Shining a light on the impossibility of creative freedom under censorship, Hichkas asked whether Iran’s revered literary works would have come to life under these conditions: “What if Hafez for his Divan, what if Rumi for his Masnavi and Muhammad for his Quran had to receive government publication permits?”

A good day will come?

Hichkas’s perennial collaborator under the pioneering Moltafet label, the producer Mahdyar Aghajani, has been central to the development of the Iranian hip-hop sound. In its early days, Iranian hip-hop artists rapped in English and were heavily inspired by US rap in their appearance and musical expression. Aghajani, who had classical music training, sought to create a distinctly Iranian sound by using traditional Persian instruments like the tar, a long-necked lute and the ney, a type of flute, and Hichkas’s key lyrics were written in Persian instead of English. Despite initial inspiration from and imitation of Western rap, Iranian rappers created a distinct identity, as expressed by the popular rapper Yas in 2014: “Poetry is in our blood. If [Tupac] could sing about his life and pain and his culture, why couldn’t I do the same thing in my own language?”

In 2010, Hichkas released a wistful, longing anthem called A Good Day Will Come, shortly after millions took to the streets as part of the Green Movement to protest an election result they believed to be rigged, and to demand political and civil freedoms. In the song, Hichkas expressed his hope for a day where Iran would be free from violence and chaos. However, the tension following the protests forced Hichkas’s exile to London, and the track became his last to be recorded inside Iran (it was released while he flying out of the country). The song became iconic to many young people (the slogan A Good Day Will Come is still graffitied by youngsters on the walls of Tehran). Meanwhile, the movement was brutally squashed and its leaders systematically arrested by the government, and the “good day”, for many, has still yet to be seen.

“Rap’s history and legacy in post-revolutionary Iran is in and of itself, really political”, Nahid Siamdoust, associate professor in media and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, tells BBC Culture. “There wasn’t a whole lot of leeway for musicians or other creators of cultural content to express that kind of critique. Hip-hop and rap provided that space.” According to Siamdoust, the period following the Green Movement gradually led to the increased silencing of rappers, which made it difficult for any kind of political expression to come through.

“When I became a teenager and started producing for underground artists, the Iranian government started cracking down on us, closing the studios we used and arresting the studio staff as well as arresting the artists I was working with,” Mahdyar Aghajani told The Quietus in 2017. Aghajani, who was exiled to Paris, told The Quietus that underground artists were treated as “national security” cases. For domestic Iranian rappers, particularly those who incorporated political subjects into their work, their first track might very well be their last, due to pressure from the authorities.

During the 2010s, there were some attempts to co-opt hip-hop as a pro-establishment art form, with the aim of promoting Islamic values and themes to a younger demographic. The tattooed rapper Amir Tataloo’s support for the conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi’s presidential run in 2017 was the most notable of these.

An era of protest

In the late 2010s, political tensions started rising again, with protests emerging annually between 2017 and 2019. Calls for regime change grew in strength, particularly among an increasingly vocal younger generation. The 2019 protests were a catalyst for lasting resentment against the state, as security forces killed between 300 in some reports and up to 1500 protestors, according to Reuters, within a week.

Addressing the protests, Hichkas released They’ve Clenched Their Fists in 2019; on the record’s cover was a long list of names of people who had been killed during the crackdown. Spoken word more than rap, the track was a searing critique of worsening conditions in Iran to the tune of a sombre setar (Iranian lute)melody. “They don’t want citizens, they want slaves. They turned the whole country into a big cage and say that there are no prisoners.” It concluded with harrowing audio of protesters being shot at.

In 2021, Toomaj Salehi, a Bakhtiari rapper who works by day as a metal factory worker, emerged as the embodiment of a defiant, fed-up generation. Typically rapping barefooted, he announced himself in his lyrics as the “roar of a rage” and a “soldier for rights”. The track Normal from 2021, made a mockery of any notion of normality in a country with staggering economic inequality. Rat Hole, released the same year, took aim at individuals domestically and abroad who he accused of being complicit in allowing human rights violations to rage in the country by looking the other way.

In 1972, he released the seminal album, Talking Book, with politically charged songs including Big Brother, which contained some of the frankest, most socially conscious lyrics he had written up to that point.

“Big Brother is a very strong protest song,” Gaines tells BBC Culture. “He says ‘You’ve killed all our leaders… You’ve caused your own country to fail.’” Wonder was describing a US society that responded to the social movements of the 1960s with violence and a series of political assassinations. “He’s clearly questioning the legitimacy of the political order at that time,” says Gaines.

The early 1970s was a disastrous era for African-American activists, with state crackdowns on the Black Panthers and the killing of Black Power leaders in Chicago, and Big Brother reflected those real events. On Wonder’s next album, Innervisions, songs including Higher Ground, Too High, and of course, one of his most influential songs, Living for the City, gave a stark view of the urban landscape. A cinematic story of the 20th-Century black American migration from the rural South to urban North, the song features a spoken word interlude that takes us right on to New York City streets with the roar of a bus and police sirens. It describes how a young black man from Mississippi gets caught up in crime, drugs and the police brutality many urban African Americans faced at the time – and remains relevant into the 21st Century.

A new national holiday

By 1980, with the release of Happy Birthday’s call to action, Wonder was one of the most important musicians in the country, and Dr King’s birthday became a rallying point to codify his activism, says Nelson George. “People were looking at that point to honour King and his movement and the change in America.”

But the America that King was murdered in, in 1968, was different from that of 1980, with civil rights struggles morphing into new challenges like equal opportunity in housing and education. The newly-elected Regan administration was cool on civil rights issues, and Reagan initially spoke out against the idea of a national holiday, resurrecting the old innuendo about King being a subversive communist, just as civil rights opponents in the 1950s had. 

“There were people then and probably still now, who just didn’t want a black person to have a national holiday,” George says. Many in the US also balked at the idea of making a holiday for someone who wasn’t a president or a government official, let alone a social activist. “There were a lot of threads working against this happening,” he adds.