Quiet Commotion

Introduction

I rap, therefore I officially exist.
— Salome MC, "بهای رهایی" ("The Price of Freedom")¹

Fun is serious business. My argument, developed here, is that hip hop, as a globalized grassroots social movement focused around the production and shared experience of art, is a form of street politics that has secured real social power for excluded urban youth in Iran. Around the globe predominantly poor, excluded, and urban youth are changing cities through hip hop, pushing back and replacing the authority of the state or filling its void with their own visions of culture, collective association, autonomy, and moral order. Perhaps more than any other artistic social movement before them, these rappers, dancers, DJs, and graffiti writers have changed the world through their artistic practices. Theirs is the story of a distinct kind of globalization: that of the grassroots.

Hip hop practitioners in Tehran, through their everyday leisure and artistic practices, are transforming the use and shape of the Iranian capital in order to make the city's infrastructure and symbolism produce value for them. In doing so, they, along with other cultural rebels, have compelled the Iranian government to make important, if limited, concessions with regard to the state's effort to control cultural production and consumption. These achievements are no small matter. These young artists and enthusiasts have carried out an artistic revolt that has resulted in real, albeit circumscribed, gains in social power.

In this paper, I have sought to tease out some preliminary observations about the particularities and spatial politics of hip hop in Tehran, using the insights of urban sociology as a primary framework to guide my analysis. Much of the extant English-language scholarship on hip hop has not discussed Iran's practitioners except occasionally.² TThe growing body of scholarship in English on hip hop outside the U.S. in combination with a storied roster of formally and informally produced video documentaries have helped to trace hip hop's rise and emplacement in (among other countries) Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Armenia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, South Africa, South Korea, China, and Japan, in addition to some of the more well-documented cases of France, the U.K., and Australia.^3a There is, however, one exceptional work in English that has provided crucial insights for this present investigation: Hisham D. Aidi's Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth (2014). Aidi's monograph does much to elucidate the interconnectedness of Black freedom struggles in the U.S., Black-American Islamic traditions, and the appeal of hip hop lyrics, music, and sampling practices to Muslim youth around the globe.^3b Nevertheless, much work remains to be done to better understand the particularities of the various expressive practices that together make up hip hop, particularly dance and graffiti, and to situate the spatial politics of these differentiated yet intertwined subcommunities in relationship to the specific spaces through which they move and upon which they act. Part of the purpose of this paper, then, is to make some headway in redressing these oversights.

In formulating my argument, I build upon the insights and work of Asef Bayat, particularly his much cited concept of "quiet encroachment"⁴ and his account of the politics of fun in Iran⁵. Quiet encroachment as a conceptual lens for understanding how marginalized groups negotiate unevenly distributed, oppressive state presence in order to secure value from dense urban environments has much to offer the study and historiography of hip hop. Indeed, the notion of quiet encroachment echoes key aspects of Tricia Rose's prescient insights in her groundbreaking Black Noise about how marginalized groups produce and secure meaning, joy, and value within the context of systematic economic and sociopolitical exclusion, a point to which I return below. My goal here, then, is to place Bayat and the larger field of urban sociology in conversation with the insights of dance studies and performance studies in order to better understand what is at stake for hip hop practitioners in their choice of embodied expressive practices and how these choices act upon and transform the physical and political order of their urban environment.

This study uses news media articles, dance videos, rap music and lyrics, and social media content as its primary source materials and places a heavy emphasis on online sources. The internet played a significant role in the dissemination of hip hop at its most crucial period of popularization in Iran in the 2000s and continued to play an essential role through the 2010s and into the early 2020s in disseminating artistic works within the context of a political system which otherwise limited and monopolized access to formal distribution channels. It is therefore important to understand and analyze materials made available online given the ways in which Iranian practitioners and enthusiasts have made use of online means for accessing and distributing hip hop works.

This reliance on online materials has both its advantages and its drawbacks. One of the strengths of this approach is that it centers the artistic creations of the hip hop practitioners in these networks as shared through one of its primary distribution media. Online materials published to or shared on the social media website MySpace and on independent websites like persianhiphop.com, rapfars.com, rap98.com (and its mirror rap98.ir), and Bia2Rap played a formative role in the early years of Iranian hip hop in the dissemination of music, videos, still pictures, and news.⁶ Other sites like YouTube and SoundCloud would later come to dominate alongside the social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and the messaging applications WhatsApp and Telegram.⁷ The internet was and continues to be a vital distribution vehicle given the government's various prohibitions on music and dance combined with their control over national radio and television broadcasts and permitting processes for live performance, which severely limit hip hop practitioners ability to share their work through formal channels. This focus on online source materials, however, also limits the scope of this investigation to those who have sought to make their contributions known or accessible to a broader audience of internet users and, therefore, misses those who, either because of questions of access to the internet and recording equipment or because of their reasonable and strategic considerations around inviting the unwelcome gaze of Iranian state bureaucracy, could not or would not submit their expressive practices to documentation and internet availability. One crucial consequence of this choice is that it almost surely over-represents male participants in the Iranian hip hop zirzamin⁸ ("underground") given that prohibitions on dance and musical performance are differentially experienced and unequally enforced along the axes of sex and gender with even harsher consequences for women and girls, making their strategic calculations about the perceptibility of their participation all the more complex.⁹ Nonetheless, for those women and girls who have made their participation in Iranian hip hop known to a broader public, I have endeavored to highlight their important role in building a robust, varied hip hop culture.

Iranian rappers 2be and Martian pose in front of wildstyle graffiti piece in an image from June 2007 watermarked with "Rap98", one of the earliest websites dedicated to Iranian hip hop.¹⁰ Watermarks were a common feature of early Iranian hip hop digital images and videos, often displaying the website to which the content was originally posted. The image here is small relative to images posted in later years to websites and social media, reflective of a need to limit file sizes for purposes of storage and for site visitors whose ability to access a media-rich site could be severely hampered by slow or irregular download speeds or unreliable internet connections.

My goals for this present writing are fourfold. First, this piece of writing serves to note some critical implications about the role that hip hop plays in activating and transforming the shape, use, and function of urban spaces. Second, this paper aims to suggest directions for future research. A third driving motivation is to question the characterization of absolute difference at the heart of much of the discourse about the United States and Iran emanating from political elites in both countries. Below the surface-level acknowledgement that Iranian youths' embrace of hip hop reveals shared cultural practices of U.S. origin, there lies a far more profound resonance between the authoritarian policing of Black bodies and culture in the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran's efforts to control the expressive practices and media consumption habits of Iranians, particularly youth. Without having to reduce the complexity and uniqueness of either socio-historical situation to a bland and inaccurate equality, that Iranian youth would interpret the expressive practices of Black, Afro-Latin, and Afro-Caribbean youth in the U.S. through hip hop as resonating with their own experiences of exclusion, lack of meaningful economic opportunity, deep dissatisfaction with the prevailing political, social, and moral order, and longing for new ways of relating to the expressive potential of their own bodies is profoundly meaningful. Among other things, it highlights how Orientalist discourses of absolute alterity belie the parallels between how power and exclusion in Iran and in the U.S. have been exercised, a point which political elites in either country are unlikely to acknowledge, not least because their supposed polar opposition is politically useful to both sides.¹¹

Lastly, I seek to bring together the original four elements of hip hop — breaking, graffiti, DJing, and emceeing — within an overview of the specific historical and sociopolitical context of Iran from the late 1990s through to the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî ("Woman, Life, Freedom") movement of 2022 around which time a markedly new generation of hip hop practitioners comes into view. This emphasis on locating the original elements as cultural forms within Iranian hip hop, while emphasizing both the historicity and cross-cultural present of these distinct though deeply imbricated expressive practices, serves to aid in tracing how and to what extent Iranian youth have indigenized and transformed these dynamic, evolving, and locally realized hip hop forms to reflect Iranian cultural priorities and lived realities. It also serves to maintain focus on how Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin cultural priorities continue to animate global hip hop practices. Far from positioning the four elements as transcendent archetypes that maintain some form of fixed identity outside of their embodied and material manifestations in spacetime and deracinated from their actual instantiation in disparate interpretive moments by distinct and changing actors, this approach shines a light on hip hop as an amalgamation of interwoven performance practices in a constant state of flux and in dialogue with a complex, dynamic network of actors, environments, meanings (historical, social, cultural, regional, individual, environmental, situational), and interpretive frames.

This approach also serves to reorient us away from the tendency in the academic literature and the media to prioritize hip hop's vocal and textual content to the occlusion of the ways in which hip hop practitioners describe and operationalize hip hop practices and performance. The extant research on hip hop in Iran concerns itself almost entirely with rappers and their lyrics with little mention of the wider array of expressive practices that constitute hip hop. This skewing of the research and popular analysis toward the oral and narrative dimensions of hip hop is true of both the academic literature in both English and Persian and of news media coverage.¹² Such an imbalance tends to overlook or, worse, misrepresent how Iranian hip hop practitioners themselves operationalize and construct their richly varied expressive communities and practices. This logocentric bias is hardly unique to the writing and documentation of Iranian hip hop. As Greg Dimitriadias has noted about hip hop analysis more broadly, "The constant search for meaning through rap's vocal content alone has led to much cross-cultural misunderstanding, especially concerning the role of social dance. The link between protest lyrics and social resistance, for example, is often assumed, while the body itself is often ignored or dismissed."¹³ This skewing toward the oral and linguistic aspects of hip hop is arguably better suited to the specific context of Iranian hip hop than many if not most other global hip hop communities, not least because of the unique importance of poetry in Iranian culture, history, and national identity in combination with the technological and spatial realities of Iranian media, politics, and underground youth culture at the time of hip hop's rise there in the early 2000s, which is a topic that I return to below.

Nonetheless, hip hop in Iran, as elsewhere, is a vast and varied constellation of diverse networks of practitioners and their aestheticized practices within which rap, or emceeing, is one element among several.¹⁴ Hip hop is not reducible to discourse alone. It bears emphasizing: hip hop is not just rap, and rap is not just words. Scholarship and analysis must not lose sight of this crucial fact. For one, to deracinate the textual content of rap from its rhythmically and temporally embodied performance to music significantly reduces the scope of the interplay of meanings that give rap its full performative power. This is not to say that lyrical analysis does not produce valuable insights. Rather, this analysis, while necessary, cannot fully explain all that rap is doing within the fuller expressive assemblage where hip hop performance brings it into being and imbues it with the expressive dynamism that has been so fundamental to its cultural cachet. Put another way, if most of what rap has to express could be gleaned from lyrics alone, then the hip hop term, "spittin'", in English, which emphasizes emphatically embodied, spoken delivery rather than words or text, would not be the layered metaphor that it is for rapping. Lyrical analyses work best when they return us to the broader interplay of performative meaning-making which lyrical interpretation serves to enhance.

Moreover, an analysis which resituates rap and rappers within the constellation of aestheticized practices that Iranian hip hoppers themselves describe as "hip hop" (هیپ هاپ) is essential to understanding Iranian hip hop on its own terms and from the perspective of its diverse practitioners, who are far from monolithic and who can and do disagree with one another. The degree to which these practitioners and the hip hop practices that they take up interact with each other is essential to any analysis which claims to speak to the subject of hip hop in general and not just not just spoken, rhymed lyrics as the traditionally synecdochic hip hop practice. Does hip hop as Iranians realize its various practices constitute a series of more or less siloed aesthetic endeavors that merely share a linguistic label or are the boundaries between these practices more semantic than empirical? This is a key question that has so far been largely absent from the academic literature. This oversight suggests that we as scholars and analysts of hip hop have yet to fully account for the richness, complexity, variety, and depth of hip hop in Iran.

Even to the extent that hip hop practices across performative media may be sufficiently independent to warrant separate analytical treatments, we must at a minimum account for how it is that Iranians nonetheless find it meaningful to identify these varied practices as hip hop. As the research presented here shows, the Iranian hip hop scene is characterized by an active and rich interplay between hip hop's various originary elemental practices — rap/MCing, breaking/dance, writing/graffiti, and DJing/music production. Many Iranian hip hop artists' practice has traversed the boundaries between the traditional elements of hip hop. Furthermore, Iranian hip hop analysts, enthusiasts, and practitioners regularly incorporate the performance, works, and expressions of various hip hop elements into their productions thereby sustaining and reinforcing the linkages between distinct hip hop practices and expressive forms and constituting an integrated hip hop community in which dancers, writers, producers, and emcees collaborate collectively in the production of a uniquely Iranian hip hop scene.

The roughly twenty-five-year period upon which this investigation takes up its focus, from the late 1990s to 2022, marks the birth and maturation of the first generation of Iranian hip hop. Among other important developments during this timeframe is a notable diversification in hip hop practices of such an extent that they constitute distinct hip hop subcultures. This is not to say that hip hop's early years in Iran are characterized by a uniform or otherwise largely consistent set of aesthetic practices so much as it signifies two important developments: one, the clarity of differentiation between aesthetic approaches and methods among self-organized sub-groupings within the Iranian hip hop underground which make the subcultures designation meaningful; and two, the capacity of these subcultures outside Tehran and rap-e farsi (rap in Persian) to capture a national audience. Of particular note at the end of this period is the emergence and national success of rappers rapping in minority languages like Azeri and Kurdish and in different Persian dialects beyond that of Tehran. Given that one of the core goals of this investigation is to challenge the logocentric bias of the literature and to provide greater insight into hip hop practices beyond just rap, this choice of a temporal endpoint based in rap language may seem a curious one. My analysis, however, does not argue against the pivotal role of rap but rather argues for a fuller accounting of the diversity of practices that the Iranian hip hop underground claims as hip hop and how this very diversity of expressive practices gives meaning and dimension to Iranian youth's embrace of its constituent practices. Such a position, therefore, facilitates a more nuanced understanding of rap's positioning among the network of various hip hop practices in Iran as Iranians — and not just scholars and Western media — define them. Such a position need not preclude acknowledgement of the significance rap plays as a sociohistorical force.

Given this investigation's focus on Tehran, then, the period under consideration, which follows the rise and stabilization of Iran's first generation to produce a truly national hip hop scene, is appropriate in multiple respects. Principle among these, the choice of 2022 as the endpoint for this study marks the eruption of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, a sociocultural watershed in Iranian history in which hip hop, including significantly Kurdish-language rap, played an important role. The complexities of that critical moment warrant a level of consideration and analysis that future investigations would better serve. Secondly, here is the emergence of practitioners who grew up with hip hop practices and cultural artifacts in the Iranian sociocultural milieu unlike their predecessors born in the decade following the postrevolutionary period in the 1980s.

What I present here is not a general theory of hip hop in Iran. Quite the contrary, what my research shows is that the dynamic interaction of multiple expressive cultural practices that have produced a distinctly Iranian hip hop culture and the resulting diversity in its forms is one of the reasons for its appeal as an expressive practice for excluded urban youth who lack formal institutional channels in which to pursue their interests. Given constraints of space, I will highlight a few ways in which hip hop is received, reproduced, and experienced in Iran by focusing on Tehran. From this basis, I offer some tentative observations about the larger structural forces that intersect with a handful of particular local experiences. Whether most or just some of these participants' perspectives are broadly shared with the artistic undergrounds of which they are a part is an important question that I must leave to future investigations. Nonetheless, these youths' unique observations about shared practices and experiences of oppression remain of critical importance.

What I seek to highlight is hip hop as an urban process and an amalgamation of locally realized expressive practices in which hip hoppers modulate and act upon the perceptibility of their participation in relation to strategic considerations about asserting their physical and cultural presence in the repressive context of Iran. Through their everyday leisure and aesthetic preferences and the activities through which they perform and embody those preferences, these youth have maintained and secured valuable autonomy while turning the infrastructure and symbolism of the city into producers of social and political value for excluded youth and fellow members of their communities. To have done so — and to continue to do so — reveals the seriousness of fun as a catalyst for change.

The Khoy B-Boys pose in front of a large crowd at Mellat Park in Tehran in 2015 (posted to their Facebook page).

Quiet Commotion: Autonomy, Joy, & State Presence

For those who do not connect with hip hop music, it may be "just noise,"¹⁵ but for others it can be hope, art, a vehicle for expressing and receiving deep truths about the experience of marginality, and a means of social and spiritual survival; something one can become by way of embodied practice; a different and even transformative way of relating to the space of one's community. Not everyone chooses hip hop, but for a significant number of the youth who do, it matters a great deal to them.¹⁶ For these young rebels, the very act of embodying its practices and appreciating its forms is considered valuable in and of itself for the autonomy that it implies and renders real. Salome MC writes about this crucial experience in relationship to her investment in making hip hop music and videos:

I was so in need of autonomy in my own work that I took it to the extreme and learned every aspect of music production so I can create what I want to create with absolute control. That wasn't enough; I got a master's degree in video production so I can make my own music videos too. This control gave me power; the power gave me more independence. It became one of the most important parts of my existence and played a big role in every choice that I made, no matter how big or small.¹⁷

The Islamic Republic's severe restrictions on access to unapproved cultural products, the state's monopoly over television and radio broadcasts, and the intrusive control exercised over performance permitting processes made the enjoyment of hip hop expression — or, indeed, any unapproved expressive practice — into an act of defiance. In this context, participation in everyday acts of expression take on new meanings in relation to state power.

Many Iranian youth have found in hip hop a way to embody personal autonomy from the state's efforts to enjoin expressive acts or to prescribe behavior. They also have resonated with popular histories about hip hop's role as an artistic and celebratory expression of collective resistance. As Tricia Rose poignantly argues in her pioneering examination of hip hop in Black Noise,

Under social conditions in which sustained frontal attacks on powerful groups are strategically unwise or successfully contained, oppressed people use language, dance, and music to mock those in power, express rage, and produce fantasies of subversion. These cultural forms are especially rich and pleasurable places where oppositional transcripts, or the "unofficial truths" are developed, refined, and rehearsed. These [...] dances, languages, and musics produce communal bases of knowledge about social conditions, communal interpretations of them and quite often serve as the cultural glue that fosters communal resistance.¹⁸

While Rose's analysis concerns hip hop in its country of origin, the U.S., much the same can be said for hip hop in Iran, where legal prohibitions on performance practices, particularly dance and music, and on unapproved expressive acts more generally, make direct confrontation and indirect subversion a routine consideration for many. Indeed, Rose's comment about the strategic wisdom of indirect confrontation resonates with a core thematic of Asef Bayat's insights about the necessity of collective action by Iran's urban poor in the postrevolutionary period. As Bayat demonstrates, Iran's urban poor deployed new strategies to pursue their claims in the face of state repression that were "low-key, nonprovocative, often individualistic, requiring patience, precision, and perseverance".¹⁹ While the South Bronx in the 1970s and 80s and Tehran after 1979 and heading into the 2000s defy simple comparisons, the parallels between approaches to indirect resistance among excluded populations in the context of dense urbanity in both locations, as Rose and Bayat rightly call into focus, present a rich area for investigation. Indeed, the very opposition that the national governments of Iran and the U.S., based as they are on a discourse of radical alterity, might very well belie shared or at the very least parallel experiences of urban exclusion and oppression — parallels that hip hop practitioners in Tehran have attuned to through their embrace of hip hop's expressive forms. In this way, we might think of hip hop in Tehran as activating a set of practices seen in other sociocultural and historical contexts, like in the Bronx, that excluded youth take up in order to enact their autonomy from the state through celebratory, expressive acts that provide a sense of social cohesion in opposition to oppressive state presences and systems of marginalization.

As Bayat demonstrates in his influential monograph Street Politics, Iran's urban poor, since well before the Islamic Revolution, have been engaged "in a silent, patient, protracted, and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive hardships and better their lives" in a process which he calls "quiet encroachment".²⁰ I argue that a process with many of the same features as quiet encroachment is occurring with hip hop practitioners in Tehran. These shared features include elements of "spontaneity, individualism, and intergroup competition",²¹ but with slightly different qualities, including a different spatial politics as well as participation from the middle class. They are engaged in temporary occupations of urban open spaces like parks,²² sidewalks, street corners, and back-alleys²³ as well as enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces such as abandoned and decrepit buildings,²⁴ abandoned homes,²⁵ public recreation centers, and "aerobic" community classes²⁶ where they record music and videos, practice and share their craft, and host performances, dance battles, classes, parties, and other events. Through their collective actions, they create fun while actualizing corporeal autonomy through their shared artistic practices and interests. These spaces where they embody their interests are experienced as zones of autonomy, circumscribed though they may be, where the state's reach is both symbolically and actually pushed back through a collective celebration of the leisure and artistic preferences of youth.

This modified still from a video whose title is given as "Raqs Zibâ Dokhtar Irâni" ("Iranian Girl Beautiful Dance") shows a young Iranian girl in 2022 preparing to perform a solo hip hop dance to the song "Gangesh Balas" by Iranian rapper Sohrab MJ. This video was shared widely on Instagram and Telegram.²⁷ The image has been modified by the author to obscure participants' faces given that the relationship of the uploader to the participants is unclear.

Hiphâp-e Irânī: Features of Iranian Hip Hop

Hip hop is a complex amalgamation of practices and cultural traditions that first emerged in the South Bronx in New York. DJ-ing, breaking, and graffiti and later rap emerged as artifacts of African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latin Caribbean cultures in the U.S. Hip hop is, therefore, Western in its origin. However, hip hop practices as they are realized by Iranians and other disaffected youth in Southwest Asia, North Africa (SWANA), and elsewhere throughout the world are not simply reproducing Western cultural forms, as Usama Kahf has shown with regard to Arabic hip hop.²⁸ Hip hop artists and practitioners throughout the SWANA region have been modifying and recontextualizing a set of deterritorialized aesthetic practices within the hip hop umbrella to create uniquely localized interpretations inflected with their specific cultures and in doing so have created new approaches and interpretations within hip hop's growing body of global aesthetic traditions.²⁹

In the case of Iranian hip hop, this is evident in the lyricism, poetics, and wordplay of rappers, many of whom pull from a rich tradition of Persian poetry and build on literary and linguistic expressive practices that have long been a part of expressive traditions in Persian.³⁰ Rappers and analysts both have emphasized the particular relationship of Persian culture to its long and storied history of poetry as a specific hallmark of rap-e farsi. Persian "is a very poetic language. And poetry is very important in Iran — every house has a book of Hafez poems," stated Salome MC, further adding, "Maybe that is why hip-hop is so popular."³¹ Hip hop analysts in podcasts³² and enthusiasts in online forums³³ have noted a key feature of rap-e farsi, which is the complex, layered metaphorical expressions which can make understanding rap lyrics difficult to parse for native Persian speakers and Persian-language learners alike.

"The Law is Banned": A Hip Hop Zīrzamīn Forms

A brief overview of the rise of hip hop practices and of the Iranian government's regulation of dance and music provides some essential context for hip hop's positioning within the Iranian political and cultural milieu. Hip hop in Iran got its start in the 1990s, at a time when popular music was still banned.³⁴ In hip hop's earliest days, informally distributed tapes and CDs, passed hand to hand, played a formative role in creating interest in rap music just as contraband satellite channels transmitting music channels from abroad provided Iranians with some of their first experiences with rap and hip hop dancing.³⁵ Some of these tapes and CDs by rappers like Tupac Shakur made their way into the country when men on international business trips purchased them abroad and carried them back into the country as gifts for their children.³⁶ Some enterprising youths translated the English lyrics and connected deeply with the social messages that they found in U.S. rappers' lyrics. As YAS, the first rapper to legally release his music in Iran, remarked,

After a while I started to pay closer attention to the music [and] I realized there was a lot more there to it, he [Tupac] was talking about real issues. I started to translate the lyrics and realized he's singing about society and the culture, about his perspective. I realized then that any kind of music that was going to stick around and have any kind of lasting effect had to say something real. It had to have a message and a deeper significance to it, in any kind of genre.³⁷

Word of mouth was critical in helping to popularize hip hop dance and music. Numerous rappers, dancers, and other hip hop creators make reference to word of mouth in the research as a critical conduit for disseminating information about music, rappers, classes, performances, and other events.³⁸ As a hip hop zirzamin took shape, rappers, musicians, and music producers utilized and created clandestine recording studios to facilitate production outside of the watchful eye of state officials. Illicit concerts were held in private homes and abandoned buildings where participants shared ideas, enthusiasm, and techniques.³⁹

Dance and music as cultural performance practices have occupied similar positions in post-revolutionary Iran as sites for and objects of socio-political and moral contestation. As Farzaneh Hemmasi observes, "Music and dance have been the most challenging art forms to reconcile to the pious, revolutionary vision of Iranian culture, both because they have long histories of being considered morally suspect in Iran and because of their prominence in prerevolutionary Iranian popular culture."⁴⁰ Dance has been illegal in Iran since the 1979 Revolution, and punishments include imprisonment, fines, and flogging. Certain kinds of aesthetic movement in performance are permitted, however, in the form of "rhythmic movement" (harikat-i mawzun), which is distinguished from dance and, therefore, not subject to the same legal interventions:

Appropriated through a renaming and reshaping of the dancing subject, the genre of rhythmic movements was constructed to counter the previous associations of dance (raqs) with immorality, corruption, and 'imitated modernity' (tajaddud-i taqlidi) largely instigated by the image of the unconstrained dancing subject of the popular entertainment scene of cabaret and European social dancing in the Pahlavi era, particularly the cabaret dancer.⁴¹

In the context of the strict religious politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the very act of embodying hip hop practices or playing hip hop music represents a multivalent form of rebelliousness. For one, hip hop as a set of artistic practices whose historical origins and continued media influence are centered in the U.S. mark it as Western, as one Iranian hip hop dancer laments,

Hip hop dancers in Iran are just as good as in many other countries where the sport is popular, and that's no mean feat given the challenges they face. Unfortunately, the Iranian authorities won't let us hold official events. I really do not understand why. [... T]hey won't give hip hop a chance because they see it a Western dance and therefore a sign of Westernization.⁴²

This issue of Westernization when it comes to performing hip hop dance in particular is compounded by the Iranian government's view in the post-revolutionary period of all raqs as un-Islamic and therefore corrupting.

Unlike with raqs, the Islamic government of Iran has adopted varying policies with regard to limitations on music. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of Iran, declared just months after the revolution brought an end to the Pahlavi monarchy, "If you want independence for your country, you must suppress music and not fear to be called old-fashioned. Music is a betrayal of the nation and of youth."⁴³ Likening it to opium, Khomeini called for a sweeping ban of most kinds of music, save classical and traditional Persian music, religious songs, and music for special occasions such as weddings, couching his rhetoric in terms of saving youth from corruption.⁴⁴ In 1997, following the election of reformist Mohammad Khatami as president, the Iranian government relented in its efforts to ban all forms of popular music. Certain kinds of popular music were legalized in official channels, subject to the approval of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Revolution, but in 2005 newly elected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered the enforcement of a ruling by the Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council — which Ahmadinejad headed — banning from television and radio all Western music, calling it "indecent".⁴⁵ The ban's broad sweep kept hip hop, too, off the airwaves. While hip hop was not specifically singled out among Western music styles in the 2005 ban, it nonetheless over time became a subject of note in the minds of state functionaries as something worthy of official comment such that in 2010, Hossein Sajedi-Nia, Tehran's chief of police, referred to hip hop as "morally deviant" music.⁴⁶ Lost among the crowd of Western music types making their way into Iran via unapproved and oftentimes outright illicit channels, hip hop in its early years had enjoyed a certain degree of anonymity — at least in the eyes of officials. This was not to last. At least in Tehran, as the genre continued to reverberate in the ears and bodies of Iranians, it ceased to blend in among the other musiqi⁴⁷ resounding through speakers and walls, streets and alleyways of the capital city.

A b-boy performs a breaking freeze on a sidewalk in Tehran in 2012 (posted to the Khoy B-Boys' Facebook page).

"Throw 021 up Forever": Hip Hop in Tehran

Tehran ye chizi ro to man koshté
Tehran man hanooz dastam moshté
Tehran, âsmounat siyé chorde
Inja kasi âzâd mishe ke morde
— Roody, "Tehran"⁵⁴

Official prohibitions on raqs and Western music notwithstanding, youth have held illicit house parties in Tehran where many times they play Western music and consume alcohol and marijuana.⁵⁵ These parties, because of their illegality, require at least the tacit tolerance of neighbors if not their outright support in order not to invite interference by the police. Neighbors, then, have been functionally implicated in the youth's illegal efforts. As one journalist put it, "The most important relationships many of them have are with their neighbours. Small but necessary violations of Iran's law require, quite simply, that neighbours keep silent for each other. You either get away with it — or someone squeals."⁵⁶ These gatherings, though prohibited, are necessary because they are a vital source of fun and autonomy. When neighbors do not alert authorities to the quiet commotion next door, they aid the youth by denying the state the resource of their knowledge and therefore the opportunity to intervene. Through their parties, these young rebels have activated networks of neighbors in preserving their temporary spaces of autonomous, hushed commotion. Occasionally, too, police are willing to turn a blind eye.⁵⁷ The situation is, nonetheless, one defined by precarity for these youth, since their success depends on the fragile but vital alliance of a network of actors whose collective decisions influence the state's capacity to intervene in their communities.

Of course, not all neighbors in such a densely populated city as Tehran are always so keen to tolerate loud music, as Bahman Ghobadi's 2009 film, No One Knows About Persian Cats, portrays.⁵⁸ In one scene, the two main protagonists Negar and Ashkan arrive at the rooftop of a multi-floor residential building during the daytime to meet with members of an alternative rock band who are positioned along different edges of the rooftop's perimeter.⁵⁹ The band members peer over the side monitoring some out-of-frame points at the base of the building as they explain to Negar and Ashkan that they are watching for the departure of a particular neighbor. This neighbor, they say, calls the police when the band rehearses in their small, informal rehearsal room that the band built on the building's roof using found and donated materials — a necessary precaution to moderate the audibility of their rehearsals and also presumably to prevent direct lines of sight from neighboring buildings. Their vigilance, it is clear, has been ritualized to assure their ability to rehearse without the interfering neighbor's summoning of the authorities, as one of the band members comments about the neighbor not having left at their usual time. As soon as they see the neighbor in question head out, the group moves into the makeshift shed to begin rehearsal. While the scene itself is fictionalized, it nonetheless represents important aspects of the real and shared experiences of many Tehranian youth participating in Iran's diverse musical underground. Adjusting the timing, visibility, and audibility of their unapproved expressive practices is an essential strategy, a point that is further reinforced during the same scene of the movie when one of the band members comments about quietly warming up on the drums using clothing to cover the batter heads in order to mute the sound while the other band members monitor for the complaining neighbor's exit.⁶⁰

As No One Knows About Persian Cats shows, Tehrani youth strategically modulate the perceptibility of their participation in unapproved performance practices in order to pursue their interests and develop their skills all while minimizing the risk of intervention by state actors and those who would facilitate state interference. They pursue these interests in spite of the costs and risks that the state's prohibitions impose. This in itself is remarkable evidence of the value that youth find in embodying these practices and pursuing their passions. To have fun, to joyfully and creatively express oneself by engaging in artistic and expressive practices that align with one's interests must, in this light, be viewed as an end in itself, whether as a source of deep meaning or fleeting pleasure particularly given that the state's efforts to heavily restrict or even outright ban participation in formalized economic channels that could remunerate their talents and passions functionally eliminated the possibility of regular or dependable compensation for their pursuits — much less careers based upon them (all the more so for the first generation of hip hop practitioners's early years). Little else plausibly explains the sustained effort that youth invest and the risks they regularly assume to pursue such pleasures particularly when the costs loom large, exacting prices both big and small ranging from menial precautionary measures to the risk of the full weight of the state's punitive power.

Temporary occupations of public spaces and abandoned buildings, in addition to those events held in private homes and building basements,⁶¹ have been essential to the production and maintenance of this youth-led hip hop zirzamin. Several kinds of sites for temporary occupations by these hip hoppers come up in the research. These sites have included Tehran's streets and back-alleys, public squares, community centers, and public parks, in addition to the enclosed, private residences mentioned above. In other cases, these youth and their collaborators have occupied spaces on a more permanent basis. At least one case has been documented of a group of hip hoppers taking over a vacant building in Tehran and repurposing it to serve as a hip hop club with a dance floor.⁶² These hip hoppers do not always succeed in avoiding the state's intervention, however. In 2010, the daily Iranian newspaper, Tehran-Emrooz, described a building that had come under police surveillance for its use as part of the city's underground rap scene. A number of men and women were arrested in a series of raids.⁶³ Arrests do happen, and as such, precarity in many ways is a structurally determined aspect of these youths' work to establish and maintain these autonomous spaces. Some youth in their interviews with online media have acknowledged the real risks of being arrested. Whatever their hardships, illegality has not stopped these hip hoppers from realizing their interests and corporeal autonomy through temporary acts of quiet commotion.

Many Iranian rappers express dissatisfaction with the authoritarian government and the suffocating political environment in their rap lyrics. Erfan gained a name for himself in Iran as a rapper but eventually left for California, where he continues rapping about Iranian politics. In one of his raps, he laments "suffocating [...] exile".⁶⁴ Salome MC raps in "No Revolution" that as a young person she feels the solution is either to leave Iran, to have another revolution, or else to wait for the violent collapse of the Islamic government.⁶⁵ She left Iran in 2010 to pursue her graduate studies in Japan.⁶⁶

The antagonism which pervades the relationship between Iranian hip hop artists and the theocratic regime is in no small part fueled by the efforts of government officials to control and restrict expressive forms deemed by officials to be threats to the moral order of Iranian society and Islam. Nonetheless, these hip hop artists' work continues to be popular among youth, as rapper Azad Right attested in 2015, "I know for a fact that hip-hop is huge in Iran — that rebellious, revolutionary mentality is something a lot of the youth resonate with."⁶⁷ While we should exercise due caution when assessing artists' statements about the reach of hip hop in Iran at various historical junctures, since they themselves were and are invested in the success and continuation of their chosen genre, there is reason to believe that comments such as Azad's are not merely rhetorical flourish. Indeed, a statement by Hussein Noosh-Abbadi, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Ershad), about the detriments of hip hop music and culture and the ban on hip hop concerts the same year as Right's statement tacitly recognized that hip hop was at least popular enough to necessitate government intervention and the allocation of government resources to the enforcement of such efforts, however piecemeal and incomplete those efforts might have been.⁶⁸ Noosh-Abbadi's statement, emanating as it did from an officialdom invested in limiting hip hop's reach and appeal and in burnishing its own image as an effective intervenor in unapproved cultural practices, then, helps corroborate Right's assessment. Such efforts to limit and ban hip hop-related activities must also be viewed in the broader context of what Asef Bayat calls Islamists' "war on fun":

The fear of enjoyment is a singular feature of these Islamist states and movements, whose doctrinal models are unable to accommodate — and so are compelled to reject and seek to deligitimise — expressive behaviours that are at the heart of human life: even including playfulness, laughter, and displays of fashion. These power-driven forces seek to reinforce their case by depicting such behaviours as part of a 'western cultural invasion.'⁶⁹

Hip hop, thus, is at the intersection of a number of outright prohibitions and undeclared but nonetheless real interventions by the state, including as a creation of Western culture, as music, as dance, and as unsanctioned expressive behavior.

Iranian hip hop artists and enthusiasts have reclaimed digital and symbolic space through corporate media networks and their publishing platforms. Many of these youth published videos and photos of their performances, dances, gatherings, and events on sites like MySpace — a key social media site for Iranian hip hop particularly in the early to mid-2000s — and, later, on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and to a lesser extent the France-based video site and YouTube-competitor Dailymotion. In so doing they have made their take on hip hop available to a global audience of internet users. They also utilized virtual gathering places like Yahoo! chatrooms⁷⁰ and online forums that they themselves created like rap98.com. In the wake of widespread protests of the reelection of Ahmadinejad in 2009, many of these social media sites were banned; however, videos and songs continued to be posted. The government's ability to prevent Iranians from accessing and publishing illicit content online has proven limited,⁷¹ and similar efforts to thwart the use of illegal satellite dishes has been at least as unsuccessful as the attempts to prevent access to unauthorized websites.⁷²

Many Iranians circumvent government internet filters and gain access to unapproved websites and online media through the use of virtual private networks (VPNs). VPNs encrypt the data exchange between the connecting device and the intermediary server. They also allow users to connect to the internet by way of an intermediary server that masks their internet protocol (IP) address, which is the unique digital identifier assigned to a device that allows it to exchange data on a network like the internet. IP addresses can be thought of like a postal address for a network-connected device in that they provide information that uniquely identifies the connected device allowing data (or "mail" in this metaphor) to be exchanged between the device and the network. IP addresses can be used to identify a connected device's general location as well as the internet service provider (ISP) providing the connection. A core function of VPNs, then, is to make the IP addresses and data exchange inaccessible to others.⁷³ The Iranian government for its part has attempted to combat the influence and appeal of unapproved media by establishing regime-approved analogues of popular web services with sites such as Mehr.ir, a video-sharing site for Persian-speakers which only shows regime-approved content.⁷⁴ The cultural contest between regime-approved and unapproved content platforms, however, has decisively favored unapproved channels perhaps going as far back as 2002, when Iranian rap videos first appeared.⁷⁵

Conclusion

Hip hop has enjoyed enduring popularity among teens and young adults of ghettos, slums, and projects the world over since its beginnings in the South Bronx in the 1970s. This popularity has aroused suspicion and been subject to legal interventions by a variety of national governments, including those of Iran, France, and the United States — and this in spite of their apparent differences in structure and regarding their claims around the acceptance of free expression.⁷⁶ The leisure and aesthetic preferences and community and social practices of youth, and primarily youth of color, are thus a site of intervention for authoritarian and democratic governments alike. This would tend to indicate, then, that hip hop practitioners' collective embrace of a street politics of everyday resistance, autonomy, and joy poses a meaningful challenge to state power across a broad spectrum of political systems. It also reveals the ways in which the symbolic and performative cannot be easily disentangled from, much less categorically opposed to, the "real" or materially consequential. This fact alone poses some deeply interesting issues for the fields of performance studies and urbanism.

By redefining their relationship to urban space through their collective embodied practices, hip hop's young rebels have created an urban social movement in Manuel Castells' sense of the phrase: "a collective conscious action aimed at the transformation of the institutionalized urban meaning against the logic, interest, and values of the dominant class."⁷⁷ Through hip hop, youth and their collaborators have appropriated sites and techniques of cultural production and made them better represent their interests and sense of moral order. The expressive culture of youth, rich with knowledge about the massive global upheaval that has been going on in cities since the advent of neoliberalism, was subsequently broadcast to a global audience. In the cases of the hip hop artists that I have looked at through my research, their everyday aesthetic and leisure practices have achieved for them an immediate form of spatial autonomy, which is itself considered a vital resource. This sense of autonomy is reinforced by a lyrical tradition in rap that makes frequent mention of "freedom" and being "free". In other words, my research shows that fun is a quite serious matter where real questions of power, corporeal autonomy, agency, identity, and enjoyment are at stake. While hip hop has not been a panacea for all of its practitioners and while these youths' achievements continue to be circumscribed in other important ways, we must nonetheless conclude that hip hop has produced real social, political, and spiritual power for some of the most excluded inhabitants of the world's cities.

In staging a so-far successful artistic revolt, hip hop artists and their collaborators have created new meanings and uses of urban space and extended their social and political power in the city. Their exclusion from formal channels through which to redress their marginalization made hip hop, with its global reach and sociopolitical expressive currents, a particularly appealing and well-suited performative practice for the urban poor, particularly youth of color in the U.S. and oppressed youth globally. With incredible passion and persistence, these young artists opened space for themselves in global communication channels and broadcast to the world performative representations of and responses to ghetto life, racism, poverty, and the violence of the urban order that surrounded them. Their exclusion became a collective reference point and subject matter for much of their work and for many of the artists that have since followed, who took hip hop and shaped it in their own localized ways. For all these reasons, hip hop and its practices serve as a vital tool for understanding urban experience, contemporary youth social movements, and urban change in cities of both the global South and North. In the context of sustained structural exclusion in slums and ghettos, these rebel youth have managed to obtain real gains for themselves and changed cities in the process.