Persian Pop Music: At ‘Home’ in Exile and in ‘Exile’ at Home

The Iranian Revolution in 1979 had a devastating impact on pop music in Iran. In the wake of the revolution, Persian pop was adopted as the symbol of the overthrown Pahlavi dynasty and it was completely outlawed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic fundamentalist regime. Seemingly overnight, a great number of Iran’s most prominent artists, musicians and leftist thinkers, along with those Iranians who wanted to (and could afford to) resettle, left their homes fearing severe punishment.1 A few years after the revolution, more than half a million exiled Persians found themselves on Southern California’s sunny shores. They jestingly dubbed their new home ‘Tehrangeles’ and set up a flourishing music industry, one that re-released the music of pre-revolutionary pop stars and produced new, increasingly Americanised, music. Recordings by pre-revolutionary Iranian musicians, Bijan Mortazavi, Googoosh, Ebi and Dariush for example, are still banned in Iran (although they are widely available via the black market and online in mp3 format), but these artists still perform to immense crowds of Iranian exiles around the globe. The music being created in exile n