The Contribution of Pre-Revolution Songs to Building Collective Representation in Iranian Movements

FACULTY OF SOCIAL STUDIES A Playlist We Know: The Contribution of Pre-revolution Songs to Building Collective Representation in Iranian Movements Master's thesis ARGHAVAN BAGHERNIA ABKENAR Supervisor: doc. Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, ph.D. Department of Sociology Programme Cultural Sociology Brno 2021 A PLAYLIST WE KNOW: THE CONTRIBUTION OF PRE-REVOLUTION SONGS TO BUILDING COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION IN IRANIAN MOVEMENTS Bibliographic record Author: Arghavan Baghernia Abkenar Faculty of Social Studies Masaryk University Department of Sociology Title of Thesis: A Playlist We Know: The Contribution of Pre- revolution Songs to Building Collective Representation in Iranian Movements Degree Programme: Cultural Sociology Supervisor: doc. Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, ph.D. Year: 2021 Number of Pages: 95 Keywords: music; social movement; protest; pop music; Iranian 1979 revolution; pre-revolution Iran; pre-revolution music; Iranian protest songs; cultural sociology; social performance; collective representation 2 A PLAYLIST WE KNOW: THE CONTRIBUTION OF PRE-REVOLUTION SONGS TO BUILDING COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION IN IRANIAN MOVEMENTS Abstract This thesis examines the role of pre-revolution Iranian songs in building a system of collective representation of the political and social situation of the decade leading to the 1979 revolution in Iran. The songs create a narrative with binary codes and symbols, similar to the background script of the movement, that is relatable and understandable for people, and solidarizes them in the movement by forming collective identities and emotions. The songs bear the core ideas of the revolution as a social movement and carry them through time. 3 A PLAYLIST WE KNOW: THE CONTRIBUTION OF PRE-REVOLUTION SONGS TO BUILDING COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION IN IRANIAN MOVEMENTS Declaration Prohlašuji, že jsem práci na téma A Playlist We Know: The Contribution of Pre-revolution Songs to Building Collective Representation in Iranian Movements zpracovala sama. Veškeré prameny a zdroje informací, které jsem použila k sepsání této práce, byly citovány v textu a jsou uvedeny v se- znamu použitých pramenů a literatury. Brno May 19, 2021 ....................................... Arghavan Baghernia Abkenar 5 A PLAYLIST WE KNOW: THE CONTRIBUTION OF PRE-REVOLUTION SONGS TO BUILDING COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATION IN IRANIAN MOVEMENTS Acknowledgments I wish to thank my family for their unconditional support through my studies. I am beyond thankful to all my friends (whose names would make a long list), who made the challenging time of writing this thesis bearable and pleasant for me with their presence and compassion. I especially thank my supervisor doc Nadya Jaworsky for her support and patience during this project. Šablona DP 3.2.0-FSS-english (2021-03-18) © 2014, 2016, 2018–2021 Masarykova univerzita 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents List of Figures 11 List of Tables 12 1 Introduction 13 2 Methodology 17 2.1 Cultural Sociology and Interpretation ........................................... 17 2.2 Data collection and analysis .......................................................... 19 3 Theory and Literature Review 24 4 Analysis 30 4.2 On the history and the socio-political context of the 1979 revolution ....................................................................................... 30 4.3 The art and intellectual discourse of the decade before the revolution ....................................................................................... 32 4.4 The pre-revolutionary popular music and Tarane-ye Novin .......... 33 4.5 The protest songs ........................................................................... 36 4.6 Pre-revolutionary protest poetry and lyrics ................................... 39 4.7 The stronger effect of songs compared to poetry .......................... 44 4.8 Songs as scripts for a cultural performance ................................... 46 4.8.1 The description of the situation ............................................. 47 4.8.2 The antagonism between the protagonist and an ambiguous enemy 53 4.8.3 The call for movement and change ....................................... 58 4.8.4 The visions of the desired state ............................................. 65 4.8.5 Employing familiar elements and a nostalgic remembrance 66 4.9 The role of Iranian pre-revolutionary songs in the post-revolution context ........................................................................................... 70 4.9.1 What happened after the revolution? .................................... 71 9 TABLE OF CONTENTS 4.9.2 Islamic Republic’s use of pre-revolutionary protest songs ... 73 4.9.3 The pre-revolution songs as tools of protests to the Islamic Republic 75 4.9.4 The sound of protest coming from exile ................................ 76 4.9.5 Pre-revolutionary music, links generations of Iranians together 78 5 Conclusion 80 Bibliography 83 Name Index 92 10 LIST OF FIGURES List of Figures Figure 1 35 Figure 2 35 Figure 3 37 Figure 4 38 Figure 5 38 Figure 6 64 11 LIST OF TABLES List of Tables Table 1 21 Table 2 53 Table 3 58 Table4 64 12 INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction Popular songs have the power of becoming the soundtrack for when people, together or alone, experience life. Whenever, and wherever a successful popular song is played, individuals come together and start singing along with the words that they know by heart. At that moment, they are present in a world of shared feelings, memories, and meanings that the song reveals. If the songs are born around a sensitive historical moment like a revolution, they find a more complex relationship with their context and can carry and revive the ideas, demands, and struggles of society. The Iranian revolution of 1979 happened eighteen years before I was born. The change of every dimension of Iranian life after the revolution was drastic, therefore the pre-revolution era is a world of imagination for my generation. One of its spectacular souvenirs is the pre-revolution pop songs. Although pop music had huge developments and innovations in the 1960s and 1970s, it was announced forbidden after the victory of the fundamentalist Islamic rules in the aftermath of the revolution. Musicians had to flee or remain silent, and publishing and consuming pop music slid to the underground layer of Iranian life like many other habits. While copying and selling pre-revolution music records was considered a crime when I was growing up, these songs were kept carefully, replayed and celebrated in the exile media and lived on in our living experience. The illegal practice of keeping the songs, was a form of resistance to the oppressive power that resembles the narrative of resistance and protest that the songs of pre-revolution represent. A series of iconic pre-revolution songs have survived the time and the ba- cklash of the state power and kept a place in the memory of old and new generations of Iranian people. These songs have a symbolic, open-ended, date and place-free narrative of protest. At the time of their creation, the censorship system suspected they carry subversive messages towards the second Pahlavi monarch. Since they were produced in the decade leading to the 1979 revolution, the ways that these songs were influenced by the protest atmosphere of their time, reacted to the political and social turbulences, and represented a narrative of action and resistance are observable. But what fascinated me to start this re- search was to think of the relationship between the songs and the revolution 13 INTRODUCTION the other way around: how can the songs have an effect in solidarizing people through collective actions like a revolution? Can they shape, or strengthen a certain way of perceiving the social and political situation and acting upon it? In social movements, alongside the political, social, and economic causes and effects of the movement, the role of the cultural products is usually un- derestimated. But the solidarity of the actors is the result of a collective understanding of the situation, intentions of action, and visions of the desired state. The Iranian revolution of 1979 is usually explained by the political, economic, and cultural dissatisfaction of the second Pahlavi regime as the causing factors, and the history-changing impact it had on the country af- terward. In this thesis, I chose to look deeper into the dynamic relationship between the pre-revolution cultural products and the revolution as a big social movement and investigate the work of cultural products on the formation of a collective understanding, that could solidarize people and orientate their actions. Music has an important role in shaping the collective meanings and identities in the movements. In the case of Iran, less work is done on the relationship between the revolution and the organization of people toward a united action, with the pop music of the decade before the revolution. This is partly the consequence of the removal of this music after the revolution and associ- ating it with Islamic immorality, and partly the neglection of academia in fields of Iranian sociology and arts that underestimates pop music as a poten- tial force in organizing and solidarizing people towards movements. I went after the pop pre-revolution songs in this thesis based on my intu- ition that told me there must be something in these songs that makes them relatable from the 1970s until now specifically around protests and movements. My strong and emotional relationship with these songs grew in

Load more