Amir Tataloo is a grassroots self-made Iranian musical artist from a working-class background. He was amongst the first post-revolutionary Iranian artists to produce music without regard for state protocol, bypassing regulatory and censorship systems for cultural output in Iran. Tataloo developed his musical style in Dubai between 2002 and 2007, largely based around hip-hop and R&B, with love themes for his lyrical content. His songs were circulated hand in hand and his music was particularly popular at house parties in Iran. By 2005 his music videos were broadcast on satellite TV channels linking Iranian diaspora and Iranians living in Iran. Tataloo was amongst a series of artists who gained attention from the Iranian diaspora media including BBC Persian and Āvang Music. By 2007 he was a celebrity within and outside of Iran and in the same year during a visit to Iran, he was detained briefly and questioned by state security due to his collaboration with diasporic media and artists who openly criticized the Islamic Republic of Iran, henceforth IRI. Tataloo continued producing his music in Dubai, however by 2013 his lyrics began to express discontent with the Iranian diasporic musicians, Manoto TV and a certain yearning for Iran, which all crystallized in the track “Khuneh Khub-e” (Home is Good, August 2013). One month later upon entering Iran, he was detained by the IRI’s security forces again and soon after published an open letter on his Instagram and Telegram platforms, apologizing to the state for crossing the red line in his cultural activities and his naivety in collaborating with the state’s ‘cultural enemies’. Between 2013 and 2018, during his time living in Iran, he produced a handful of songs in favor of the state’s politico-cultural interests, including “Enerji-ye Hasteh-I“ (Nuclear Energy), which openly supported an ‘armed’ Iran^,; and in his social media posts, he further propagated the state’s ideological narratives^, such as supporting the IRI’s take on hijab and religious practices. These public gestures were in marked contrast with his personality and artistic history. Such questionable ‘conversions’ towards the IRI’s interests made him a controversial figure amongst his fans, the Iranian diaspora, IRI supporters, and the very same disbelieving public that the IRI had attempted to reach through their musical pawn, Tataloo. Following a series of public and social media confrontations, Tataloo made his final departure from Iran and migrated to Türkiye in 2018, where he remains at the time of this writing (July 2022), producing music that criticizes the IRI. The following section sets out the conceptual frameworks for analysis of Tataloo’s artistic output, before continuing to a study of Tataloo’s music – set within the socio-political context of its production – with considerations of the implicit manipulations by Tataloo and the IRI.

This chapter is based on the idea that the understanding of air pollution via the sense of smell is based on the cultural contexts, unconscious articulations of the discourses and the complicated relationships between smells, people and their interactions with the urban environments. Although the olfactory understanding of the air quality is commonly linked with the perceptions freshness and purity as well as putrid and filth, but these understandings have gone through hegemonic shifts. In addition, the pollutants that impact the air quality changed over time to an extent that some major contributors now do not smell to humanswhereas in Victorian London, air pollution could mostly bee seen and smelled. Therefore, while the sense of olfactory could be a medium of understanding the pollution, the dynamics of conceptualisations and olfactory awareness of air pollution in centuries have had subconsciously manipulated conscious sensory responses. To reveal some of such hegemonic and molecular shifts, this chapter takes and interdisciplinary scope in comparatively studying the 19^th century industrial settings to the current issues of air quality,the everyday life practices of Londoners and the socio-cultural context of their behaviours.

In comparison to Los Angeles, there was never an Iranian «community» of popular musicians in Germany. Nevertheless, Iranian popular musicians and scholars debating popular music left their traces. In this overview, musicologist and anthropologist Amin Hashemi discusses the most important of these, and asks why some were more successful than others.Popular music in Iran, as it is known in the West, had one foot in the local and street music of the Centre and South of Tehran – as well as the surrounding Northern villages such as Tajrish – and the other foot in the consumption of Western popular music since the 1960s. The latter led to the formation of many TV talent shows, occasional and promotional performances, with their peak in the 1970s. After 1979, artists such as Leila Forouhar and Ebi, who immigrated to the U.S. between the 1980s and the 2000s, became the emerging stars of these shows . These artists gradually built an Iranian community of popular musicians in L.A., with their music known as Losangelesi.

This article examines sonic performances that refer to traumatic events in post- revolutionary Iran. It is based on archival and historical research, as well as on interviews with experts and field observations. It compares the sounds of the 1980s with those of contemporary Iran to understand the dynamics of generational transformation of cultural ideas about resilience and resistance. It begins by exploring the quality of resilience in a revolutionary society entangled in an eight- year war. This section examines the official elitist approach to art as ideological resilience. It also maps the dramatic mobilisations of the earlier revolutionary devotees who volunteered for the war. The ideological understanding of religion is compared to an unofficial bottom-up sonic performance of emotional resilience during the 1980s that stems from conventional popular perspectives on religion. Earlier articulations of art as resilience were expressed through the notion of serenity and embodied in a gentle approach to devotion and comprehension. In contrast, cultural resilience gradually transformed into a more antagonistic, segregationist and violent concept. The article reflects on earlier notions of resilience as set against an unstable post-war society defined by cleavage and disintegration. The 1990s was an era of cultural vacuum, political division and militaristic cultural suppression. It was characterised by a degeneration of earlier moral understandings of resilience, the over-flow of militarism into daily life, the top-down politicisation of morality and the de-politicisation of lifestyles. The article concludes with an account of the cultural transformations after 2009.

The case of popular music of post-revolution Iran is believed to be so controversial since being advocated as a challenge towards religious structures, political power and social injustice and gender issues by some officials, media and academics. This paper looks at wider opportunities of studying popular music as a form of popular culture with respect to the social relationships of power and resistant in comparison to some other literature that were limited to state political conceptual- isation of power and resistant, amalgamation of popular music and art music, Eu- rocentric analysis over popular music in the Middle East as the production of so- cial classes, as well as other pathological studies inside Iran concerning generation gap and youth culture. Alternatively, this paper revises repeatedly mentioned facts and events in literature and then (re)contextualises and reinterprets the concept of popular music, power and resistance in contemporary Iran. The result is a wider understanding of the social struggles over several discursive representation of pop- ular culture beyond politics, social classes, religion, etc.

The standard way of studying music is to examine its history, genre, form and aesthetics. Posing essential questions – such as how and why each musical movement or genre emerged – might be just as interesting. Like all human endeavours, music is ‘created’ within a particular social and cultural context; the process of ‘creation’ is not isolated or independent, but is a blend of elimination, absorption, assimilation, and projection of socially constructed concepts. By situating music within its unique social context, one may gain a better understanding of why different musical movements, such as the innovations introduced by ‘Ali-Naqi Vaziri’s Superior School of Music (Madreseh-ye Ali-ye Musiqi) on the one hand, orthe traditionalist school of music on the other, waxed or waned in Iran during the 1960s.

در اوایل قرن بیستم میلادی اولین ایده‌های ضبط موسیقی ایرانی و ثبت آن روی کاغذ در این کشور شکل گرفت و رفته‌رفته نحوه‌ی نوشتن موسیقی ایرانی به صورت نت غربی با افزون کردن علائم و نشانه‌های موسیقی خاصّ ایرانی توسط وزیری و سپس دیگران، این فن تکامل یافت و تا کنون نیز ادامه دارد. اما در دوران معاصر با ظهور فن‌آوری‌های جدید رایانه‌ای از جمله نرم‌افزارهای نت‌نویسی با کیفیت صوتی بالا و واسط کاربری ساده و کارا برای تولید و ویرایش موسیقی کلاسیک غربی و یا پاپ، راک، و غیره، خلاءی در زمینه‌ی نحوه‌ی ثبت و یا خلق موسیقی ایرانی حس می‌شد. البته در ایران نیز به دلیل نیازهای روزافزون هنرمندان اقداماتی صورت گرفته است و نرم‌افزار «آهنگ‌ساز فارابی» تا حدود زیادی این خلاء را پر کرده است، زیرا علاوه بر داشتن امکانات معمول نرم‌افزارهای موسیقایی غربی همانند انواع سازهای ارکستری و غیر ارکستری، تکنیک‌های سازی و تقریباً علائم نگارشی موسیقی، این امکان را نیز برای کاربر فراهم آورده است تا به سرکلیدهای پنج دستگاه موسیقی ایرانی دسترسی داشته باشد، فواصل میکروتونال را بسته به نظر شخصی خود تعیین کند، تکنیک‌های نوازندگی خاصّ تار و کمانچه به هنگام نت‌نویسی را لحاظ کرده، بتواند سازهای غربی و ایرانی را در کنار هم به کار برد و نیز جالب‌تر آن‌که از کیفیت صدای شبیه به واقعیت تار و کمانچه هنگام پخش و ویرایش بهره ببرد. این نرم‌افزار نه تنها موجب سهولت و صرفه‌جویی در وقت و هزینه در تولید موسیقی ایرانی و تحول در نحوه‌ی انتقال تجربیات بین موسیقی‌دانان و نیز آموزش موسیقی شده است، بلکه راه‌هایی را نیز در خلاقیت و نوآوری موسیقایی گشوده است.

The intersection between migration, musical creativity, and wider scholarly and public debates regarding multiculturalism cannot be understood without also considering the subjectivities of migrant musicians. A focus on subjectivity nuances prevalent debates around multiculturalism that focus on the ‘culture concept’ when it comes to social integration. This is because concepts such as ‘the social’ and ‘the cultural’ are both arbitrary. This article approaches these debates from the perspective of subjectivity and musical creativity among Iranian migrant musicians in the United Kingdom. There is no rigid concept of ‘the’ British culture to be integrated into or ‘the’ Iranian culture to be representative of. The article refers to Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the formation of subjectivity and the various forms of integration are processes rather than moments. In this sense, the migrant cannot be taken for granted as a representative of ‘the Iranian culture’ that needs to be ‘preserved’. Once ‘culture’ is taken no more as a rigid but a mercurial entity, the subjectivity of its members is always in the making through social interactions. Therefore, the musical creativity of a migrant musician and all the social interactions it entails, are part of the continuation of the making of their subjectivity. This article makes use of methodologies from psychoanalysis and ethnomusicology to discuss how we may view the ‘integration’ of Iranian migrant musicians in the UK as the continuation of such processes in a multitude of socially constructed meaning networks accompanied by their musical agency. Nevertheless, psychoanalytical ideas of subjectivity yet to be tested for migrants in the fieldwork. While the project emphasises music as a social product, it takes an individual rather than a community-level ethnographic approach in exploring further relationships between musical creativity and integration, in recognising the diversity of subjectivities as well as in avoiding essentialist views about migrant and host identities. It accounts for the different socio-cultural contexts these musicians have experienced both in Iran and since arriving in the UK.

This article offers a psychoanalytical rethinking of creative communication among Iranian musicians in the United Kingdom, proposing a shift away from prevailing frameworks of integration that often treat culture as a stable, manageable entity to be either retained or adapted. Instead of approaching musical creativity as a functional tool for social inclusion, this study investigates how unconscious dynamics, fractured subjectivities, and latent cultural dissonances are negotiated through music. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the article foregrounds creativity not as a unifying or harmonious process, but as one inherently bound to the symbolic, imaginary, and real registers of experience—each disrupting simplistic notions of identity or belonging. Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted across various UK cities between 2022 and 2024, the study integrates lived experiences, narrative fragments, and performative acts to explore how musical expression reveals what remains unresolved or unintegrated in the migrant subject. Rather than assuming that integration is either achieved or desirable in linear or measurable terms, the article emphasises how creative encounters often expose tensions, contradictions, and affective gaps that resist closure. In this light, music becomes less a means of adapting to a host culture than a psychic site where encounters with otherness, memory, and desire take shape. By aligning psychoanalysis with ethnomusicology and migration studies, the article argues that creativity is not simply a matter of individual agency but a complex interplay between internal divisions and external structures. It invites a reconsideration of how migrant musicians live with, and through, dislocation—without resolving it into normative narratives of cohesion or integration. This theoretical repositioning suggests that the work of creativity lies precisely in its capacity to articulate what does not fit, what remains opaque or foreign, even to the self. Through this lens, integration is not an endpoint, but a question continuously deferred.

Understanding the often neglected relationships between the creative processes of the practice of rock music by the Iranian youth in the making of their subjectivity and the characteristics of the social space of the Iranian university that they attend to are the main concerns of this article. Taking the practice of music as a meaningful medium and the social space as the context of the constitution of subjectivity, the article examines the constitution of the subjectivity of musician students through their practice of rock music in the social space of the university and beyond. Autonomous and unsupervised social spaces — as the foundations for the development of subjectivity — are rarely public in Iran. Iranian universities are exceptional because while they are official spaces, they could go beyond being a place for studying and provide the ‘student organisations’ with certain degrees of socio-cultural autonomy, freedom from the official agenda and civil enactions. The debate is whether these social spaces can provide the student practitioners of rock music in Iran the same degrees of socio-cultural autonomy through which they can develop their subjectivity and agency. In other words, the article explores the extend to which rock music is being socio-culturally recognised inside the university. The article asks what are the dynamics of this social space in facilitating the development of Iranian rock music outside the universities; what are the dynamics of the private social spaces of rock music and how these several private and official social spaces share in the constitution of the subjectivity of student rock musicians?

This element aims to understand the discursive power structure of popular music of contemporary Iran, the broader issue of cultural hegemony and the constitution of popular culture in the semi-democratic environment since 1979. While not taking a chronological order to (re/de)construct the perspectives, the element is mainly focused inside Iran but also pays attention to the substantial dynamics of cultural production in diaspora, in both cases, focusing on the politicisation of culture. By employing an interdisciplinary approach – combining ethnomusicology, discourse analysis and psychoanalysis – and with a clear ontological perspective on hegemony in Iranian popular music, the element develops a bottom-up theoretical framework that illuminates the dynamics of power beyond the so-called notion of resistance. It demonstrates that there is not a coherent cultural hegemony in Iran – in its traditional political meaning – despite the implementation of ideological apparatus for more than four decades.