I wanted an electric guitar like Pink Floyd. "The teacher told us we were going to play an instrument. "My parents were always working, so I went to kindergarten when I was 3," he says. His favorite music video: Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall. As a kid growing up after the Islamic Revolution, he watched Western television on his parents' illegal satellite dish. Mahdyar's story is typical of many middle-class rappers in Tehran. Aghajani fled Iran out of fear that his government was trying to capture him for producing rap music, which was against the law. Mahdyar Aghajani smokes while listening to a song he is producing at his Paris apartment, on May 8, 2011. It is the most popular thing young Iranians listen to." "Now there are thousands of people rapping.
"We started as a small community of rappers," says Mahdyar, one of the stars of the acclaimed 2010 film No One Knows About Persian Cats, which explores underground music in Tehran. Today, despite laws prohibiting rap, exiled artists are trying to change their country from afar, sharing beats and rhymes over Skype while introducing Rap-i-Farsi to new audiences outside of Iran. But as the specter of new protests faded, so too did the mullahs' hip-hop crackdown. At the time, the authorities were still dealing with the fallout from the Green Movement, the mass demonstrations against then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That prompted some of Iran's most popular MCs to leave the country. Six years ago, Tehran's police chief, Hossein Sajedinia, deemed 021 music "morally deviant" and arrested scores of young rappers. "But if you go to a party, people are playing rap." "We don't have clubs," says Mahdyar Aghajani, 27, a hip-hop producer known to his fans by his first name. But Iranian rappers have long spit from the shadows, selling their music clandestinely and holding secret concerts.
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Known as Rap-i-Farsi or 021 music (after the telephone city code for Tehran), Iranian hip-hop grew out of the same alienation and despair as its American precursor. Despite these strict rules, or perhaps because of them, underground music is flourishing, especially hip-hop. But many are still frustrated with the lack of jobs and still resentful of laws that prohibit criticizing the government in public, smoking marijuana or even drinking alcohol. lifted economic sanctions, young Iranians are euphoric about rejoining the rest of the world. "It is beyond sad," Williams told the press, "that these kids were arrested for trying to spread happiness." The authorities let the dancers go, but next time, they warned, they wouldn't be so lenient. They were forced to repent on state television and threatened with 91 lashes, along with six months in prison. In the spring of 2014, not long after the video was released, Iranian authorities quickly put the young dancers behind bars. But what makes that little scene unique, and dangerous, is that it happened in Tehran, the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a country governed by a strict interpretation of religious laws. They filmed the party and uploaded the video to YouTube, where it received more than a million hits.
Sporting sunglasses and fluorescent sneakers, a small group of men and women danced on a rooftop to "Happy," the hit single by Pharrell Williams. It could have happened almost anywhere in the world.
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