From the introduction to Tehrangeles Dreaming: Intimacy and Imagination in Southern California's Iranian Pop Music by Farzaneh Hemmasi (Duke University Press, April 2020): 

The sudden influx of popular musicians and media producers into Los An- geles was critical in establishing this diasporic hub’s distinctiveness, but Iranians had already been flocking to Southern California and the United States more generally throughout the prior decades. Friendly relations be- tween the US government and the sha, (who had the American and Brit- ish governments to thank for engineering the 1953 coup securing his rule) meant that from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s, there were many Ameri- cans in Iran and many Iranians in America. California was especially pop- ular with Iranians pursuing higher education. In the 1970s, roughly fifty thousand Iranian students attended American colleges and universities, with many electing to attend the Golden State’s high-quality yet affordable state universities (Shannon 2017). Some of these students and their fami- lies settled in the United States, and especially in California, establishing enough of a presence to sustain Iranian-oriented restaurants and other busi- nesses that have lasted to this day. Some students also returned to Iran, bringing back their foreign education—and in my father’s case a foreign wife as well. In 1971 my Iranian father received his doctorate from the Uni- versity of Indiana; he and my Euro-American mother married in the same year. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Tehran and then to Shiraz. Both of my parents taught at what was then called Pahlavi University. I was born in Shiraz in 1975, and our social circle included many families consisting of an Iranian husband and American wife with the same basic origin story as our own.

The political unrest of the late 1970s and the eventual 1978–1979 revo- lution spurred the departure of thousands of Iranians and most foreign- ers as well. Given its already established Iranian community and a climate and mountainous landscape recalling Tehran, Los Angeles was an obvious choice for those with the means to choose where they landed. Families with connections to the monarchy, members of political opposition groups, and individuals from religious minorities persecuted under the Islamic Republic were among the first to leave Iran and settle in Los Angeles. (After leaving Iran in 1980, my family considered moving to Los Angeles as well, but be- cause my father found an academic post in northern California, we eventu- ally resettled there.) Today Iranians live in large numbers from San Diego to Ventura County, with especially visible populations in the western Los Angeles neighborhoods of Westwood, Beverley Hills, and Santa Monica, and throughout the towns lining Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Val- ley. Shiite Muslims, Jews, Christians, Baha‘is, and Zoroastrians are all rep- resented in Southern California, as are Iranians of Persian, Azeri Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish, Arab, and other ethnicities (Bozorgmehr 1997, 2011; Kelley, Friedlander, and Colby 1993). Immediately following the revolution and the termination of Iranian and American diplomatic rela- tions, US borders were closed to most Iranians hoping to move to or study in America. Despite these challenges, over the intervening decades Iranians have continued to enter the United States as economic migrants, asylees, refugees, and especially university students. However, the majority of indi- viduals and families who established Iranian Southern California and the Tehrangeles media industries arrived from Pahlavi Iran.

The accidental founders of Tehrangeles pop were in California at the time of the revolution for nonpolitical reasons. Singer and songwriter Shah- ram Shabpareh and the vocalists Ebi, Shahrokh, and Shohreh Solati were in the United States to perform for local Iranian audiences, while music producer Vartan Avanessian was in Southern California on a business trip. When news of the shah’s ouster and the Islamist triumph reached them, these musicians decided it was better to remain in the United States than risk repercussions for their “morally corrupting” activities. Especially in their early decades, the Tehrangeles culture industries represented the ad- aptation and continuation of Pahlavi music and media producers’ careers and professional networks. Vartan Avanessian, Jahangir Tabaraei, and Ma- nouchehr Bibiyan—prolific music producers with large catalogs of record- ings and strong social and professional networks across the prerevolution- ary domestic Iranian culture industries—were crucial to establishing the Tehrangeles music business in the 1980s. Prerevolutionary musiqi-ye pāp ce- lebrities including Vigen Derderian, Dariush, Ebi, Shahram Shabpareh, Sia- vash Ghomeishi, Hassan Shamaeizadeh, Leila Foruhar, and Shohreh Solati were all in Los Angeles by the late 1980s. Singers specializing in light classi- cal repertoire like the female vocalists Hayedeh, Mahasti, and Homeira also moved to Southern California, as did mardomi singers like Sousan and Ab- bas Ghaderi. Numerous well-known lyricists like Shahyar Ghanbari, Touraj Negahban, and Zoya Zakarian who were active in the prerevolutionary in- dustry also moved to Los Angeles, along with composers and arrangers like Manouchehr Cheshmazar, Farid Zoland, Jahanbakhsh Pazouki, and oth- ers with whom they had collaborated in Iran. Tehrangeles-based musicians also worked with their colleagues who landed in western Europe, including composer Esfandiar Monfaredzadeh and lyricist Iraj Jannatie Ataie. By the 1990s, Tehrangeles was the primary destination for aspiring Iranian pop musicians. Tehrangeles stars who first made their names in Southern Cali- fornia include the duo Andy and Kourosh, Moein, Faramarz Assef, Omid, Mansour, and Shakila; the prolific producer Schubert Avakian is also in this category. First-generation immigrants fleeing the revolution, and individu- als like Sepideh who moved to the United States as children or teenagers during the Iran-Iraq War, are more often participants in the Iranian mu- sic industry than second-generation youth who grew up in North Amer- ica. There are also more men at all levels of the music and media industry, with women active primarily as vocalists and lyricists. The concentration of power in the hands of Tehrangeles’s founding cohort—most of whom are now aged between fifty and ninety—has meant that this group’s perspec- tives have been somewhat disproportionally represented in Tehrangeles me- dia, even when younger vocalists, musicians, or spokespeople are the ones speaking or singing.

Taken as a group, Iranians in the United States have made their mark as “high-status immigrants,” boasting impressive levels of academic achieve- ment, entrepreneurship, and financial success in comparison to both many other immigrant groups and Euro-Americans as a whole (Bozorgmehr and Douglas 2011; Bozorgmehr and Sabagh 1988). The founding generation of Tehrangeles popular culture doesn’t quite fit this profile: for many in this group, their greatest financial success and fame were in prerevolutionary Iran and didn’t necessarily translate into the more modest conditions of the diaspora. Instead, an important stream of Tehrangeles performers’ income comes from performing at wealthy Iranians’ festivities, first in Los Angeles and later elsewhere in the diaspora. Entrepreneurship has been crucial to Tehrangeles music and media companies: a plethora of Iranian-owned ter- restrial and internet radio stations, audiovisual production and reproduc- tion businesses, cable and satellite television stations, nightclubs and res- taurants, party and concert promoters, and other companies and individual ventures have generated the business infrastructure for this popular music’s local and international distribution and performance.

Southern California’s Persian-language popular music is stylistically  varied, including sentimental ballads, patriotic songs about the home- land, songs about exile, covers and adaptations of prerevolutionary classic songs and genres, and lots and lots of dance music. When Iranians speak of “Tehrangeles pop” or especially los ānjelesi pop (pop “of Los Angeles”), they typically mean upbeat dance music performed by a soloist singing light, colloquial lyrics. This also has affective associations: Tehrangeles pop is generally thought of as music meant to enliven a social gathering and put listeners in a good mood. In Tehrangeles today, a few musicians limit themselves to the sort of prerevolutionary, smooth, Western-leaning, senti- mental pop style (e.g., Ebi) while others are primarily mardomi artists (like Ahmad Azad), but many others compose and perform across genre bound- aries to appeal to as large an audience as possible. Tehrangeles also has a less commonly acknowledged serious side, which is on display in certain artists’ morose romantic pieces and in patriotic and “political” songs evoking Iran’s present “ruin” and its future potential. Finally, one of the expatriate culture industries’ greatest sources of income and material has been the creative re- mediation of popular music from the “golden age,” roughly concurrent with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign.

When either Iranians or non-Iranians speak of a “Little Iran” or “Little Per- sia” neighborhood, they are usually referring to the intersection of Ohio Avenue and Westwood Avenue, where many of the city’s oldest Iranian- owned businesses are concentrated: Attari Sandwich Shop, the music store Music Box LA, Sholeh Restaurant, and Gol o Bolbol Ice Cream. Within these few blocks, visitors can purchase Iranian groceries, pick up tickets for an upcoming pop or classical concert, buy Persian-language magazines and books produced in Los Angeles and in Iran, and order a plate of rice, grilled tomato, and kebab. Other small businesses with Persian lettering advertise immigration services, beauticians, passport photos, and music lessons. Im- pressed by the number of Iranian establishments on this stretch of West- wood that bore the names of prerevolutionary Iranian businesses, anthro- pologist Fariba Adelkhah suggests that these few blocks were “une espèce de réinvention ou de reconstitution quelque peu nostalgique du Téhéran des années 1970” (a kind of reinvention or somewhat nostalgic reconstruc- tion of 1970s Tehran; 2001, 3). If one walks north on Westwood and makes a right before Wilshire, one finds, tucked behind a public library and a parking deck, the Pierce Brothers Memorial Park and Mortuary where Iranian businesspeople, artists, scholars, political figures, and pop music stars are buried alongside American celebrities including Peggy Lee, Dean Martin, and Burt Lancaster. Beverley Hills is also a kind of Iranian neighborhood marked by a high concentration of especially Jewish Iranian residents and the infamous “Persian palace” mansions built for Iranians (Maghbouleh 2017, 39–48). Jamshid “Jimmy” Delshad was mayor of Beverley Hills be- tween 2007 and 2008, and then again between 2010 and 2011. Elsewhere in Los Angeles County, otherwise public spaces become temporarily Iranian for special events like the pre-Islamic Chaharshanbeh Suri festival on the beach in El Segundo, where people jump over fires before the New Year, or the Sizdah Be Dar festival on the thirteenth day of the New Year that brings Iranians to the San Fernando Valley’s Balboa Park. Iranians also take over various large-capacity performance venues like the Gibson Amphitheater when Tehrangeles pop stars play to the local crowd.

Tehrangeles music and media businesses are neither in Westwood nor in Beverley Hills—these are several miles northwest in the more affordable and more ethnically diverse San Fernando Valley. During my fieldwork and on subsequent visits, I would wander Westwood in the morning, have a bowl of āsh-e reshteh (noodle soup) at Attari, and then drive north on the 405 over the Sepulveda Pass, getting off at the Reseda or White Oak Av- enue exits to meet someone at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf café for an inter- view or chat. Ventura Boulevard boasts many Iranian businesses and syna- gogues with Persian signage directly along the avenue and in its numerous strip malls, where they are often sandwiched in with other “ethnic” stores. I would sometimes stop at a strip mall with a Persian-language sign advertis- ing terāfik eskul (“traffic school”), which also included a Himalayan restau- rant and the small shop Shemshak Juice selling fresh-squeezed pomegran- ate juice and willow-tree water imported from Iran. Iranian entertainment businesses are more hidden. Cabaret Tehran, a major performance venue for Tehrangeles pop musicians, has a daytime alter ego as the lunch spot Medi- terranean Express; its nightclub persona is unapparent until around eight in the evening, when the pink neon Persian-script Cabaret Tehran sign is turned on and crowds of nattily dressed Iranians smoking, chatting, and drinking tea fill up the patio for an evening of karaoke or a live performance by a Tehrangeles vocalist. Music and media production businesses, and the transnational networks that carry Tehrangeles products to international Iranian audiences, are even less apparent to casual observers. My visits to music company headquarters and television stations took me to unassuming business complexes near auto repair garages and donut shops that gave no hint of the colorful popular culture their tenants produced. Since the 1980s, music and television entrepreneurs have collaborated with and even opened offices close to one another—for instance, during my fieldwork the televi- sion station Jam-e Jam and the music company Avang were on the same floor of a Ventura Boulevard office building, while the music company Taraneh and the television station Omid-e Iran were in the same industrial park.

Tehrangeles artists extend their audiences beyond the local through reg- ular international tours. Tehrangeles vocalists make frequent trips to cities in North America and western Europe with large Iranian diaspora popula- tions, sometimes playing small clubs and sometimes major venues, as when Googoosh played Royal Albert Hall in 2013. While several million Iranians now live in the West, Tehrangeles artists’ largest potential audiences are, naturally, within Iran. However, because Tehrangeles artists don’t gener- ally visit Iran, and because there are very few countries to which Iranian passport holders can travel without a (difficult-to-acquire) visa, it has taken some creativity for Tehrangeles artists to reach the domestic market. As of 2019, the only countries Iranian citizens can visit without a visa are Ar- menia, Dominica, Ecuador, Georgia, Haiti, Malaysia, Micronesia, Serbia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Tehrangeles performers have attempted to meet Iranian residents partway by regularly staging large concerts in Turkey, Ar- menia, Georgia, and Malaysia as well as in a few other neighboring coun- tries popular with Iranians, like the United Arab Emirates. These lucrative tours often take place during the Iranian New Year season, which coin- cides with the vernal equinox and is a national holiday. Since the mid-2010s, some Tehrangeles artists—Sepideh included—have begun performing on Iranian-oriented luxury cruises embarking from the Turkish Mediterra- nean. The combined costs of plane flights, hotels, and concert tickets are prohibitively expensive for average Iranians, but the events are popular and profitable enough to have kept Tehrangeles artists coming back year after year. Some Tehrangeles artists also entertain at lavish weddings; I heard tales of a very well-established Tehrangeles vocalist being paid $25,000 plus expenses to perform at an Iranian couple’s wedding in Dubai.

By far the most common way in which audiences access Tehrangeles mu- sic is via mass media. During my fieldwork in the mid-2000s, satellite tele- vision broadcasts of Tehrangeles music videos and programs featuring or hosted by Tehrangeles performers were the primary transnational carriers of expatriate popular culture. These satellite television stations are free to air, meaning that they are accessible to anyone with a satellite dish pointed at the right celestial coordinates—no subscription is required. Iranians the world over own satellite dishes, including inside Iran, where they are ille- gal but largely tolerated. Since the mid-2000s the internet has become an increasingly important avenue for selling, advertising, and disseminating Tehrangeles popular music. Instagram is currently very popular within Iran and with Tehrangeles pop musicians; it is also one of the few foreign social media sites that are not blocked in Iran—at least at the time of writing. However, satellite television continues to be effective in reaching domes- tic audiences because fewer people have internet in their homes; the state’s internet filters and policies of keeping internet speeds low are also factors. While filter breakers and virtual private networks are available in Iran, and while the state also uses satellite-jamming technology to attempt to block foreign broadcasts, overall it is less trouble to install a dish on one’s roof and point it toward the Hotbird satellite orbiting Earth at thirteen degrees east. The satellite television business began in Southern California in the early 2000s and has since spread to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Tur- key, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Several Western governments have also embraced Tehrangeles and other Iranian expatriate popular culture as part of their “cultural diplomacy” initiatives. Voice of America Persian Language Service, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Radio Farda (Radio “Tomorrow”), and bbc Persian produce high-quality Persian-language tele- vision and radio broadcasts and internet programming for domestic and diasporic Iranian audiences; these include interviews, videos, and perfor- mances by Tehrangeles pop musicians. Like satellite dishes, none of these media outlets are officially permitted, but they are nonetheless widely ac- cessed in Iran.

As the foregoing account makes clear, Tehrangeles musicians and media producers and their productions are imbricated in an assemblage of private and governmental, diasporic and domestic, and commercial and political networks and conflicts. The Iranian state interprets unofficial media as part of “soft war” (jang-e narm) on Iranian citizens by Western and Iranian oppo- nents seeking to foment a “velvet revolution” (enghelāb-e makhmali) (Naficy 2012; Price 2012; Rahimi 2015; Semati 2012; Sreberny 2013). Participating in this assemblage therefore puts Tehrangeles musicians in a precarious posi- tion vis-à-vis the Iranian state. At times, Iranian officials have questioned, harassed, arrested, and criminally charged Iranians who work with or ap- pear on these outlets, including Iranian citizens who live and work abroad (Michaelsen 2018). A standout example is the Tehran Revolutionary Court 28’s March 2017 announcement, published in domestic media, that it had sentenced Googoosh in absentia to sixteen years in prison. Her crimes were “propaganda against the Islamic Republic” and “creating centers of corrup- tion and corrupting the public.” Googoosh has not set foot in Iran since her departure in 2000 and is extremely unlikely to return to Iran to serve her time, but she remains accessible to domestic audiences through foreign government and expatriate media and through concerts in neighboring countries—at least one of which was sponsored by the US government– funded Radio Farda. While the Revolutionary Court sentence is best un- derstood as symbolic, it exemplifies how Iranian expatriate popular music and musicians intertwine moral, commercial, and political concerns, and how transnationally circulating popular music produced halfway around the world becomes embroiled in tense relationships between homeland and diaspora, and state and international actors—all of whom have competing stakes in the Iranian nation.