The very title of this book is refreshing: both motrebi and losanjelesi have pejorative connotations for the average Iranian music-lover, and so putting these terms in the title signals a most welcome reevaluation of conventional wisdom. Although classical Persian music has received, deservedly, much academic attention on the part of musicologists and cultural historians, popular music has been much less studied. Moreover, the studies we do have tend to concentrate on recent decades; Iranian hip-hop has proven to be far more attractive as an object of scholarly inquiry than the fondly remembered bandari songs of Nematollah Aghasi.
Fully half the book, four chapters out of eight, is devoted to the motrebs, the musical entertainers of traditional urban society. Using written sources as well as interviews with the last remaining motrebs, the authors piece together a narrative that covers the social background of both the musicians and their audiences. It turns out that within the motreb milieu hierarchies existed that determined who played what and for whom. The discussion of the musicians’ repertoire contained in chapter 3, amply illustrated with musical examples, is of particular interest to musicologists. One insight to be drawn from the four chapters devoted to motrebs is that their lifeworld was not static. Musical styles evolved, attempts were made to engage with popular European music, the violin replaced the kamāncheh, and performance settings changed with time: from private parties the musicians moved to the cafés of Lālehzār Street in central Tehran.
A puzzling absence in this long discussion of motrebs is any reference to the fact that so many of them were Jewish. To be sure, it is impossible for a scholar based in Iran, and very difficult for one based in Australia, to travel to Israel to interview elderly Iranian motrebs who have moved there, but the information contained in the publications of Alain Chaoulli and Houman Sarshar might have been drawn upon to round out the picture.Footnote 1 There are enough indications in the book that the authors harbor no personal animus toward non-Muslim Iranians, and so one wonders, with sadness, whether this omission might reflect an extraterritorial reach of official Iranian sensitivities that begets prudent self-censorship.
Chapter 5 takes us to the realm of “popular music,” which, we learn, is everywhere “intrinsically linked to the development of the middle classes and particularly to the market economy, mass production and mass media” (p. 82). Using Carlos Vega's suggestive term “mesomusic” (“a musical category straddling classical and folk categories” p. 83), the authors trace the evolution of first the tasnif and then the tarāneh from the nineteenth century to the 1950s. Tasnifs were composed by common people, aristocrats, motrebs, and court musicians, and this chapter provides fascinating examples of the lyrics set to music over the decades. Oddly enough, tasnifs of the Constitutional Revolution, such as those composed and sung by Aref Qazvini, are left out of the discussion. Although this reviewer's article on that topic is included in the bibliography, he is not so vain as to conclude that the authors consider it the last word on the subject!
Chapter 6 is devoted to the 1960s and 1970s, when different genres, ranging from the less to the more European-influenced, coexisted. Radio and television brought the music of Iran's pop stars to the homes of all those who wished to listen to it—but one might point out that many Iranians did not wish to partake of that pleasure; numerous were those who refused to have a radio or television set in their house. The post-1979 puritanism that drove most pop stars to Los Angeles and silenced those who stayed had its roots precisely in the 1960s and 1970s, when official policy promoted artistic activities that met with the hostility of the pious.
Chapter 7 takes us to Los Angeles, and chapter 8 back to Iran. These chapters discuss some of the artists who have made a name for themselves since the 1980s. The emphasis is on texts, and one wishes more attention had been given to the purely musical aspects of their productions. A number of key figures are not mentioned, nor is any attention paid to the recording industry and its impact on listening habits. On the whole, the first five chapters of the book are more satisfying than the last three. Perhaps the authors are simply less passionate about recent developments.
The book is on the whole well and carefully researched and presented. There are, however, two minor problems: often a colloquial term occurring in a song's lyrics is transliterated without the written form of the word being given. For example, a reader unfamiliar with the various registers of the Persian language might be hard-pressed to find the word gulleh (p. 8, for goluleh, lit. bullet) in a dictionary. Also, for a coauthored book the authorial “I” occurs far too often. None of these flaws detract from the value of this erudite and well-written book, which I read in one sitting.
Finally, it is only fair to mention Anthony Shay's extraordinary sixteen-page foreword. Far more than a “foreword,” this text is in fact a rich and encyclopedic introduction to the study of Iranian music. It is a reflection of Shay's generosity, also acknowledged by the book's authors, that he put so much effort into his exordial text.
