Underground, overground: Rock music and youth discourses in Iran
Underground, overground: Rock music and youth discourses in Iran
复制标题
地下、地上:伊朗的摇滚音乐和青年话语
DOI:
--
复制
发表时间:
2005
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
L. Nooshin
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
L. Nooshin
The Tehran basement (zir-e zamin) is an interesting phenomenon. A standard feature of the ubiquitous apartment blocks that were built from the 1960s onwards and became one of the most prominent signs of modernity in the rapidly expanding city, the basement is rooted in traditional architectural designs in which the space below ground offered seclusion as well as coolness in summer and warmth in winter. Nowadays, the basement serves many purposes. More often than not a parking area, it also represents a liminal space in which the boundaries between private and public domains become blurred. Such boundaries remain important in Iran and are reinforced architecturally through the high walls and metal gates that surround residential buildings and protect the internal, private space from the outside world. But basements transgress this. Regularly used for wedding receptions or parties where men and women mix freely (in contrast to receptions held in public places), women’s beauty salons are often located in basements away from the public gaze, but not quite in the private domestic realm. Basements also served as air raid shelters during the Iran-Iraq war. In recent years, however, something else has taken refuge in the basements of Tehran where, twenty-six years after the 1979 Revolution, a revolution of a rather different kind is taking place. Following the relaxation of government restrictions on popular music in 1998, many young people began to form their own bands, something that has led to the emergence of a grass-roots popular music for the first time in Iran since 1979. In particular, many bands are developing a new style of music, largely rock-oriented, but also drawing on a range of other (predominantly Western popular) idioms, effectively creating a localized brand of Iranian rock.