A veteran music journalist and educator, Lily Moayeri grew up at the cultural intersection of her birthplace, Washington, DC, and her parents’ home country of Iran. The daughter of a diplomat, she had spent her childhood living in various counties around the world and, during her travels, had become addicted to Western pop. But during a two-year return to Iran between his father’s assignments abroad, the Islamic Revolution broke out in 1979. This resulted in the banning of all music deemed Western or non-Islamic throughout Iran. , and it became impossible for the budding music-obsessed to get their hands on the albums of their favorite bands. Most music stores, including the cassette store opposite the Moayeri family home in Tehran, had been closed.
But while young Lily may no longer have access to a physical record store, she soon found another way to nurture her passion for music, thanks to an underground network of smugglers who circulated audio cassettes. and illegally dubbed contraband video. She even started her own small-scale stealth counterfeit ring, fearlessly distributing her lovingly homemade mixtapes to friends at school despite the ever-looming threat of incarceration. This secret circuit “allowed us to re-enter Western entertainment…the tape store of my childhood has been replaced by door-to-door service”, writes Moayeri in a new anthology, The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store: A World Story.
The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store, released on July 13, is described as “a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individuals, but also what they meant to communities, musical genres and society at large”. The following exclusive excerpt from Moayeri’s essay, which appears in the “Cultural Geography of Record Stores” section of the book, proves that the spirit of camaraderie, community, and connection that these stores foster simply cannot be contained between four walls.
“The revolution will not be televised, it will be recorded: acquiring popular music in Tehran before and after the revolution”, by Lily Moayeri
For a few years after the institution of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, there was a strict travel ban. Its gradual lifting throughout the 1980s did not mean hassle-free passage, but rather that Iranians were not prisoners in their own country and Iranians abroad were not barred from returning home. But it also meant that illegal audio and video tapes began circulating in an underground network, via the pilots of Iran Air flights who smuggled back albums on cassettes they had bought in Europe and videos of programs they had bought in Europe. they had recorded on European television.
Most notable of these was the UK’s long-running music charting scheme, top pops. These items were then duplicated on blank tapes, packed in unmarked briefcases and delivered by an affable man who would only come to your home on the recommendation of a trusted customer. My aunt Sussan – who was introduced by one of her close friends, a music lover – connected our family to this underground network, which enabled us to take up Western entertainment again. Thus, the cassette store of my childhood was replaced by a door-to-door service. top pops episodes informed my choices for albums I would buy from the briefcase selections: Culture Club, Duran Duran, Wham!, Howard Jones, Tears for Fears, Spandau Ballet, Thompson Twins, Simple Minds, A-ha, the Style Council, The Human League, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Bananarama. The list was long.
I asked my parents for a boombox with a double cassette player so I could make mixtapes from the albums. They agreed, in exchange for a good report card, and with the stipulation that I should charge my friends for the mixtapes I made for them, to compensate for the wear and tear on the boombox and the cost of the blank tapes.
Now, instead of doing my homework, I would painstakingly make record/play/pause mixtapes. My mixtapes used to soundtrack parties my high school friends threw. They were denied just low enough not to be heard outside, inadvertently alerting the Revolutionary Guards (aka the Pasdars), who under Islamic law had the right to raid the party , confiscate our “contraband”, any other “inappropriate” items, and take us all to jail.
Maybe one of the reasons I was willing to risk this low-level tape traffic was that sharing music with friends, talking about songs and dancing, isn’t just instinct natural human but, as mentioned before, a huge part of Iranian culture. We’ve practiced the dances in heavily choreographed videos like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and music-driven films like lightning dance And Free from all ties. We performed for each other at parties and were intoxicated by the camaraderie and connection it created.
Of course, Iranian music, both traditional and modern, has always been popular and more easily transmitted, which has helped to find people interested in the top pops-the inspired music in which I was both more difficult and more important to me. This was in the mid-1980s, when the Islamic Republic was still gaining a foothold in Iran, establishing its structure and punitively enforcing its extreme laws. To quote Khomeini in his speech on the Khurdad uprising 15 (1979): “But as for those who want to divert our movement from its course, who have in mind treason against Islam and the nation, who consider Islam incapable to run the affairs of our country despite its 1400 year record – they have nothing to do with our people, and that must be clear.