Music is an integral part of the human experience. We utilize it for rituals and parties, marriages and funerals. Nations have anthems; regions have classic folk tunes; sports teams have fight songs. This column, Harmony, focuses on music, culture, place, and how they interact. Through interviews with artists from around the world, we discuss topics like genre, community, and the concept of home.
Today we’re featuring Iranian rapper Salome MC, who has been making music for sixteen years. She’s collaborated with artists from Germany to Japan, and has made four EPs and albums. With a master’s in audio/visual arts, her music is often accompanied by fascinating videos, such as the video for “Odium” below. We talked with Salome about influences, lyricism, globalization, and more.
You are commonly known as “Iran’s first female rapper.” As a groundbreaking artist, where do you draw inspiration? What artists, ideas, and music styles influenced your decision to become a concept hip-hop artist?
Ok so, let me just clarify something real quick. When I started rapping in early 2000s, yes, I was the first woman in Iran to do so, but here’s the thing; there were a handful of people who were doing it in the first place, regardless of gender. So with that in mind, what does it mean to be the first woman? It didn’t feel like I was doing something extraordinary. Interestingly enough, it’s more of a male-dominant scene now than it was back then, at least if we get into the statistics and ratios. So, I was just a teenager doing what I liked, not really breaking any grounds as far as I was concerned.
Looking back, it is quite compelling how a few people who listened to hip-hop in Tehran found each other – thanks to yahoo chatrooms – and created a whole music scene that is now a cultural phenomenon in Iran. I was eighteen then, and I had been listening to hip-hop since I was ten. The first Hip-Hop tape I ever owned was from Cartel, a crew of rappers from the Turkish diaspora in Germany. That pretty much set my taste in music and I was drawn to artists who represented marginalized groups and non-mainstream ideas. When I was writing my first song, it coincided with the time the U.S. attacked Afghanistan, and later Iraq. So there was this surge of political hip-hop from America at the time, and I became fascinated by rappers like Paris (Guerilla Funk) and Immortal Technique, especially their respective albums “Sonic Jihad” and “Revolutionary Vol. 2”. These two albums had an enormous influence in my socio/political songwriting. I actually recently met Immortal Technique, and cried when he was performing some of the songs from that album. I also owe much of the English vocabulary I know to him.
But it wasn’t only hip-hop, I was quite influenced by concept musicians regardless of genre. Pink Floyd, Dream Theater, Steven Wilson. Back to hip-hop, Laurin Hill’s Miseducation and Aesop Rock’s Labor Days are big influencers.
How has Iran (as both a geographical location and a political state) shaped your music?
Iran is a historically very poetic country, and the language itself is harmonious and lyrical. I grew up reading and listening to poets like Hafez, Khayyam, and Saadi, which is a quite common occurrence in an Iranian household. Khayyam’s poetry and philosophy had a big impact on me, and I’ve used his quatrains in the chorus of a couple of my songs. Living in Tehran which is a big, overcrowded, metropolitan city had its own particular influences, I think. You have more privacy but less personal space. You question the speed and look for ways of slowing things down. You keep seeing tired faces at rush hour and start looking for alternate ways of living your life. So I moved to a small town. Bandar Anzali, a port city south of Caspian sea. Magnificent nature, but I couldn’t handle it. It started choking me down. Privacy out the window, I moved back after nine months. Then I realized I have a love and hate relationship with Tehran. And really, it’s not so much of Tehran, but a big city thing. I’ve experienced life in Tokyo, Shanghai, Istanbul, New York. They have global identities, and they have more in common than qualities which set them apart, at least in my experience. I think all my music reflects that love and hate relationship with The City, in capital letters.
Now, politics. I know this is a juicy topic so I will keep it short. Wherever you live, if you are under a government which tries to control and regulate as many aspects of your life as an individual as possible, you are going to become political, unless you live in extreme wealth or extreme poverty, which is a different story. Why? Because it’s your everyday life. You feel it when you walk down the street. You feel it when you go to school, go to work. It’s there when you are partying with friends. It’s there when you are dining with family. So that aspect of my music, and the fact that I am very libertarian in thought, I definitely owe it to the special nature of the Iranian government.
“I Officially Exist” and “Excerpts from Unhappy Consciousness” both seem heavily focused on philosophical thought. How has the study of philosophy influenced your music?
I was an avid reader of both Eastern and European philosophical schools of thought in my teenage years of self-discovery, so that naturally reflects even in my earliest songs, perhaps somehow unintentionally. But the two albums you mentioned I crafted carefully and purposefully in their concept and wholesomeness, so thanks for noticing that. I actually get criticized quite often by the average Iranian hip-hop listener for my so-called “heavy” topics, and this style of writing is one of the reasons I am in the fringes of the Iranian music scene. I don’t mind, I just like telling my stories exactly the way I want. “What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, and the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me.”
Some of your videos are quite dark. Could you talk a bit about the messages you are conveying through the suffering/desperation evidenced by your videos (such as “Aquaphobia” and “Callous”)?
Well when everything is going great, I just live my life and enjoy it. I am very aware of the short time I have here and I like making the best of it. I usually turn to art when I want to make sense of less joyous experiences. “Aquaphobia” is the result of me experiencing the 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. I lived in Sendai at the time, one of the cities that was hit the hardest.
“Callous” is different. It’s the third song from “Excerpts From Unhappy Consciousness” and in this part of album’s story, the protagonist discovers stoicism and that she can stand against outside forces and push through it. The video, though, is actually made by A1one, one of the pioneers of Street Art in the Middle East. He is a mentor from my graffiti-drawing days – that’s ancient history so please don’t ask about it – and I am a big fan of his work. When he approached me about a possible collaboration I was naturally very excited. The stop-motion video is his interpretation of the song. I truly love it. There’s no video credit anywhere because, well, A1one likes being left alone. I just followed his requests. He has granted me permission to mention the collaboration in interviews though, so here I am!
You call Mari Soul the ‘fire queen.’ Describe what it was like to work with the talented fire dancer on “Riddle” after she took a break from dancing to focus on her child?
Well, that was the very reason I was inspired by the prospects of working for her, especially for a song like “Riddle,” which asks the question: what is it that drives us to do certain things? Here you have a woman, an amazing nurse who works twelve-hour shifts, a single mother, a queer member of the society, who finds time and energy for dancing her soul out. She was great and I filmed it in Seattle winter, and she danced bare feet on the ground. I had to shoot over and over again to get different angles and frames, but she was spirited and energetic until the last take. It was a great experience.
When speaking of the making of your song in “1+1,” you say, “we started in a happy place about how the world got smaller, and we travel a lot more, and we see a lot more now, and we’re a lot more connected as human beings, but then we started questioning that. Are we really?” Has your thought process on this evolved since the making of “1+1?” How do you think the world’s interconnectedness has affected people and music?
In general, I am an optimist about the world getting smaller. I think in the long term, it’s all going to work out for the better – we will be united and connected as a human race when the Klingons make the first contact. But in the short term, well… we already see how in this age of so-called interconnectedness, people who are not equipped to process the load of information end up with sensory overload, and are easily tricked into being afraid of their fellow human beings; and as we all are aware, this fear is being manipulated into political support in various parts of the world.
When it comes to music, I am going to just give you an example. There’s a music genre called “World Music.” Despite being one of those vague categories, I am pretty sure it means every type of music that is not Western. Isn’t that ridiculous? I see it as the musical equivalent of “The Orient,” a now (almost) obsolete term that is “a European invention,” as Edward Said puts it. The day this so-called genre doesn’t exist will be a good day for music, and for human beings.
In a June 15 Facebook post, you lamented Western media’s depictions of Iran. Specifically, you were critical about World Cup analysis about oppression in Iran. You made the assessment that Western outlets often “stereotype in this recycled neo-orientalist vision.” What are some of the most common myths perpetuated by Western media? What do you wish Westerners knew about Iran that they do not?
What people should understand not only about Iran but any country in the world is that you can’t fit a whole nation in one single narrative. Especially a country as old, as large, and as diverse as Iran. I can go on and tell you something you don’t know about Iran right now, but really, I would be just giving you the narrative from the perspective of a middle-class upbringing in the capital city of Iran.
Here’s an example: when I went to university as an undergrad in Tehran, the dean of our school was a woman, and so was the head of our department. In my first student job my boss was a badass business woman – big shout out to Ms. Sabooni for making me take powerful women for granted. Now years later I went to grad school in Japan and there was only one full-time woman academic in our department, let alone anyone in the position of authority. I worked three jobs there and never had a woman as a boss. There’s a glass ceiling for women everywhere, but I felt it the least in Iran, as far as normal social life goes. Now beware, as I mentioned this is the narrative of an educated, middle-class woman living in Tehran. This is something that I can’t stress enough: class systems are a bigger separator than cultural differences. I can tell you right now that an Iranian middle-class family has more in common with an American middle-class family than they do with the less privileged members of society in Iran, and vice versa.
Another thing that is easy to forget when you click on headlines: that horrible news about Iran that you can’t fathom how it’s still happening in this day and age? It’s horrible news inside Iran too, that’s why it’s news in the first place. Politicians, civil rights groups, and activists are already at it. It’s being discussed. There are protests. Not every protest is to topple the government, people actually want problems solved. Not by bombs from above, but by political and civil discourse, just like every other country in the world.
To help fund more travel stories like these, click here. All donations go to pay writers and photographers. Salome MC’s latest song, “Riddle” is out now. See the video for it here:
