This series looks at Shaya, a 19-year-old female rapper looking to make it big on Iran?s underground music scene. Though music considered immoral or un-Islamic, including anything featuring solo female vocalists, is legally banned in Iran, an illegal underground music movement is thriving, dependent on clandestine recording studios and young webmasters constantly working around internet censorship. For Shaya, in many ways just another anxious teenager living with her parents, the medium of rap provides her with a voice. Her songs reflect the contradictions of Iran?s post-revolutionary generation: they both nationalistic and sharply critical of Iranian society and apathetic, often misogynistic youth culture. The country's first post-revolution generation grew up on either officially approved revolutionary music and religious chants, or contraband foreign imports. The new generation, however, has access to underground music directly addressing, and in the process helping to shape, the modern Iranian youth experience.
I am an American undergraduate student at Princeton University. I am majoring in international affairs but am currently on a year-long leave of absence from school to conduct research on political graffiti and Kurdish nationalism. My field research has taken me to Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, where in my free time I've been documenting the people and spaces around me.
