How Hip-Hop Connected the Iranian Diaspora and Taught Me to Swear in Farsi

The early 2000s were a vastly important time for cultural events: Michael Jackson died, YouTube and the iPod were founded, reality television became a thing, and  Top of the Pops aired its final episode. And, at the same time in Iran, a significant underground music movement was beginning to blossom: Persian hip hop.

What started as a few Tehran based young artists imitating US hip hop—first rapping in English, then rapping in Farsi over US beats—eventually moved on to creating their own tracks and spitting in Farsi. For teenagers who lived in Iran, and for those who made up part of the roughly 80,000-deep Iranian diaspora in the UK, this phenomenon was massive. And for me, the genre gave me a deeper grasp of my mother tongue, even if only in the sense that I learned how to call someone a ho and talk about the universal phenomenon that is coke dick.

The two front-runners of the scene were arguably Hichkas, often called the Godfather of Iranian rap, and a group named Zedbazi, which formed in 2002. Hichkas combined hip-hop with elements from classical Iranian music: lyrically, he focused on social issues in Iran, steeped in nationalist tradition – and while his flow sounded aggressive, he avoided profanity. Zedbazi took the opposite approach and pioneered Iranian gangsta rap; becoming the first in a wave of musicians to swear and explicitly rap about sex and drugs, quickly achieving huge popularity among Iran’s exceptionally young population (60 percent of the nation are thought to be under 30).

“Hip-hop is without a doubt the most popular genre for the young generation in Iran,” says Mahdyar, Persian hip-hop’s first and most iconic producer, speaking to me from Paris. “If you’re out on the street you don’t hear rock, you don’t hear electronic—you hear hip-hop and pop—it’s the biggest genre that’s been created by the post-revolution generation.”

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