This is a first for us here because it has the name of everyone of us at the end. We are a music magazine, not a political one but what is happening in Iran right now is making it impossible to stay outside.
In May 2024 our editorial took up the case of Toomaj Salehi, Iranian rap artist. We will include a section from that editorial: Artistic freedom is something we take for granted, but there is a poem called “Not My Business” by Niyi Osundare that points out what can happen when we constantly pretend to not see what is going on. I feel that although we are small, we have to sometimes raise our voices. Toomaj Salehi is a rap artist based in Iran, currently sentenced to death for writing and performing songs critical of his government. “It’s a shame you’re blood sucking leeches,” he sings in the “mouse trap” about his government apologists in the West. “If you cover your eyes, then your hands are drenched in blood.” In 2024, Zara Esmaeili, an Iranian street musician, was arrested after a video surfaced showing her singing Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’ without wearing a hijab as required by Iranian law. It is illegal there for women to sing in public, just allow that to sink in! According to human rights reports, since 2025, the Iranian regime has specifically targeted and censored the social media pages of female singers for ‘production of criminal content’ and ‘harming public decency.’
It is not hard for those in power to turn an innocent person into a criminal, sadly. But to be sentenced to death under charges widely condemned by human rights organisations for “spreading corruption on earth” speaks everything about a system that runs scared. Singers who try and practice their craft can expect explicit attack on them. In “Rathole,” Salehi sang of those still supporting the regime: “You saw the people’s pain but closed your eyes.”
I will also turn to the Instagram account of Iranian rapper Evi, which had nearly 26,000 followers, and was also taken offline in December. She had previously said security agencies contacted her, demanding she delete her page within 24 hours—a demand she refused.
“I will stand with my people for the rest of my life and will not accept anything that contradicts living freely, even if it is presented in the name of religious law,” she said in a post. (link here)
Let us not close our eyes to what is happening. If we as a magazine can’t raise awareness for artists in plight, arrested and in danger of losing their lives for singing or dancing or showing their hair, then how can we sleep at night?
Iranian artists in the diaspora are making their feelings felt. For example, Lily Amis, an indie writer and songwriter (not a vocalist) who told us: “I left Iran decades ago as a child war refugee. I wrote the song myself in response to the recent protests and the ongoing struggle for freedom.”
The song in question is Daryā-ye Khoon (Iran’s Ocean of Blood)
The artist website is here
Check out the song and the accompanying video here
Her album : Iran 0098 SOS is available here on bandcamp where you can download the tracks. Let us say:
“A mother folds an unused shirt,
مادر — صبرِ سنگینتر از مرگ.
No grave, no trial, just silence and lies,
اعدام on fast-forward, justice denied.
Hospitals choking, چشمها خاموش،
Hundreds of suns went suddenly dark.”
Have a listen, the song is an anthem for the people and their fight for change, a desire for freedom as the body bags are piling up of the young. A comment to us recently was that our platform confers social responsibility as well as the need to promote music. We don’t need to be told. We support the people of Iran, we support Iranian artists trying to fight this regime with music and dance as their weapons.
Remember that it has been said The Beatles music smuggled into the USSR helped bring down the Berlin Wall, music and dance are anthems for the youth of Iran and will bring another wall down.
I danced on a Friday when the world turned black – It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back. They buried my body and they thought I’d gone, But I am the dance, and I still go on.”
Power to the People, John Lennon:
“I got to ask you comrades and brothers
How do you treat your own woman back home?
She got to be herself
So, she can free herself..”
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