Opinion | The Rapper Toomaj Salehi’s Arrest Shows Iran’s Crackdown on Dissent Is Failing

It was Mr. Salehi’s older brother who launched him to hip-hop, and by the point he was an adolescent, he was writing his personal lyrics. Iranians want rap as an artwork type, he stated in a video: “The higher courses have a voice sufficient. I believe rap is the voice of the suffocated throats.”

Regardless of his motivation, Mr. Salehi struggled to pay to get his work produced; at one level, he offered his home goods and even his bike. He was shunned by many underground studios that didn’t wish to be related along with his overtly political lyrics, and in the end needed to journey to the north to discover a producer who was comfy working with him.

However as public anger has constructed since December 2017, when one of many largest mass protests because the 1979 revolution started, Mr. Salehi’s music discovered its viewers. In his first large hit, “Rathole,” he rapped about regime apologists inside Iran and overseas, telling them to purchase a “rathole” with the cash they obtained propping up the clerical institution. The lyrics had been so stunning when the track got here out in 2021 that many Iranians discovered it onerous to imagine the rapper was residing contained in the nation when he launched it. He needed to do an Instagram dwell to clarify he was, actually, based mostly in Iran.

“There has definitely been a historical past of offended lyrics earlier than Toomaj, on condition that rap has functioned as a language of protest,” Nahid Siamdoust, an assistant professor of media and Center Jap research on the College of Texas at Austin, advised me. “What units Toomaj’s music aside and is a brand new characteristic is its radical anti-state rhetoric.”

After “Rathole” went viral in Iran and throughout the Iranian diaspora, Mr. Salehi was arrested in September 2021. Followers and supporters reacted to the information by beginning the social media hashtag #FreeToomaj, calling for his launch. After being accused of “propaganda towards the regime,” he was launched on bail after eight days. The comb with incarceration made him solely extra defiant. That month, he pinned a tweet that learn: “Shall the pen that doesn’t write break. Behold what these folks have suffered.”

When the anti-regime protests kicked off in September 2022, Mr. Salehi, like many Iranians, discovered he couldn’t sit on the sidelines. Regardless of the danger of returning to jail, he uploaded movies of his peaceable participation from the streets of Shahin Shahr and recorded two songs highlighting the bravery and plight Iran’s folks. In essence, the artist was now residing his artwork.

“We come to streets like ghosts and change into a nightmare for the federal government,” he rapped in “Battlefield,” through the top of the demonstrations. “We see the sunshine after this hell. Neither suppression nor execution can cease us. We shout and go ahead. Name us roaring fighters.” Within the video for “Fortune,” he confronts the clerical institution immediately, sitting throughout from an nameless official representing the Islamic Republic and predicting its demise by studying espresso grinds.