Mohsen Namjoo: the defiant life of Iran’s Bob Dylan
Watching from the Western world into the dystopian reality of Iran’s rule, it’s clear that revolution feels more important than ever. Back in the day, Bob Dylan knew that in his corner of the world, just as Mohsen Namjoo knows it in his.
Comparing Namjoo to Dylan may seem like a trite allusion to some, but it’s a label that the Iranian musician has come to embrace wholeheartedly in the pursuit of the message he wants to convey. He works with people at his heart, and if, somewhere along that walk, that happens to encompass pieces of politics, art, and revolution, then so be it.
In this sense, the hallmarks trace back to a figure like Dylan are more than evident, with him starting out stalking through the streets of New York City and cultivating a global political march in his wake. Namjoo’s was admittedly on a more insular scale but no less mighty, taking on the shackles of a society that restricts its people’s freedoms at every turn.
It’s obvious that in whatever form it takes, music is always going to be the answer in combating this. “If I blend anything, it comes from life itself, the contradictions that exist in every aspect of our life,” he told The Guardian in 2017. “I come from a country where the state is run by people with an eighth-century mentality”.
“This mentality doesn’t belong to modern times, but it has modern tools in its hands in order to exercise its power”.
Mohsen Namjoo
Namjoo added, “It is an unharmonious combination [that] led to my way of thinking and my music.”
Hailing from such a straitjacketed environment, such as Mashhad in the east of the country, where live music is banned and is forced to simmer in an underground scene, the options were always going to be severely limited. As such, the tipping point came in 2008 when Namjoo decided to flee Iran in exile, for the chance to create and sell his music legally.
That journey of flight has taken him right across Europe and the US, but he has never forgotten his roots. Iranians watch him avidly from afar online, and he has never forgotten them in his heart, releasing the song ‘Gladiators’ in 2009, in protest against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, following a period of particular unrest.
But Namjoo’s goal has never been purely about politics, just simply making music for the sheer freedom of it, away from the shackles of a country where he has been sentenced to prison in absentia. Dylan may not have been faced with such extreme challenges, but he certainly knows about wanting to be lifted of the weight of a whole country’s political wrath.
As time has gone on, this has rendered Namjoo more and more sceptical of the spotlight. “I don’t want to be seen in public and just want to produce music,” he said. “There’s nothing beyond this popularity, it’s very fake. To be honest, I don’t think about people very much. I don’t feel committed to them, nor I have learnt anything from them.”
It doesn’t need to be spelt out how this mantra is resoundingly similar to that of our old American folk rock friend. Who knows if Dylan and Namjoo have ever quietly crossed paths while on their travels, but if they ever did, it’s clear that they would find a certain kindred spirit in each other. Namjoo: the quiet revolutionary, the limelight avoider, and above all, Iran’s Bob Dylan.
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