When rapper Toomaj Salehi was imprisoned in 2021 for criticising Iran’s hardline Islamic regime in his lyrics, he came out fighting, recording a video for a blistering new track just outside the central prison of Esfahan, where he’d been detained for eight days.
Set against a foreboding synth intro layered with samples of distant screams and the sound of advancing shock troops, ‘Bazmandeh’ (Survivor) rang like a battle cry: ‘Give it to me, Iran is mine,’ he demanded. ‘It’s completely destroyed. I will build it myself.’
Just over a year later, Salehi was back in prison, charged with ‘corruption on earth’ and ‘war against God’. By this point, the 32-year-old welder had shot to fame, his music the soundtrack to a mass uprising sparked by the death in custody of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini, a young Kurdish woman detained for wearing her headscarf in a way that showed hair.
Salehi’s unforgiving lyrics nailed the mood of a public tired of forgiving – ‘Yes, yes, sir,’ he rapped with mock deference on ‘Normaleh’
