Iran Courts Its Exiled Singers While Music Keeps Working as Protest
Iranian authorities are trying to persuade prominent singers living in exile to return home, Deutsche Welle reports. The same account describes a double game: the state wants music as a political tool, and music keeps escaping the assignment, having become a powerful expression of dissent and resistance.
Governments that treat culture as infrastructure tend to end up here. A singer who comes home is a piece of legitimacy; a song that travels further than any official broadcast is a problem with a melody. Iran is working both ends at once — courting the voices it can reach and living with the ones it cannot.
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Bringing a singer home can be courtship or control — either way, the state sets more of the terms once the singer is back on its soil.
Which leaves the authorities negotiating from an odd position: a government that wants music as an instrument is dealing with a form that has already refused to behave like one.