GOOGOOSH

It’s a sunny but unusually cold winter morning and Googoosh is sitting next to a heater at a desk off of her living room, wearing a turtleneck under a zip-up sweater. She is at her longtime home in Bel Air, in the hills above Los Angeles. One of her two Pomeranians is in her lap; her golden retriever is lurking in the background. We greet each other in Farsi before settling into a conversation in English, with just the occasional Farsi word thrown in.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Googoosh in modern Iranian culture. Born Faegheh Atashin in Tehran in 1950 to Azerbaijani parents—but known as Googoosh since childhood—she is the preeminent singer and actress of prerevolutionary Iran. Every generation has its megastar—in the West, we’re arguably in a Taylor Swift era—but Googoosh has defied considerable odds to remain a star for generation upon generation of Iranians. Today, thousands of fans (many, if not most, born well after the 1979 revolution) travel from Iran to Turkey or Dubai to see Googoosh perform live, and thousands more in exile have flocked to her shows in cities including London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York—a testament to the way she has come to embody a vision of Iran that is at once contemporary and traditional. 

“I was very little when I started performing,” she says. “In the beginning, I just wanted to make my father [entertainer and comedian Saber Atashin] happy but little by little, I noticed that people around me were enjoying what I do.” At the time, Iran (under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) was embarking on a furious drive toward modernization; by the time Googoosh turned 18 in the late 1960s, Persian society had fully embraced Western social mores and pop culture. It was in this heady atmosphere that she became a symbol of modern Iran: first as an actor, starring in a series of popular films, and as a fashion icon, with her miniskirts and haircuts (one of which came to be known as the Googooshi) copied by thousands of Iranian women.

It is in music, however, that Googoosh has made her lasting mark. During the 1970s, she was at the forefront of a new genre of Persian popular music, fusing the complex dastgah system of traditional Persian music with Western pop melodies. And while Persian pop had long since imported the violin into its repertoire, in Googoosh’s music, many of the classical instruments, such as the tar, ney, tonbak and santur, were supplanted by their Western equivalents: guitar and bass, flute (or clarinet), percussion and piano. “I wanted to be classical and modern,” she says. The result was a sound that was both instantly recognizable to an Iranian audience and yet strikingly new, allowing a young generation, open to Western culture and ideas, to claim her as their own. It made her one of the most popular figures in Iran, especially among young women for whom she represented female empowerment in a male-dominant, patriarchal society.

Yet for more than two decades, Googoosh was completely absent from public life. At the time of the Islamic revolution in 1979—when the shah was overthrown, the monarchy abolished and the fundamentalist Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini was hailed (and subsequently officially installed) as the regime’s highest authority, its “supreme leader”—she happened to be visiting the US. Despite the wholesale rejection of Western society by the Shia clergy now in charge, Googoosh decided to return to Iran. “It was a very bad situation for me and other Iranians at the time in America,” she says.  “I felt lonely,” she explains. “I didn’t have anybody; I didn’t have money. I couldn’t stay alone in America.” She decided to catch a plane to Tehran from New York, not knowing “what would happen to me,” she says. “If I’m going to die, I prefer dying in my own country.” Many others waited anxiously to see what form the country would take after over two millennia of continuous monarchy.

On her return she was imprisoned for about a month, her interrogators in jail telling her that what she did for a living “was a sin,” and her passport was confiscated. There are differing notions in Islam as to whether a woman’s voice can be considered awrah—to be exposing the intimate parts of the body—and should therefore be prohibited. In Shia Iran, the clergy had always frowned upon singing, especially pop music; soon after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, popular music was banned and musical performances by women outlawed. At the same time, an Islamic dress code made wearing the hijab mandatory.  Iranian women today are among few women in the world whose grandmothers could claim having more rights; one of the first acts of the new regime was the overturning the Family Protection Law, which saw, overnight, the reversal of women’s rights in marriage, child custody and divorce.

She wears a dress by FERRAGAMO and an earring by COMPLETEDWORKS.