“I’ll Also With My Poverty, Buy All Your Sadness”: Tataloo and the Tatality Fanbase in Iran

ABSTRACT

This article explores the emergence of Tataloo and his fans, the Tatality subculture. I ask how the strong and incontestable relationship was constructed between them through social media, particularly on Instagram, between 2003 and 2017. I argue that Tataloo, emerged as a clergy-musician, in the private realm of the Iranian youth subculture and communicated in an unlimited, intimate way with them. I consider the spread of, and free access to, social media, accompanied by changes in Iranian youth’s structure of feelings, and secularization of the society as determinant factors that led to the appearance of the Tataloo and Tatality phenomena.

KEYWORDS:

• Tataloo
• Tatality
• fandom
• Iranian youth
• social media
• structure of feeling

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Brian Fauteux for his valuable advice on both the initial and final drafts of this paper, prepared for his popular music proseminar at the University of Alberta in fall 2020. I extend my thanks to Dr. Kate Pratt of the University of Alberta for her insightful suggestions and comments over the past two years, greatly contributing to the improvement of this article. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewer and the journal’s editors for their valuable feedback. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my wife, Hajar Ghorbani, an anthropologist whose encouragement and illumination of the topic’s significance inspired me to undertake this research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Musiqi-ye pâp is the local term for pop music. It is a Westernized style consisting of short, vocal, metered songs. Although Sasan Fatemi (“The Genesis and Development,” The Genesis of Popular) recognizes Western-influenced Persian songs (Iranian pop music) as a branch of Iranian popular music, many pop singers never entered the mainstream, had nothing to do with the music industry, and, therefore, are not necessarily “popular.”

2. I chose to examine the Tataloo-Tatalities relationship between 2003 and 2017 because, in 2003, Tataloo’s first music video was released on the Internet and, in 2017, he left the country and changed his relationship with his fans. In December 2023 he was arrested by the Turkish police and handed over to the Iranian authorities after being accused of rape and harassment in Turkey.

3. For some insightful introductions to the issue of music fan studies see Duffett, “Introduction,” “Fan Practices,” Understanding Fandom.

4. Since 2011, Tataloo has released a free album or two each year on the Internet.

5. Before the revolution, particularly from the 1960s onwards, over 90% of the music broadcast in radio and television programs was Westernized pop music (Youssefzadeh 36). Although the 1979 Islamic revolution had an extreme impact on the music industry and production and profoundly altered pre-revolutionary relations, this song style is still dominant.

6. However, some Iranian classical music albums were released between 1981 and 1988, and Iranian attitudes toward Iranian classical music intensified in an unprecedented way (see Samim 145).

7. Samim argues that despite the absence of popular music in Iran between 1979 and 1988, the genre strongly influenced the field of music production and its mechanisms (particularly art music) in Iran in the following years and decades.

8. Golpushnezhad, who is among few scholars who have studied Tataloo, used the term “party rap” (see 268, 272, 274) as a subgenre. Although she did not elaborate on the characteristics of this subgenre/style, she stated that the song “Jigili,” sung by Tataloo and Tome, is an example of the “party rap” subgenre. Listening to the song, I propose that, despite a short use of rapping verbal elements in Jigili, it is not an example of Persian rap.

9. While genre classification might seem irrelevant in studying social or political aspects of pop musical genres, imprecise classifications and considerations of singers and genres may create an unreliable, invalid history of a musical genre and, more importantly, may provide a framework through which some aspects are foregrounded, and others are ignored.

10. Ten years later, in his second album titled Tatality, Tataloo made increasing use of rapping in, for example, the song “Maghz-e Dar Rafte.” A Tatality interviewee claims that it was this song that led to Tataloo’s acceptance among rappers at the time (M.M).

11. Some of the earliest examples of Persian rap in Iran are an officially released album in 2004 titled Eskenas, consisting of six rap songs by Shahkar Binesh Pajouh (“Eshgh-e Lati”), and the theme song from a 2005 TV series (Mottaham Gorikht).

12. These aspects had influences on Iranian youth. For example, two interviewees reported that they were encouraged to buy baggy clothes as soon as they watched the music video of “Boro Az Pish-e Man.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Behrang Nikaeen

Behrang Nikaeen is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta, Canada. Since 2015, he has been conducting ethnographic research on Azerbaijani music within Iranian Azerbaijan. Currently, his research focuses on estrada and rock music in the Republic of Azerbaijan, with additional interests in pop music and youth culture in Iran.