Iran’s first oil well, Masjed Soleyman
Oil and the Sounds of Mobility
A few years ago, I was chatting to a friend about the Sonic Tehran project, at that time still very much in thinking stage. Dismissing the idea with a wave of his hand, he said: ‘what is there to say about the sounds of Tehran other than traffic noise’? Somewhat taken aback, I responded that there is a great deal more to say about the sounds of Tehran beyond its well-known traffic. But he did, of course, have a point. Like any other major global capital, it’s hard to get away from the sounds of traffic in Tehran, and car use has increased significantly in recent decades - encouraged by relatively cheap petrol and a rather poor (but admittedly improving) public transport infrastructure, as well as a rapidly expanding metropolis that is most easily navigated by car; unless you’re stuck in gridlock traffic, that is. The resulting sound and air pollution has been exacerbated by a struggling economy, years of sanctions, poor regulation and access to new vehicle and parts, as a result of which old and highly pollutant vehicles dominate the roads. In his history of Tehran, Ali Madanipour describes how from the 1920s ‘Reza Shah [r.1925-1941] established a transportation network to unify and control the national territory’ (1998:39), promoting car use and cutting transport costs by abolishing road tolls and taxes, building 14,000 miles of new road by the late 1930s and importing vehicles in unprecedented numbers (14). Figures published in August 1926 in the newspaper Etelaa’aat give the following for registered vehicles across the entire country: 564 private cars, 432 rental vehicles, 108 cars belonging to ‘foreigners’ and 36 diplomatic cars. Fast-forward 60 years and there were ‘an estimated 425,000 private cars in Tehran, 80 percent more than other urban areas of the country’, rising to 750,000 in 1996, plus 300,000 motor cycles according to the Tehran municipality (Madanipour 1998:129). As Mayor of Tehran from 1988-1998, Gholamhossein Karbaschi – a former theology student turned urban planner - was responsible for widespread improvements to the city, including a restricted central traffic zone and a series of highways built ‘almost overnight’ in the words of some of my friends and family. The opening in 1999, and gradual expansion of Tehran’s metro system (a soundworld in itself) and improved bus services are having an impact and there have been recent initiatives to address the issue of sound pollution, including a recent report commissioned by the municipality of Tehran. But there’s still a long way to go. Hardly surprising, then, that my friend’s first reaction to thinking sound and Tehran = traffic. Indeed, the sounds of engines, vehicle horns, screeching tyres, and so on, are an ever-present soundtrack to the lives of Tehranis, and a regular backdrop in cinematic representations of the city. And like all sounds, they need to be understood first and foremost as vibrations that cause a visceral physical experience that bears on the whole body, not just the ears. The sound of traffic literally vibrates Tehran.
As well as the traffic itself are the many other sounds that circulate in and around vehicles: taxis drivers calling out destinations; taxis themselves – particularly the ubiquitous shared taxis - as important sites of verbal and other sonic exchange; the sounds of radio, cassettes, CDs. In a country where public sounds are tightly policed, cars have become liminal semi-public spaces where illicit music can be listened to, particularly certain kinds of popular music that were prohibited in public for many years following the 1979 Revolution, some of which remain restricted. In the 1980s, drivers were regularly stopped, cars searched, cassettes confiscated, fines served. Prior to the liberalisation of the public domain under President Mohammad Khatami in the late 1990s, the sounds of ‘underground’ rock music from a passing car would take on a wealth of meaning. Such sonic transgressions continue, for instance in the practice of maarbaazi (‘playing like a snake’), in which young people in more affluent areas drive ‘fast and recklessly along the city’s crowded vehicular arteries and veins, often accompanied by loud, illegal music’ (Braithwaite 2016). Another common practice is the exchange of telephone numbers between young people - on pieces of paper but also shouted out – through open windows between cars in standing traffic, a direct challenge to the official modesty laws which seek to restrict social interaction between unrelated men and women.
Beyond the sounds of movement is what that mobility makes possible in terms of human interaction, of people moving from one part of the city to another - particularly as the city has expanded - as well as from outside Tehran into the city; and the sonic implications, linguistically, musically, and so on.
It’s interesting to think about the extent to which traffic has literally shaped the city and its sonic character. From the 1930s, the increase in number and speed of vehicles led to the widening of Tehran’s streets and the destruction of historical structures such as the old city gates, the city walls and many traditional neighbourhoods with their narrow streets and blind alleys (Madanipour 1998:203). Much of the changing morphology of Tehran since this time has been driven by a steady rise in car ownership and traffic congestion. The building of new highways connecting different parts of the city aimed to alleviate the problem, but some of these have cut across old neighbourhoods that have been transformed as a result. I experienced this on a visit in 2015, after a 5-year absence, during which time a new highway had been built right through the quiet streets of Chizar in the north of the city, once a location of lush and peaceful gardens, of which some vestiges still remain. I found myself quite disoriented; and such disorientation was a regular theme in my conversations with Tehranis about their experiences of the rapidly changing city - including new buildings, roads, tunnels, and so on. Several described getting lost in previously familiar neighbourhoods; others talked about the city as an organic being, continually growing and metamorphosing, almost like a character with its own will. Given the impact of all this on the sonic environment, one of the questions of this project is how more stable and familiar sounds mediate the experience of rapid urban change.
Tajrish Square, north Tehran, 1946 Tajrish Square, 2015
The sounds of traffic are intimately tied up with the broader sonics of Iran’s new modernities as they arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modernities that were powered and largely paid for by new energy sources, and particularly by crude oil after its discovery in Iran in 1908. The car was an important site of individuated and accelerating mobility, and the transition from carts, horses and donkeys to motorised vehicles both symbolic of and driven by the growing oil economy, which has shaped Iranian society and culture since that time. And so, following this train of thought, my friend’s comment set me thinking about the socio-sonics of petroleum: the broader impact of oil on the sounds of Tehran beyond the obvious case of traffic. Below, I explore a few examples of the impact - both direct and indirect – of oil on the sounds of Tehran, through its energy, of course, but also through its material by-products, the modern institutions and infrastructural projects that it made possible, and the sonics of social and political unrest and violence unleashed in attempts to assert ownership over this precious commodity.
Oil was first discovered in Iran in Masjed Soleyman in the southwestern province of Khuzestan in 1908, 7 years after British businessman and speculator William Knox D’Arcy acquired a 60-year concession for the right to explore for oil, natural gas and minerals in an area that covered almost three-quarters of the country. The concession was signed by Mozzafar al-Din Shah on 28th May 1901 at what is now the Niavaran Palace in north Tehran. In return, the Shah received £20,000 plus an equivalent value in shares and 16% of annual profits. A number of such concession had been granted in the course of the 19th century, with much rivalry between Britain and Russia for access to resources. It was to be almost 20 years before oil was discovered elsewhere in the region. The ‘D’Arcy Concession’ consolidated British influence in the south of Iran and allowed it to extend this influence in the years that followed, particularly through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which was formed in 1909. In 1914, the British Government bought a majority share of the company, allowing it control over the Iranian oil industry, a state of affairs that remained in place until 1951. Anglo-Persian was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1935, became British Petroleum from 1954, and BP from 1998. Needless to say, the resonances of the D’Arcy Concession and other unequal concessions and treaties continue to reverberate to the present day. And so I suggest that listening to the sounds of oil includes listening to neo-colonial imbalances of power and exploitative relationships in which Britain is heavily implicated.
Tehran is almost 1,000 kilometres away from the major sites of oil extraction and refinement and their associated sounds (of interest in their own right), both industrial sounds and those of the large expatriate (mainly) British community that lived and worked there. Some of these can be gleaned from documentary films that were made about the oil refinery at Abadan (at that time the largest in the world) such as AIOC’s propagandist Persian Story, filmed just before operations at Abadan were suspended in 1951 (following the oil nationalisation that I discuss below) and widely screened outside Iran, as well through exhibits at the Abadan Oil Museum (see also video below). But in fact, the sounds of oil extended far beyond these sites. As I describe below, oil – and the quest for oil - shaped Sonic Tehran, not least as a lubricant of modernity, and seeped into and shaped every area of Iranian life.
Public Life and Materiality
Alongside the sounds of mobility, oil enabled the emergence of a new kind of public life in the first half of the 20th century. Early electricity generators were powered by coal and wood, but by the 1920s oil and gas had become the primary fuels (hydro-electric power was also developed quite early on). The petro-economy of oil (and gas) thus played a central role in the electrification of Tehran and facilitated the kind of urban transformation that opened up new spaces of sociality and public entertainment such as cinemas, theatres and nightclubs, as well as European-style shops, restaurants and chic hotels. As Asef Bayat notes, ‘oil became central to the social, economic and spatial life of Tehran’ (2010:102). By the 1920s, electric street lighting was well established and Tehran’s Lalehzar (lit: ‘tulip fields’) district had become the epicentre of a growing nightlife largely made possible by oil.
Theatre Saadi, on Baherestan Street in the Lalehzar district
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lalehzar_Street-1961.jpg)
As well as the sounds of such spaces, oil is also the sound of emerging sound recording industries, of film production and of broadcasting technologies; oil is the sound of an increasingly mediated society. In cinemas, oil powered the projectors, the lights, the sound; oil enabled people to travel to the venues. As Negar Mottahedeh observes, oil ‘is the founding resource of the Iranian film industry’ (2017:1), and she goes on to observe that ‘it was inevitable that the domination of Iranian screens by nations such as Britain, Russia and the United States, whose main interest in Iran was oil, would leave its mark on the products of a film industry constituted in Iran in the wake of a long, stubborn and viscous battle for territory, resources, and citizenry’ (3). More broadly, cinema played a crucial role in the emergence of ‘a new kind of metropolitan, cosmopolitan, urban modern Iranian subjectivity’ at this time (Rekabtalai 2016). It’s interesting also to think about the sounds of those involved in early cinema production, distribution and screening, which included a significant number of individuals from religious minorities such as Armenians, Jews and Zoroastrians, as well as Russian and Arab émigrés, Catholic missionaries, and so on, each with their own accents, languages, musics ...
But such new spaces were not without their contestations, and one might imagine the sounds of such opposition, starting with the first cinema hall in Tehran, which was closed a year after opening in 1905 due to religious objections and political sensitivities in the period leading up to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. Naficy (2011) describes some of the ambivalences associated with the early years of cinema in Iran, including the new kinds of spectatorship that it engendered and the new public spaces it opened up, particularly for women. Despite this, film gradually became established, and by the early 1930s there were 15 cinemas in Tehran showing a mix of imported and locally-made newsreels, documentaries, silent films and the newly arrived medium of sound film. In fact, as Naficy observes for ‘silent’ cinema, ‘The movies were silent – but not the movie houses’; they were accompanied by gramophone recordings or by musicians (playing traditional instruments, and later piano) who would sometimes also play outside the cinema before the show (Kashefi 1994). Screen translators were hired to provide a running commentary and Naficy quotes from an eye-witness account from the early 1930s:
‘When the pictures were showing, the spectators were very noisy. But when the intertitles came on and he [the translator] began reading them, everyone was absolutely quiet. As soon as he finished, the spectators returned to their loud clamour, talking to the characters on the screen, whistling, catcalling, belittling each other about the plot outcome, and sometimes even arguing and fighting with each other. Every film-goer brought with him [sic] a paper bag of nuts and seeds, which he broke and ate noisily throughout the movie’ (2011:226)
Throughout the 20th century, religious opposition to cinema continued, leading to a number of arson attacks, particularly at the time of the 1979 Revolution, the most tragic being the fire at the Rex Cinema in the southern oil city of Abadan in August 1978, in which 420 people died. The distressing sonic dimensions of such tragedies can all too easily be imagined.
In relation to sound recording, it’s also interesting to think about the material sonics of oil and oil-derived products, particularly from the 1950s, with the development of plastics-based vinyl long-playing discs and polyester-based reel tapes and later cassette tapes. In this sense, once can understand oil’s role in the changing soundscape of Tehran as both energy source and providing for the very materiality of sound recording itself.
Oily Economies, the Expanding City and State Power
Since the beginning of the 20th century, then, oil - and the sounds of oil - have shaped every aspect of Iranian social, cultural and political life. Oil is the sound of construction, of roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and of the growing industrial sector, which by 1945 numbered around 378 large industrial units, mainly located in the south of Tehran, including factories making textiles, matches, cement and agricultural products, as well as glassworks, brickworks, and so on (Madanipour 1998:14). Oil both powered and paid for the growing urban fabric of Tehran. In a passage saturated with implicit sound, Asef Bayat describes how the city became,
… the spatial embodiment of this surging accumulation process. In and around the city, industry, commerce, services and foreign enterprises mushroomed. More than a place of production, Tehran became a site of ever-increasing consumption, as new spending patterns and Western lifestyles were adopted; restaurants, cafes and exclusive uptown neighbourhoods appeared. (Bayat 2010: 103)
Madanipour discusses the circular process by which Tehran’s expansion led to a greater concentration of wealth and resources, which in turn attracted more people for work and other opportunities (1998:111). This concentration of power, capital and people is largely due to Tehran’s ‘unique role in the national [oil] economy … as the largest economic agglomeration in Iran. Its economy is to a large extent based on managing the national economy, a fact shown in that almost half the working population in the capital is employed by the public sector. The national economy is in turn largely dependent on oil production and export, as Iran holds huge reserves of oil and gas.’ (Madanipour 1998:62). Further, the ever-expanding ‘urban landscape of Tehran is clearly a product of the periods of upturn in economic cycles of boom and bust’ (ibid.:188-9): with the rise in oil prices in the 1970s, resources were directed into building and the construction industry flourished; later in the property boom of the 2000s, much construction work was undertaken by Afghan refugees – with their own sonics of accent and music - working in poor conditions and often living on building sites.
More generally, oil was responsible for an increasingly fast-paced and noisier sonic environment, something that was of course not unique to Iran. James G. Mansell describes how sound transformed British life between 1914 and 1945, during what he calls the ‘age of noise’, citing an article published in the Manchester Guardian in 1928:
When the complete history of the present period comes to be written, it should surely be described as the age of noise. (W. S. Tucker, “The Age of Noise,” a lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society, quoted in the Manchester Guardian. Jan 20 1928)
Mansell writes about how the ‘sonic maelstrom of mechanised society bred anger and anxiety and even led observers to forecast the end of civilisation’. This noise was ‘modernity itself, expressed in aural form, with immense implications for the construction of self … everyday sounds elicited new ways of thinking about and being modern’ (2016). Some aspects of the ‘age’ of noise as it arrived in Tehran in early 20th century were clearly shared with other modernising cities globally; others very particular to Iran and to Tehran specifically.
Beyond the role of oil in the expanding city, control over oil revenue in Iran has given successive governments great economic and political power and to some extent alleviated them of the kind of public accountability that comes with primarily tax-based state finance. Oil has thus allowed for a concentration of political power as well as a bloated public sector workforce and centralised bureaucracy, much of it based in Tehran. Oil wealth channelled into a wealthy elite in the 1960s and 70s also led to the growing social divide that ultimately fuelled much of the discontent that erupted in social unrest and eventually the Revolution of 1979. One might also think about the ways in which oil revenue was mobilised against Iran’s own citizens, for instance paying for the secret police service and its regime of surveillance, as well as the incarceration and torture of political opponents. We can hear the sounds of the lavish and ostentatious state functions of the Shah, intended to bolster his own power, alongside the sounds of state violence intended to silence opponents. And all paid for by oil.
It’s worth noting that oil was not the only fossil fuel to play an important role in Iran’s entry into modernity and its transformation in the 20th century. But it was oil in particular that came to symbolise Iran’s relationship with the outside world in ways that were both politically-charged and emotively connected to ideas about national self-determination.
The Political Sonics of Oil
Which brings me nicely to the politico-sonics of oil. The sounds of conflict have been a constant and recurring aspect of Tehran’s soundscape from its early years as capital, and with increased intensity around moments of political unrest, revolution and war. In this section, I focus on the sounds of one particular moment in the long history of struggle for control of Iranian oil; and which became a defining point in the country's recent history, arguably setting off a train of events that would eventually lead to the Revolution of February 1979, and all that ensued for Iran, the region and the wider world. This is the moment when Iran sought to reclaim control of its oil from Britain, through a movement led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh who was appointed by the Shah in 1951 following the assassination of Mossadegh’s predecessor, Haj Ali Razmara. As well as questions of revenue and the unfavourable (for Iran) terms of the contract with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - including the fact that the Iranian government had little representation in the company and was unable even to access and audit accounts - were the very poor living and working conditions of the Iranian oil workers in Abadan, compared with the relative luxury of the mainly British expatriate workers. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was generally known as a weak king, easily manipulated by Britain and the US, and who responded to challenges to his authority with repression. In another post I will explore the sounds of such autocracy. The Shah had originally been supportive of greater Iranian control over the country’s oil wealth, but was made to understand that he would lose the military and other support of Britain and other countries if he pursued this line. As Mottahedeh observes, ‘The Abadan refinery sustained two modern wars’ (2017:3) and Churchill has been quoted as describing British control over Iranian oil as ‘a prize from Fairyland far beyond our brightest dreams’ (ibid, quoting from Abrahamian 2013). Mossadegh’s attempts to legislate for the nationalisation of oil in 1951 were naturally opposed by the British, who also feared more generally that Iran would fall under Soviet influence. Feeling his authority threatened, the Shah removed Mossadegh from his post in the summer of 1952, an act that led to 3 days of rioting before he was reinstated. Fears over nationalisation led Britain to first deploy naval forces to protect and then to evacuate British workers from Abadan in the summer of 1951, and to lobby for a global boycott of Iranian oil. It is now well documented that Britain and the US used undercover agents to undermine Mossadegh and eventually to remove him from power in the coup d’etat of August 1953. Aware of outside plots to remove him, Mossadegh held a referendum on August 4th which gave him a landslide mandate to dissolve parliament – the members of which were all appointed by the Shah – effectively challenging the Shah’s power. In the days that followed, the Shah tried unsuccessfully to remove Mossadegh, but the level of support for the latter was such that the Shah was finally forced to flee Iran (going to Rome via Baghdad on August 16th); he eventually returned to Iran after the coup on 21st August.
So much for the political background. What about sound? Approaching the 1953 coup from a sonic perspective means hearing the sounds of pro-Mossadegh rallies, anti-coup demonstrations, the violence deployed against Mossadegh supporters, and so on. One person I spoke to, now in their 80s, was a student at the time and witnessed the events of the coup on the streets. He described some of his sonic memories to me: the large crowds of Mossadegh supporters, including nationalists and leftists, as well as many others gathered in and around Toopkhaneh Square in central Tehran, and close to Mossadegh’s house, on 25th Mordad (16th August), 3 days before the coup, to celebrate the departure of the Shah. He recalled the joyous chants in the square: ‘Shah faraari shodeh, savaar-e gaari shodeh’ (‘The Shah has run away; riding a donkey and cart’), the sonic communitas literally bonding the crowd.
Toopkhaneh Square, 15th August 1953
Someone else I spoke to described the toppling of the statue of Reza Shah (the father of the incumbent, who had been removed from power by the allies in 1941 for his pro-Nazi sympathies), teetering on its plinth and finally crashing to the ground, the sounds echoing across the square. Sound is also an important part of an eye-witness account published in the New York Times on 18th August:
For two hours, men sawed at the ankles of the bronze statue, while others, chanting songs written overnight on the flight of the Shah, heaved on ropes looped around the figure. Finally a motorized crane was brought into action and the statue was toppled with a great clank amid loud cheers. Similar operations were carried out on six other statues in Teheran and one in Hamadan ... Similar anti-Shah sentiment was shown by the removal of virtually all his pictures from homes, restaurants, offices and even Government Ministries. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/081853iran-statues.html
On 28th Mordad (19th August), the day of the coup, the situation descended into chaos as gangs of hired vigilantes (as we now know, paid by the CIA) attacked Mossadegh’s home and arrested him, and then set about hunting down his supporters in the streets, armed with large clubs and knives. At least 300 people were killed in the violence.
The former student I spoke to described the clandestine political gatherings that followed, held in backstreets close to the University of Tehran (on Shah Reza Street, now Khiaban-e Enqelab, Revolution Street) rather than in enclosed spaces, to avoid surveillance and to allow for a quick get-away in the event of security forces arriving.
There are plenty of images from the streets of Tehran during the 1953 coup; looking at these pictures, it’s not difficult to imagine the sounds - the chants and speeches, the sounds of running, of gun shots, of burning newspaper offices, of political meetings, of activists being imprisoned and later tortured. Listening to oil means listening to all of this; it also means listening to the voice of a defeated but still proud Prime Minister on trial for treason ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZwF10hqr8g
There is less film footage of the coup easily accessible, other than on official newsreels, including those by organisations such as British Pathé aimed at viewers abroad and representing interests desperate to keep oil and oil revenues flowing westwards. Few of these include original sound. One such newsreel is a brilliant example of British spin that presents Mossadegh as an aggressor and with the key message at the end: following straight on from scenes of violence and chaos in Tehran, we are shown an aerial shot of the magnificent oil refinery at Abadan as the voice over speaks on behalf of the British nation (the ‘we’) whose thoughts:
… instinctively turn to Abadan, that monument to British enterprise and engineering skill. Forced to abandon what we had created in the wilderness, is it too much to hope that we shall see once more the tankers of Britain at Abadan. Maybe sanity will yet prevail and Iran and Britain go forward in harmony.
Here, listening to oil means listening to the sounds of authority embodied in the British male ‘received pronunciation’ voice. No doubt 'soft' colonialism was something 'instinctive' to Britain at that time (and arguably still) and they were certainly prepared to go a long way to defend and justify exploitative and extractavist policies. The tone is very similar to that in the Persian Story documentary made just 2 years earlier, where Britain is presented as playing a civilising role in 'the wilderness’, ‘a benevolent harbinger of modernity in an otherwise backward country’ (Damluji 2013:82). Naficy has written about how the oil documentaries (the first made in 1921) became a vehicle for companies such as Anglo-Persian to both claim responsibility for Iran’s modernisation (2011:186) - sending a message to audiences in Britain that ‘oil extraction was fundamental to the progress of modernity in Iran’ (Damluji 2013:78) - as well as justifying ‘its continuing practices of oil exploitation and extraction as a fundamental part of Britain’s postcolonial civilizing mission, framed as a win-win situation wherein Iran exchanged its oil for the promise of modernity’ (82) and presenting such modernity ‘as a condition dependent upon a British imperial model’ (85).The sounds of the Iranian coup of 1953 are the sounds of the struggle for self-determination and for democracy; the sounds of a nation seeking to control its own natural resources. Images such as those below from the days following the coup are saturated with sound.
A communist newspaper office’s equipment is burned on the streets of Tehran, August 1953.
Soldiers chasing protestors
Newspaper office set on fire
Rally in support of Mossadegh, including a wide political spectrum from the communist Tudeh party to the nationalist-fascist Pan-Iranist party whose flag can be seen at the front.
19th August 1953. Occupation of the Tehran radio station. An army officer delivers a speech in the hall of the station.
In their article ‘Resounding the Campus: Pedagogy, Race, and the Environment’, Amanda M. Black and Andrea F. Bohlman write about what they call ‘auditory scars – the results of acts of silencing past and present’ (2017:9). Tehran has experienced many acts of silencing in its history, and I will return to such silences in a later blog; for the moment, I suggest that the notion of ‘auditory scar’ might be a useful way of thinking about the painful sounds of a nation’s past that continue to resonate into the present day. Whilst those living in the countries that perpetrated the coup may be ignorant or have forgotten about the culpability of their own governments, the coup is very present and alive in the memories of Iranians today, both those who lived through it and the ‘post-memory’ of younger generations such as myself, many of whom feel personally connected to the events through their parents and grandparents. The sounds of the coup continue to resonate on the streets of Tehran today, not least because later periods of civil unrest and violence can all in some way be directly or indirectly linked to 1953, its fallout and the histories that followed, whether the sounds of revolution; of war and the bombing of Tehran in the 1980s; or street demonstrations calling for greater democracy or contesting election results … there is a great deal to say about such sounds and I will return to them in due course.
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As I neared the end of writing this blog, I came across the project ‘After Oil’, which examines the ways in which ‘energy plays a critical role in determining the shape, form and character of our daily existence’:
The dominant form of energy in any given era – in our case, fossil fuels – shapes the attributes and capabilities of societies in a fundamental way … global society today is an oil society through and through. It is shaped by oil in physical and material ways, from the automobiles and highways we use to the plastics that fill up every space of our daily lives. Even more significantly, fossil fuels have also shaped our values, practices, habits, beliefs and feelings.
Clearly, this resonates strongly with the ideas I’ve been exploring in this blog post. But the project is also concerned with:
… the social, cultural and political changes necessary to facilitate a full-scale transition from fossil fuels to new forms of energy … in addition to the adoption of renewable, ecologically sustainable energy sources, a genuine shift in our energy usage today demands a wholesale transformation of the petrocultures in which we live.
It will be very interesting to observe the impact of such seismic cultural transformations on the deeply ingrained Iranian petroculture in a post-oil future.
For the moment, we’re still very much living in a petrocultural world. When I started writing this blog – prompted by friend’s provocation - I hadn’t appreciated quite how oil-soaked the socio-sonics of Tehran are. The more I delved, the more it became apparent how far-reaching and multi-faceted the intimate connection between sound and oil is, so much so that it has been hard to do justice to here and I’m very aware of only having scratched the surface. As the primary mobiliser of modernity, oil was foundational to the sonic transformation of Tehran and Iranian society more generally in the 20th century and has truly been the lifeblood of Tehran’s sonic life since. Tehran is of course not unique in this – modernity and the sounds of cities worldwide have been profoundly shaped by wider petrocultures, but as the capital of a country which has long been of strategic geo-political significance for global powers, oil invokes a vast and complex web of sonic significance that goes well beyond its ubiquitous and infamous traffic. It is also embedded in a highly potent and emotive affective valency that is hard to pin down, one that is interwoven with ideas about national self-determination. Whether one considers what oil fuelled or made possible through its revenue, what was built and torn down, the material by-products of oil, or its politics, it’s clear that the petro-sonics of Tehran flow wide and deep.
Thank you for reading! If you have any comments or thoughts on anything discussed in this blog, I would love to hear from you via the comments box below or the contact form on the website.
Acknowledgements: I am very grateful to Mohsen Mohammadi for feedback on an earlier draft of this blog post.
References
Ervand Abrahamian. 2013. The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations. New York: The New Press.
Asef Bayat. 2010. ‘Tehran: Paradox City’, New Left Review, 66:99-122.
Amanda M. Black and Andrea F. Bohlman. 2017. ‘Resounding the Campus: Pedagogy, Race, and the Environment’, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 8(1):6-27.
Lauren Braithwaite. 2016. The Soundtrack to Mar Bazi: Automobile Protests in the Islamic Republic of Iran. MST Dissertation, University of Oxford.
Mona Damluji. 2013. ‘The Oil City in Focus: The Cinematic Spaces of Abadan in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Persian Story’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 33(1):75-88.
Saeed Kashefi. 1994 ‘Film Music in Iranian Cinema’, www.iranchamber.com/music/articles/iranian_film_music.php
Ali Madanipour. 1998. Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis. Wiley.
James G. Mansell. 2016. Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity. University of Illinois Press.
Negar Mottahedeh. 2017. ‘Crude Extractions. The Voice in Iranian Cinema’, in Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices, ed. Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright. Oxford University Press.
Hamid Naficy. 2011. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, Volume 1. The Artisanal Era, 1897-1941. Duke University Press.
Golbarg Rekabtalaei. 2016. ‘Tehran or Farangistan. Early Cinema and the Cityscape’. Paper presented at the Association of Iranian Studies Conference, University of Vienna, August 2016.
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