How one Iranian-American teen's bootleg mixtape circuit 'allowed us to mainline Western entertainment once again' (exclusive book excerpt)

Veteran music journalist and educator Lily Moayeri grew up at the cultural intersection of her birthplace, Washington, D.C., and her parents’ home country, Iran. The daughter of a diplomat, she’d spent her childhood living in various cities around the globe, and in her travels had become hooked on Western pop. But during a two-year return to Iran between her father’s assignments abroad, the Islamic Revolution broke out in 1979. This resulted in the banning of all music deemed Western or un-Islamic throughout Iran, and it became impossible for the budding music obsessive to get her hands on albums by her favorite groups. Most music stores, including the cassette shop across the street from the Moayeri family home in Tehran, had been shut down.

But while the young Lily may have no longer had access to a brick-and-mortar record store, she soon found another way to maintain her music passion, through an underground network of bootleggers that circulated illegally dubbed contraband audio and video cassettes. She even launched a small-scale stealth bootleg ring of her own, intrepidly distributing her lovingly homemade mixtapes to friends at school despite the ever-looming threat of incarceration. This secret circuit “allowed us to mainline Western entertainment once again… the cassette store of my childhood was replaced by door-to-door service,” Moayeri writes in a new anthology, The Life, Death and Afterlife of the Record Store: A Global History.

The Life, Death and Afterlife of the Record Store, out July 13, is described as “a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general.” The following exclusive excerpt from Moayeri’s essay, which appears in the book’s “Cultural Geography of Record Stores” section, proves that the spirit of camaraderie, community, and connection that such shops foster simply cannot be contained within four walls.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, It Will Be Taped: Popular Music Acquisition in Pre- and Post-Revolution Tehran,” by Lily Moayeri

For a few years after the Islamic Republic of Iran was instituted in 1979, there was a strict travel ban. Its gradual lifting throughout the 1980s didn’t mean hassle-free passage, but rather that Iranians weren’t prisoners in their own country, and Iranians abroad were not banished from returning home. But it also meant that bootleg audio and videotapes began circulating through an underground network, via the pilots of the Iran Air flights who would smuggle back albums on cassettes they had bought in Europe and videos of programs they had taped off European television.

Most notable of these was the U.K.’s long-running music chart program, Top of the Pops. These items were then duplicated onto blank cassettes, packed into unmarked briefcases, and delivered by an affable fellow who would only come to your home on referral from a trusted client. My aunt Sussan — who was introduced by one of her close, music lover friends — connected our family to this underground network, which allowed us to mainline Western entertainment once again. Thus, the cassette store of my childhood was replaced by door-to-door service. Top of the Pops episodes informed my choices for the albums I would purchase from the selections in the briefcase: Culture Club, Duran Duran, Wham!, Howard Jones, Tears for Fears, Spandau Ballet, Thompson Twins, Simple Minds, A-ha, the Style Council, the Human League, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Bananarama. The list was long.

I petitioned my parents for a boombox with a double cassette player so I could make mixtapes from the albums. They agreed, in exchange for a good report card, and with the stipulation that I would have to charge my friends for the mixtapes I made them, to offset the wear-and-tear on the boombox and the cost of the blank cassettes.

Now, instead of doing homework, I would painstakingly make record/play/pause mixtapes. My mixtapes soundtracked the parties my high school friends would throw. They were turned down just low enough so as not to be heard outside, inadvertently alerting the Revolutionary Guard (aka the Pasdars), who under the Islamic law had the right to raid the party, confiscate our “contraband,” any other “inappropriate” items, and take us all to jail.

Perhaps one reason I was willing to risk this low-level cassette trafficking business was that sharing music with friends, talking about the songs and dancing, is not just natural human instinct but, as mentioned earlier, a huge part of Iranian culture. We practiced the dances in heavily choreographed videos like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and music-driven films like Flashdance and Footloose. We performed for each other at parties and were intoxicated with the camaraderie and connection it created.

Of course, Iranian music, both traditional and modern, was always popular and more easily passed around, which made finding people who were interested in the Top of the Pops-inspired music I was into both harder and more important to me. This was in the mid-1980s, when the Islamic Republic was still getting a foothold in Iran, establishing its structure and punitively enforcing its extreme laws. To quote Khomeini in his speech on the Uprising of Khurdad 15 (1979): “But as for those who want to divert our movement from its course, who have in mind treachery against Islam and the nation, who consider Islam incapable of running the affairs of our country despite its record of 1400 years — they have nothing at all to do with our people, and this must be made clear.”