Googoosh is going silent – Asiapedia

Sooner than Beyoncé, ahead of Cher, ahead of Madonna, there was once Googoosh.

The 75-year-old Iranian superstar catapulted to stardom in Iran all through the Nineteen Seventies, simplest to be silenced through the Islamist regime that took energy after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In 2000, she was once in spite of everything allowed to depart Iran to are living in exile.

For Iranians—in particular the ones within the diaspora—Googoosh symbolises an generation of cosmopolitanism in late-Pahlavi Iran, the duration from the mid-Fifties till 1979 when Iran’s in style song, cinema, tv and model embraced modernity and puzzled social norms.

However as protests roil Iran and the country’s clerical leaders in finding their grip on energy slipping, the “Voice of Iran,” as Googoosh is understood, hasn’t grew to become up the quantity. As a substitute, she’s discovered herself hanging her farewell excursion on pause.

“Everyone seems to be looking ahead to my final live performance in LA,” Googoosh instructed journalists in December 2025, “however… It’s not that i am going to sing till my nation is rescued.”

Googoosh’s refusal to sing isn’t an indication of hesitation however a aware political gesture—one that pulls its power from her singular place in Iran’s cultural historical past.

For Iranians outside and inside the rustic, Googoosh been a canvas onto which they’ve projected nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Iran, reminiscences of rupture and loss, and fantasies of resistance.

A celebrity is born 

Born Faegheh Atashin in 1950, Googoosh was once raised in Tehran through Muslim Azeri oldsters who had fled Soviet Azerbaijan. Even supposing civil government registered her beneath the Perso-Arabic identify Faegheh, her degree identify Googoosh—in reality a male Armenian identify—persevered.

She grew up onstage and onscreen. Her father, an acrobat, integrated her into his act when she was once simply 3 years previous; through the age of four, she was once the circle of relatives’s number one breadwinner.

As she matured, Googoosh moved throughout song, cinema, model and dance, emerging to prominence inside a cultural panorama formed through Western influences and aligned with the state’s modernising ambitions. Through the mid-Nineteen Seventies, she had develop into probably the most recognisable determine of Iran’s pre-revolutionary pop culture.

In keeping with Iranian research pupil Abbas Milani, Googoosh “embodied the frivolous joys, the reckless abandon, the exuberant generation of social experimentation, the defiant need to debunk custom and its taboos, and the vigour and power of teenybopper.”

Onscreen, she wore the most recent types and cuts. Younger Iranians copied her hair and hemlines. She danced, posed and sang like an international megastar—along Persian, she recorded in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish—and, within the procedure, redefined what a feminine pop megastar may just appear to be in Iran.

Exiled from the degree

But to a few Islamist critics of the Pahlavi order, she symbolised “gharbzadegi,” sometimes called “Westoxication”—the conclusion that through embracing the West, Iranians have been betraying the traditions in their other people and bringing about ethical decay.

Within the 12 months previous the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Googoosh had a residency at a Los Angeles membership. But whilst many artists fled Iran within the wake of the revolution to rebuild their careers, Googoosh returned, simplest to be hastily punished for her previous.

Government charged her in 1979 with “ethical corruption.” A few years later, the brand new regime in short incarcerated her, confiscated her passport and prohibited her from publicly acting.

Identical to that, a central determine within the country’s cultural existence was once got rid of from the highlight. It could be 21 years ahead of she would carry out once more.

Googoosh wasn’t by myself; musicians and performers around the nation encountered the similar destiny: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s ultimate chief from 1979 to 1989, noticed song as a vice. The regime additionally categorically prohibited girls from acting solo in public.

In December 2025, she printed her memoir, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice.” In it, she opens up about this era of her existence—and her resolution to go back to Iran.

Although she was once on the top of her status within the late-Nineteen Seventies, she alleges that her managers had misappropriated her profits. As innovative unrest intensified and the Pahlavi regime imposed martial legislation and closed cabarets and theatres in an try to appease conservatives, her resources of source of revenue vanished. This induced the transfer to Los Angeles. However mounting debt and substance abuse problems influenced her resolution to go back house.

She writes that innovative hostility wasn’t merely directed at pop culture; it went after excitement itself, in particular when embraced, celebrated or expressed through girls. To the Islamic Republic, song was once now not a type of artwork or a vocation; it was once a provocation and an ethical abomination.

Googoosh, who have been a working towards Shiite Muslim who prayed, fasted and went on pilgrimage, describes the surprise she felt that such a lot cruelty may just coexist with claims of non secular piety following the Islamic Revolution. Non-public religion and public, secular performances had now not been noticed as contradictions in pre-revolutionary Iran.

That each one modified in 1979.

Iranian tradition in exile

The revolution catalysed a mass cultural exodus: Hundreds of thousands of Iranians fled the rustic, with many settling in California, the place different in style singers reminiscent of Hayedeh, Mahasti and Homeyra rebuilt their careers in exile.

A proxy Iranian leisure trade emerged in Los Angeles, permitting Iranian pop culture to live to tell the tale outdoor the Islamic Republic. In what got here to be known as “Tehrangeles,” studios recorded Persian-language song and tv, whilst marketers opened cabaret-style efficiency venues.

The leisure infrastructure in-built Tehrangeles later expanded to Europe, Canada and the Persian Gulf; a lot of the programming was once saturated with motifs of reminiscence, longing and nostalgia.

In the meantime, Googoosh’s twenty years off the degree had simplest amplified her mystique. When she in spite of everything gained permission to depart Iran in 2000, she carried out her first live performance at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre ahead of a sold-out crowd.

Since then, she has recorded 9 albums. But maximum of her enthusiasts have proven restricted hobby in those more moderen choices. When she sings them, chants of “Ghadimi! Ghadimi!” (“Outdated! Outdated!”) incessantly upward thrust from the gang.

Like many within the diaspora, they flip to Googoosh to not have interaction the prevailing however to move themselves to an previous generation—successfully freezing her, and their reminiscences of Iran, previously.

Silence reclaimed

As soon as silenced through the Islamic Republic, Googoosh now voluntarily withholds her voice in harmony.

Many see this refusal as a reclamation of her company; with Iran once more roiled through mass mobilisation and protest, her silence resonates as loudly as her songs as soon as did.

If Googoosh has lengthy functioned as a vessel for collective reminiscence, she now stands as a reminder that reminiscence by myself isn’t sufficient—that nostalgia can’t stand in for a political reckoning, and that voices formed through exile stay tethered to unfinished struggles at house.

By means of The Dialog