Baraye: song of the day (or maybe the century, so far)

I think of this as the song of the century thus far (or one of them). It comes from the protests in Iran in 2022 sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini who had been arrested for improperly wearing her hijab.

Here’s the Los Angeles Times explaining the song’s origins:

As crowds poured through the streets of Iran last month to demonstrate against the government, an up-and-coming 25-year-old singer named Shervin Hajipour began working on a new song.

For the lyrics, he drew on tweets by his fellow Iranians explaining their reasons for joining the rapidly expanding protests. They were many…

He set the words to a mournful keyboard melody and titled it “Baraye” — “for the sake of” or “because of” in Persian.

Then, on Sept. 28, he posted it on social media.

Within a day, according to some estimates, it received more than 40 million views, quickly spreading across the nation and to the Iranian diaspora. The government responded by arresting Hajipour, and soon the song was removed from his Instagram page.

But it was too late to suppress it. The protest movement, led by women and young people, had unified a discontented nation across socioeconomic lines, geographic regions and ethnicities. “Baraye” was now its anthem.

Rana Mansour’s version is easier to absorb because it’s in English and she’s smoothed out the lyrics.

But listen too to Shervin Hajipour’s original, showing the tweets he composed it from, with subtitles.