There is a cassette tape in my mother’s kitchen drawer in Tehran, its label written in my grandmother’s hand: Googoosh, 1352, Mehrabad. I have not held it in twenty years, but I can still see the blue ink, the way the Persian letters lean slightly left, as if already moving toward departure. Music, for those of us who live between countries, is not entertainment. It is a transport device. It carries the weight of specific rooms, the smell of rice steaming, the particular silence of a parent deciding not to cry. This essay is about how songs become vessels for memory, how a melody can return us to a kitchen we can no longer enter, and why the cassette tape—not the playlist, not the streaming service—remains the most honest archive of displacement.
In the Iranian diaspora, music functions as a form of yad—memory—but also as ghorbat, the ache of distance from home. These are not separate experiences. They are braided together, like the two channels of a cassette: one side carries the song, the other carries the hiss of absence. When I write about music here, I am writing about the politics of everyday memory. What we choose to preserve, what we are forced to leave behind, and how a three-minute song can hold more truth than a passport stamp.
The Cassette as a Domestic Object
Before the revolution, before the war, before the first wave of departures, the cassette tape was a household object in Iran. It lived in drawers next to sewing kits and expired passports. It was passed between cousins at weddings, copied in the back rooms of record shops on Lalehzar Street, labeled with whatever pen was nearby. The cassette was not precious. It was practical. And that practicality made it intimate.
My grandmother kept her cassettes in a tin box that once held Danish butter cookies. The box smelled faintly of metal and rosewater. Inside, the tapes were arranged not alphabetically but by mood: gham for sorrow, shadi for joy, deltangi for longing. She did not need a system. She knew each tape by the weight of it, by the way the plastic case had cracked in a particular corner, by the sound the reel made when she shook it gently. This is the kind of knowledge that does not transfer to a digital library. It is embodied, specific, unrepeatable.
When I think of music as a transport device, I am not thinking of the song itself. I am thinking of the object that held the song. The cassette was a container for time. You could not skip a track without pressing a button and waiting for the whir. You could not shuffle. You had to sit with the sequence, the way you sit with a memory that arrives unbidden and refuses to leave until it has finished speaking.
The Voice as a Room
There is a particular quality to the voice of Hayedeh that I can only describe as architectural. When she sings Masti, her voice does not rise; it opens. It creates a room around the listener, a room with high ceilings and heavy curtains and the smell of tea left too long on the samovar. My mother would play Hayedeh on Sunday afternoons, when the house in Los Angeles felt too quiet, too clean, too far from the noise of Tehran. The music did not fill the silence. It made the silence bearable by giving it a shape.
For the diaspora, the voice is not just a voice. It is a room we used to live in. The timbre of a singer’s voice can trigger what neuroscientists call music-evoked autobiographical memories, but for us, the memory is not just personal. It is collective. It is the sound of a country before the rupture, before the borders closed, before the phone calls became too expensive and the letters too slow. When Hayedeh sings, she is not performing. She is holding the door open.
I have tried to explain this to friends who did not grow up with exile. They hear a beautiful voice. I hear my aunt’s apartment in Tehran, the one with the balcony overlooking Valiasr Street, the one where we sat on the floor and ate tahdig with our hands while the cassette player clicked from one side to the other. The song is not the memory. The song is the key to the room where the memory lives.
The Politics of Preservation
There is a quiet political undercurrent to all of this. After 1979, many songs were banned in Iran. Female solo voices were silenced. Cassettes were smuggled in suitcases, hidden under clothes, copied in basements. To own a Googoosh tape was not just nostalgia. It was an act of refusal. It was a way of saying: this voice will not be erased.
My father carried a small collection of cassettes when he left Iran in 1984. He wrapped them in a shirt and placed them at the bottom of his suitcase, beneath the documents and the photographs. He told me once that he was more afraid of losing those tapes than of losing his passport. The passport could be replaced. The tapes could not. They held the voices of people who were no longer allowed to sing, the sound of a country that was already becoming a memory.
This is why the cassette matters. It is not a retro fetish. It is a record of resistance. The hiss on the tape, the warble of a stretched ribbon, the drop in pitch when the batteries were low—these are not flaws. They are evidence. They are the sound of a people holding onto something the state wanted to take away. When I listen to a digitized version of an old tape, I am grateful for the preservation. But I also know that something is lost. The hiss was not noise. It was the sound of the room where the recording was made, the sound of a fan turning, the sound of a mother telling her children to be quiet. The hiss was the context. And context is everything.
The Playlist as a False Archive
I have a playlist on my phone called Tehran. It has 47 songs. It is organized by mood, by tempo, by the algorithm’s guess at what I want to hear next. It is convenient. It is also a lie. The playlist does not know that Mordab by Googoosh should always be followed by Ghesseye Eshgh by Hayedeh, because that is the order my mother played them on a cassette recorded by her brother in 1976. The playlist does not know that the pause between songs was not a pause. It was the sound of the tape flipping over, the click of the machine, the brief silence that meant we were moving from one side of the story to the other.
Streaming services have given us access to almost everything. But access is not the same as memory. A playlist is a collection of songs. A cassette is a collection of moments. The difference is not technical. It is emotional. The playlist does not carry the weight of the object. It does not smell like the inside of a butter cookie tin. It does not have a label written in blue ink by a grandmother who knew that the tape would outlive her.
I am not against digital music. I use it every day. But I am suspicious of the claim that it preserves everything. What it preserves is the song. What it loses is the song’s life. The scratch on the vinyl, the warp on the tape, the way the sound changed when the machine was old and the belt was loose—these are not imperfections. They are the fingerprints of time. They are the evidence that the music was once held by human hands.
The Ritual of Listening
In my family, listening to music was never a background activity. It was a ritual. The cassette player was placed on the kitchen counter, next to the bowl of sabzi khordan. The volume was set carefully, not too loud, not too soft. The tape was rewound to the beginning, even if we had just listened to it the day before. And then we sat. We did not talk. We did not scroll. We listened.
This ritual was a form of taarof, the Persian system of politeness, but directed at the music itself. We were showing respect to the voice, to the memory, to the people who were not in the room but were somehow present anyway. The music was not a soundtrack. It was a guest. And like any guest, it deserved our attention.
I have tried to recreate this ritual with my own children. I bought a small cassette player online, the kind that runs on batteries and has a single speaker. I found a few old tapes at a flea market in Westwood, tapes that had been brought from Iran decades ago and sold by someone who no longer had a machine to play them. When I press play, the sound is thin and wobbly. But my children sit still. They listen. They do not ask why the music sounds old. They understand, without being told, that this is not just music. This is a room. This is a country. This is a grandmother they never met, singing along to a song she loved.
The Untranslatable Word: Deltangi
There is a word in Farsi that has no exact English equivalent: deltangi. It is often translated as “missing” or “longing,” but those words are too small. Deltangi is the ache of the heart for something that is gone, something that may never return, something that exists now only in memory. It is the feeling of listening to a song and being transported to a place that no longer exists, or that exists but is unreachable, or that exists only in the space between the notes.
Music is the most reliable transport device for deltangi because it does not require translation. A melody can cross borders without a visa. A voice can enter a room without knocking. When I hear the opening notes of Soltan-e Ghalbha, I am not remembering Tehran. I am in Tehran. I am seven years old, sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s living room, watching her close her eyes and sway. The song is not a reminder of the past. It is the past, made audible, made present, made real.
This is why I write about music on this blog. Not because I am a music critic. Not because I want to recommend songs. But because music is one of the few things that can hold the weight of displacement without breaking. It is a container for deltangi, a vessel for the voices we have lost, a transport device for the rooms we can no longer enter.
What We Pass On
My mother gave me a cassette tape last year. It was not a copy. It was the original, the one with my grandmother’s handwriting, the one that had traveled from Tehran to Los Angeles in a suitcase in 1984. The plastic case was cracked. The label was faded. But when I held it, I felt the weight of everything it had carried: the songs, the silences, the hiss, the hope, the grief.
I have not played it yet. I am afraid that the tape will break, that the machine will eat it, that the sound will be too faint to hear. But I also know that I will play it eventually. I will sit in my kitchen, next to the bowl of sabzi khordan, and I will press play. And for three minutes, I will be in a room I have never seen, with people I have never met, in a country that exists now only in the space between the notes.
This is what music does. It transports us. Not to a place, but to a feeling. Not to a memory, but to the moment before the memory was made. It is the closest thing we have to time travel. And for those of us who live between countries, it is the only home that never asks for a passport.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do certain songs trigger such vivid memories?
Music activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, including those involved in emotion, memory, and sensory processing. When a song is associated with a significant life event—especially one tied to displacement or loss—the brain encodes the music and the memory together. Hearing the song later can reactivate the entire network, bringing back not just the event but the feelings, smells, and physical sensations attached to it. For diaspora communities, this effect is often amplified because the music is linked to a place that can no longer be visited freely.
What makes cassette tapes different from digital music for memory?
Cassette tapes are physical objects that carry the marks of their history: handwritten labels, cracked cases, the hiss of the recording process, the specific sequence of songs chosen by a family member. Digital files strip away this material context. A playlist can hold the same songs, but it cannot hold the weight of the object, the ritual of rewinding, or the evidence of the tape’s journey across borders. The cassette is not just a medium; it is a witness.
How can I preserve old cassette tapes without losing their character?
Digitizing old tapes is a practical way to prevent loss, but it should be done carefully. Use a well-maintained cassette deck, clean the tape heads, and record at a high bit rate. Keep the original tape in a cool, dry place, away from magnets and direct sunlight. When digitizing, do not remove the hiss or the imperfections. Those sounds are part of the recording’s history. They are the context that makes the music meaningful. A careful transfer preserves the song and the room it was recorded in.
What is deltangi, and how does it relate to music?
Deltangi is a Farsi word that describes a deep, physical ache of longing for something or someone that is absent. It is more than missing; it is a state of being. Music is one of the most direct ways to access deltangi because it bypasses language and goes straight to the body. A familiar melody can open the door to a room of memory that words cannot reach. For the Iranian diaspora, deltangi is often the emotional core of listening to pre-revolutionary music, which carries the sound of a country that no longer exists in the same form.
This essay is part of an ongoing series on the material culture of the Iranian diaspora. Future pieces will explore the politics of the family photograph, the ritual of the samovar, and the untranslatable weight of the word ghorbat.
