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Change Your Life! |
Googoosh googols Iranians in US |
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August 21, 2000
LOS ANGELES (AP) - To tears and shouts of joy, Googoosh, Iran's most beloved entertainer, brings the songs and memories of her country before the Islamic revolution to the largest Iranian exile community in America. Googoosh's three-hour show Saturday night to a sold-out crowd of 15,000 was her first in the United States since she broke two decades of silence. A cultural icon in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, Googoosh was forced to end her acting and singing career after the 1979 revolution, living an isolated life in a Tehran apartment. The hiatus was interrupted only when a more moderate government under President Mohammad Khatami, elected in 1997, allowed her to travel abroad again. Her tour, which began in Toronto last month and continues onto New York, Houston, Washington and San Francisco, has electrified Iranians abroad and reflects the small but influential changes inside Iran and in the country's relations with the United States. It was especially meaningful in Los Angeles, whose huge Iranian community has led some to nickname the city "Tehrangeles." Performing on a stage bathed in green, red and white - the colors of Iran's flag - her long absence seemed only to invigorate her mystique, her own internal exile tying her to a community that left Iran a generation ago. "Hello, to all the people of Iran," she said after coming on stage. Dressed in an elegant white gown and cape and her hair a dark blonde, the 50-year-old singer broke into tears before she began singing. People in the audience cried and shouted, "I love you, Googoosh." She put her hand to her heart. "I am so excited," she said softly. Her songs electrified a crowd that, in turn, wept, jumped to its feet, clapped, danced wildly and chanted her name. Googoosh's popularity is difficult to describe. Her fans in America - some born after the revolution but raised on her bootleg cassettes - compare her to Madonna, the Beatles, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Her fashions, inspired by her trips to the West, set trends in pre-revolutionary Iran. Her haircuts became statements in themselves, soon visible all over the country, and her pictures in magazines were the stuff of young girls' scrapbooks. To this day, her music and soaring voice can be heard from the stereos of cars tied up in the traffic jams that snarl Tehran's streets. "I know every lyric by heart. I can recite them to you without hearing the music," said Josephine Cohen, a 26-year-old Iranian-American whose parents immigrated before the revolution. "She transcends age." Googoosh was in the United States when the Shah was overthrown in 1979. Despite the personal risk - her lifestyle embodied much of what the Islamic Republic intended to wipe out - she returned a few months later to Tehran. Her passport was confiscated and, under a regime that banned women from singing or dancing before audiences that included men, she stopped her public performances with her popularity undiminished. The seeming permanence of the ban made the concert Saturday even more meaningful. An estimated 600,000 Iranians live in Southern California, and tickets were listed on the eBay Internet site for nearly dlrs 1,000. "We grew up with her, and we have all these memories of her," said Juliette Sardarian, who left Iran after the revolution. "With her songs, we lived and we danced. They are our good memories."
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