Nima Yousefi's Equinox of Insanity

An Introduction to Persian Music Videos

As some might know next week is the Persian New Year, and in honor of that I’ve decided to help educate the public about my culture. Persians have a long standing history of literature, arts and music, and since I know nothing about any of those I decided to just hit up YouTube for some music videos. So here’s a sample of types of Persian music, and videos, that characterize my people. This also gives me an excuse to test out posting YouTube videos to my blog, which is totally sweet.

Googoosh

Googoosh is the Celine Dion of Persian music, minus the pure soul devouring seething evil of that crazy Québécois bitch. Googoosh is a legend in Persian music, having grown up before the eyes of the society, remaining a shimmering star the whole way. And check out that video. It sounds like porno music, if it was made by Blondie, which is totally freakin’ awesome.

The Black Cats

The Black Cats are the perennial Persian boy band… except with a fattening middle-aged guy as their frontman. Imagine N*SYNC, but instead of Justin Timberlake insert Tom Jones. Remember that video where N*SYNC were dancing shirtless in the rain or pillow fighting in the rain or whatever the hell it was they were doing? Yeah, well now imagine a shirtless pillow fighting Tom Jones added to that. Two words: sexy overload.

And am I the only one expecting someone to pass the dutchie on the left hand side?

Cameron Cartio

Cameron Cartio represents the new wave of young Persian singers. Dark, gritty, and really emotional, telling tales that reflect the life of Persians everywhere. What is he singing about, you ask? The fucking weather. At least I think that’s what he’s singing about. I really can’t tell. Either half this video is in Portuguese or my Farsi has gone straight to shit.

Shahrokh

I have absolutely no idea who this guy is, but he’s obviously a total friggin’ badass. I mean, the guy spends the entire music video sitting in a Star Trek captain’s chair. Hell, Picard at least bothered to get up once in a while when Q would show up, but not Shahrokh. He’s stands for no man! I’m also 83% sure he’s not handicapped.

Not only that, but it looks like he got most of the shots for his video out of a Kaiser Permanente commercial. He’s even too good to film his own shit!

X-Elementz

These are a pair of douchebags I found out about because of MySpace (Damn you Tom!). They are … get ready for it … Nick and Ryan Tyler. How you get Persian street-cred with names like that is beyond me, but they nevertheless seem to have gotten over 9500 friends on MySpace, which is roughly 19 times more friends than Matt’s spectacularly awesome not-EMO band has got. For shame, Matt, for shame!