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Why Iranian pop legend Googoosh, once silenced by the Islamic Republic, has paused her singing
Before Beyoncé, before Cher, before Madonna, there was Googoosh.
The 75-year-old Iranian megastar catapulted to stardom in Iran during the 1970s, only to be silenced by the Islamist regime that took power after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In 2000, she was finally allowed to leave Iran to live in exile.
For Iranians – particularly those in the diaspora – Googoosh symbolises an era of cosmopolitanism in late-Pahlavi Iran, the period from the mid-1950s until 1979 when Iran's popular music, cinema, television and fashion embraced modernity and questioned social norms.
But as protests roil Iran and the nation's clerical leaders find their grip on power slipping, the “Voice of Iran,” as Googoosh is known, hasn't turned up the volume. Instead, she's found herself putting her farewell tour on pause.
“Everyone is waiting for my last concert in LA,” Googoosh told reporters in December 2025, “but … I am not going to sing until my country is rescued.”
Googoosh's refusal to sing is not a sign of hesitation but a conscious political gesture – one that draws its force from her singular position in Iran's cultural history.
Over the past several years, I've studied Googoosh's trajectory as a musical and cultural icon. For Iranians inside and outside the country, she's been a canvas onto which they've projected nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Iran, memories of rupture and loss, and fantasies of resistance.
Born Faegheh Atashin in 1950, Googoosh was raised in Tehran by Muslim Azeri parents who had fled Soviet Azerbaijan. Although civil authorities registered her under the Perso-Arabic name Faegheh, her stage name, “Googoosh” – actually a male Armenian name – endured.
She grew up onstage and onscreen. Her father, an acrobat, incorporated her into his act when she was just three years old; by the age of four, she was the family's primary breadwinner.
As she matured, Googoosh moved across music, cinema, fashion and dance, rising to prominence within a cultural landscape shaped by Western influences and aligned with the state's modernising ambitions. By the mid-1970s, she had become the most recognisable figure of Iran's pre-revolutionary popular culture.
According to Iranian studies scholar Abbas Milani, Googoosh “embodied the frivolous joys, the reckless abandon, the exuberant era of social experimentation, the defiant desire to debunk tradition and its taboos, and the vigor and vitality of youth.”
Onscreen, she wore the newest styles and cuts. Young Iranians copied her hair and hemlines. She danced, posed and sang like a global star – alongside Persian, she recorded in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish – and, in the process, redefined what a female pop star could look like in Iran.
Yet to some Islamist critics of the Pahlavi order, she symbolised “gharbzadegi,” also known as “Westoxication” – the belief that by embracing the West, Iranians were betraying the traditions of their people and bringing about moral decay.
In the year preceding the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Googoosh had a residency at a Los Angeles club. Yet while many artists fled Iran in the wake of the revolution to rebuild their careers, Googoosh returned, only to be swiftly punished for her past.
Authorities charged her in 1979 with “moral corruption.” A couple of years later, the new regime briefly incarcerated her, confiscated her passport and prohibited her from publicly performing.
Just like that, a central figure in the nation's cultural life was removed from the spotlight. It would be 21 years before she would perform again.
Googoosh wasn't alone; musicians and performers across the country encountered the same fate: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme leader from 1979 to 1989, saw music as a vice. The regime also categorically prohibited women from performing solo in public.
In December 2025, she published her memoir, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice. In it, she opens up about this period of her life – and her decision to return to Iran.
Even though she was at the height of her fame in the late-1970s, she alleges that her managers had misappropriated her earnings. As revolutionary unrest intensified and the Pahlavi regime imposed martial law and closed cabarets and theaters in an attempt to appease conservatives, her sources of income vanished. This prompted the move to Los Angeles. But mounting debt and substance abuse issues influenced her decision to return home.
She writes that revolutionary hostility wasn't simply directed at popular culture; it went after pleasure itself, particularly when embraced, celebrated or expressed by women. To the Islamic Republic, music was not a form of art or a vocation; it was a provocation and a moral abomination.
Googoosh, who'd been a practicing Shiite Muslim who prayed, fasted and went on pilgrimage, describes the shock she felt that so much cruelty could coexist with claims of religious piety following the Islamic Revolution. Personal faith and public, secular performances had not been seen as contradictions in pre-revolutionary Iran.
That all changed in 1979.
The revolution catalysed a mass cultural exodus: Millions of Iranians fled the country, with many settling in California, where other popular singers such as Hayedeh, Mahasti and Homeyra rebuilt their careers in exile.
A proxy Iranian entertainment industry emerged in Los Angeles, allowing Iranian popular culture to live on outside the Islamic Republic. In what came to be called “Tehrangeles,” studios recorded Persian-language music and television, while entrepreneurs opened cabaret-style performance venues.
The entertainment infrastructure built in Tehrangeles later expanded to Europe, Canada and the Persian Gulf; much of the programming was saturated with motifs of memory, longing and nostalgia.
Meanwhile, Googoosh's two decades off the stage had only amplified her mystique. When she finally received permission to leave Iran in 2000, she performed her first concert at Toronto's Air Canada Centre before a sold-out crowd.
Since then, she's recorded nine albums. Yet most of her fans have shown limited interest in these newer offerings. When she sings them, chants of “Ghadimi! Ghadimi!” (“Old! Old!”) often rise from the crowd.
Like many in the diaspora, they turn to Googoosh not to engage the present but to transport themselves to an earlier era – effectively freezing her, and their memories of Iran, in the past.
Once silenced by the Islamic Republic, Googoosh now voluntarily withholds her voice in solidarity.
I see this refusal as a reclamation of her agency; with Iran again roiled by mass mobilisation and protest, her silence resonates as loudly as her songs once did.
If Googoosh has long functioned as a vessel for collective memory, she now stands as a reminder that memory alone is not enough – that nostalgia cannot stand in for a political reckoning, and that voices shaped by exile remain tethered to unfinished struggles at home.
Richard Nedjat-Haiem is PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara.
This article was first published on The Conversation.
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