Dream Rovers - Dear Superstar

Image via Wikipedia

There's something about country music that goes beyond "americanness", and sometimes takes it far beyond our shores to places that you might not expect.  I never expected to hear country music from Iran, or watch a country music video that was filmed in Tehran, much less one about a topic controversial to the Mullahs.  But here we are.

Dream Rovers is an Iranian country music band.  Founded by university students Erfan Rezayatbakhsh (elf) and Ahmad Motevassel, their unexpected group sings country music from a long way away from Nashville.  This song was inspired by watching an Iranian television documentary about female genital mutilation.  When Erfan changed the channel, there was a Taylor Swift music video.  Inspired, he wrote a song about a letter to a country music superstar reminding her that she lives a very, very different life than some of her fans.

This song reminds me of just how little I know about Iran and the Iranian people.  What little I do know is pretty one dimensional, because I found it so surprising that a group could record this at what is ground zero for the Iranian revolution.  What's more, this was written on the heels of the massive pr0-democracy protests in Tehran in 2009, and the hard government crackdown then.



This video only has 41,000 views, and that's a shame.  The world is a much more complicated place than we can imagine.