I’ve heard his haunting voice and singing style for the first time late after midnight when it played automatically among bunch of youtube videos. I was reading something and I stopped. I listened to it again and again. His other songs, albums, eventually his story, and his thoughts. As I dived into his universe, my curiosity, wonder and love also grew. I would like to host a unique artist, Mohsen Namjoo in the first piece of “Astroportraits” series which I was meaning to start for sometime now.
I loved the unusual style that spoke right into my heart that night. The way he transferred passions and emotions through breathing, letters, words, sounds in a form of language that I can’t even understand yet was still moved very much by it. I love the way he carries his chaos just like all the other geniuses who were beyond their times and never got fully understood. And he does all these while seeming like a modest friend you’d encounter in a friends place.
Bob Dylan of Iran
It’s not difficult to understand why The New York Times mentions him as Bob Dylan of Iran. Namjoo has a mars very close to Dylan’s mercury and his sun shines in Dylan’s mars sign. And of course comparing with something similar is easiest way to understand something very foreign. Truth is two musicians are very different. Mohsen Namjoo was born as a Pisces. Even if we do not know his hour of birth, the energy of the day he was born tells us a lot about this unique person.
I think people born in pisces, are carrying a divine light on them which is visible for a moment just like the reflection of the sunlight on the fish scales. They have a “beyond the visible” kind of quality, sometimes even with their bodies and lives as if they are transcending to another world with some aspect of their lives. You probably know one of those people who look like a different person on each photo, people born in pisces and neptunian folks have this flowing quality with them.
In the highest expression of pisces, this transcendence usually is accompanied by art, music, science, philosophy and goes through losses, chaotic proceedings out of individuals personal control. Because the way to the divine goes through expressing universal emotions, beliefs and concepts in a way that anyone can understand, this sign usually hosts artists who posses a transcendental understanding and mostly not understood by others and who faced various losses and had to make sacrifices.
Mohsen Namjoo also found himself inside vague and chaotic circumstances when his recordings were rejected by the authorities. In musicians horoscopes, venus usually signifies harmony and pleasurable activities also denotes the artists taste and style of expression. In Namjoo’s natal chart, both mercury and venus are in the visionary sign of Aquarius. Traces of his “unusual style” is emphasized with this position. In general, venus in its happy signs like Taurus and Libra in artists charts creates a style best described as “classic” or “expected”. However in Aquarius, together with mercury we see an unconventional venus which likes to be on the pursuit of what is innovative, humanistic, somewhat alternative also very fond of freedom and friendship.
Being positioned behind pisces, acting as a pisces quality, this combination spreads his work through “the internet”which is an aquarius concept, in a fated way totally out of his control. His carefully protected one of a kind work reached people in a very unusual way around the time it was rejected by the official authorities.
When we consider moon and jupiter placed in aries as the owner of the creative expression, along with the aquarian planets, we conclude that the artist will not be satisfied by practicing what is already done by others, in contrary he would like to dare to try the untried and new and start and feel challenged by something new almost instinctually. His chosen profile photo in his soundcloud account proves this point so beautifully. And although saturn in the conservative sign of cancer also creates a distance to the tradition and forms of the past, eventually it makes sure that the tradition takes place in what is invented or modernised. Namjoo, combines and synthesises traditional Iranian musical forms with entirely different musicians and musical trends techniques and creates unusual and one of a kind pieces. He explains this like this in one of his interviews:
You may think tradition is a good thing, because on one hand you know that new generation is not very interested in it. You might be seeking a little bit of a nostalgia, or missing the past. But I don’t want all those bad and sad things that happened at past to become an issue again. All right,maybe we miss the past but I think we should at least leave it behind a little bit and see what we have right now. In short I don’t think it’s good to be stuck at the past or still feel sad about it.
In harmonious aspects between mercury and venus, themes of taking pleasure from communication, word play and poetry are common. Perhaps because planets in aquarius get along so well with my airy positions I tend to like artists who have placements here, a little more. To understand Mohsen Namjoo’s visionary and innovative style a bit better, let’s have a look at other musicians who also share this combination.
Mozart and Handel who is also a pisces and well known for religious tones in his work has this airy combination. Again we see this position in another pisces musician from Austria, known as “Falco” who combines classical music with hiphop, rock and pop music. Legendary Janis Joplin who blends rock music with blues tones and most importantly another pisces artist also sharing the same mars position with Namjoo, Lou Reed who became a cult while not being able to create a traditional financial success story. Combining unrelated things together brilliantly and creating an innovative style for the next generations is the common theme among these brilliant musicians.
One of my favourite songs “Mojir” is based on a sound recording of his grandfathers prayer when he secretly recorded as a child and his grandfather passes away only two months after this incident. 30 years later, he creates this amazing song based on that recording. It’s like they are singing it together with his grandfather and this is a style that sends chills down one’s spine while merging the old with the new. I think this piece carries both the essence of his innovative and experimental artistic expression and his creative power that transforms the traditional into something entirely different.
South node in taurus, mars in gemini and aries placements tell us that Mohsen Namjoo’s artistic expression finds itself instinctively through poking and digging with curiosity and playing with words maybe in a witty and rebellious way. However, although on the surface, words and motive for music seem innocent, on a deeper level they touch issues which are hard to detect and face and because of this, for Namjoo, communication seems to be a sensitive area which is almost always open to all sorts of sudden crisis. We see this phenomenon at work when he sent his music to the authorities, they fall short on understanding this unusual and different music and because they do not wish to risk anything they reject it. Language and not being fully understood is both an advantage and a disadvantage for him. There are significations that his music and his work carry the potential of being dangerously misunderstood and that he may find himself in difficult communications especially over beliefs throughout his life.
The biggest example of this situation takes place in 2009, when Iranian courts sentenced him to prison for 5 years for “contemptous recitation of Koranic verses” through his song called Shams which is based on Koranic sura Ash-Shams. The court did not amend its ruling even after Namjoo’s formal apology. The artist lives in very far away from his homeland, in United States, since 2008.
Of course the absence of earth element in the chart- even if he has an earth ascendant is not making this communication any easier. The absence of earth and the highlighted presence of air planets signify that the artist is more pleased by ideas and theories than the physical experience. He describes it this way:
In reality, I preferred theory to playing an instrument. All sorts of theory, from art to philosophy of art, to watching films, reading criticism, literature, novels …
Compassion and understanding of the ignorance of others and being able to unite art and wisdom with commercialism might be every artists challenge but even more so for Mohsen Namjoo. Everlasting journey from financial stability through maintaning the status quo to choosing the new, challenging which does not guarantee a financial return yet exciting and transformative. Abandoning the status quo even physically and realising the transformation far away from home perhaps through academics, teaching or publishing. It was priceless to see the cover of this book which Namjoo participated:
To even more accentuate this issue, when he was asked in an interview if he felt challenged by creating new music for his fan base or rather by producing music that he knows will sell which is within his comfort zone he answers:
I honestly wish I could produce music for myself. But producing music, in general, involves a lot compromising due to financial stability. For example, if I do solo performances with my setar around the world, for Iranian audiences, all my fans would be satisfied. It would also be financially beneficial for me as well. That being said, I hate to perform this way. I like composing new songs/albums through new concepts so I discover new ways of producing music. But people don’t like that. They prefer just listening to my old songs and styles, instead of the new ones, because it brings back their old memories. They don’t appreciate my attempt of trying new music out.
The transformative quality of the artist who has his pre natal solar eclipse in the sign of transformation, in scorpio, can be observed clearly in his artistic style and in his approach to the music. In an interview he makes an interesting analogy making this symbolism clear. He compares the unchangeable and traditional Iranian musical forms with a dead body (taurus) and others who want to change it yet instead keep feeding on it to maggots.(scorpio). Mohsen Namjoo is an artist who has the potential of carrying out this transformation.
I want to add that I’ve always personally respected those musicians that came before us, the ones we mentioned by name earlier, and the generations that came before them who tried to do something different. We can’t deny that this is an evolution. If they hadn’t produced certain works, our work wouldn’t have gotten to a certain level.
But this thing that we call Iranian music, those seven modalities, or what you can call the repertoire that they put in front of you when you go to learn Iranian music … Ever since I was a kid, my feeling was that this is like a corpse and everybody is sitting on it like maggots. Everybody’s feeding himself and nobody’s thinking about making this body move. The biggest push was made by musicians before us—people like Hossein Alizadeh or Shajarian, each in his own way. My joke was that they wanted to wake this dead body up—but I believe that you have to kick it hard and throw it to the other side of the room. So hard you can’t even tell what will happen. Will it break apart? Will it stay intact?
These are of course scorpionic themes. This transformative energy is overflowing from him. The visual composition he created for his website actually depicts all the concepts I’ve been trying to transcribe above.
Mars being placed in gemini as the ruler of his pre-natal solar eclipse, indicates that this transformative energy will be realised through ways of education, lecturing, learning, verbally expressing and even teasing. We see this is the case in Namjoo’s life. After having a mathematics degree, he pursued his education in school of drama and department of fine arts in Iran then he continued in Austria and United States and he is quite busy with lectures, workshops and masterclasses. He is the first musician I’ve seen, who stated “Research Interests” on his bio.
As a unique artist who has a lot to offer to this world through his wisdom and gifts I think Mohsen Namjoo represents what true creativity is while experiencing it himself.
If you like to hear how all these concepts I’ve tried to elaborate in this article fit into the artist thoughts, you might enjoy this interview with himself broadcasted on BBC Persian weekly music magazine.
