NIMANY & Post Punk Music Scene

BlackList's frontman Josh Strawn wears NIMANY on the stage!
One of Nima's favorite NYC bands and inspired by groups such as The Comsat Angels, The Manic Street Preachers, Suede, The Sound, and For Against, Blacklist is simultaneously celebratory and melancholy, replacing the hysterical protest song of the 20th century with anthems for a new generation weaned on amusement and starved for confrontation.

"I came across NIMANY designs (if I remember correctly) because I keep up as best I can with the underground rock scene in Iran. The only way to do this is via the Internet, and it just happened that one day I came across a site with photos of his work. Persian calligraphy is gorgeous and NIMANY's stylistic interpretations of it are very cool, so of course I was very taken with his work. It goes without saying that oftentimes the fashion world is little more than superficial, overpriced absurdity, but I think this lable is visually attractive and positions fashion in a place where it has the power to be political without sacrificing depth or aesthetics. Generally when people in fashion try to get political, they're just branding self-righteousness. NIMANY, on the other hand is trafficking in symbols and emblems that subversively expose the sophistication and modernity of a culture and language that's by and large misrepresented in the West. So instead of being a politics of consumerist self-satisfaction, I see what they're doing as an excellent strike back to our media and popular culture's lack of understanding and appreciation for Iran's art and history.


And the best part about it is that it works rather effortlessly at this and doesn't beat you over the head. But in the end, I dig their designs because I think they're really fantastic looking. Sort of like Blacklist tunes--if you want to read my lyrics for the subtexts and hear us as a political band, you can certainly do that and you can practically get a reading list from our songs (Ibn Rushd, Omar Khayyam, George Orwell, Victor Serge, Arjun Appadurai, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Salman Rushdie, Slavoj Zizek, just to give you the short list). But if you just like the music, that works too. You don't have to know who Akbar Ganji and Zakia Zaki are to appreciate 'When Worlds Collide' by us. Same with NIMANY, you don't even have to know it's Persian to know that you love the way it looks. In other words, it is form or melody that succeeds first--if the more thought out ideas and agendas work too, they are only able to do so because the rest is already in place and one's appreciation of one shouldn't condition too much your ability to appreciate the other. That's what I try to do with our music and it's how I feel about NIMANY's project." says Josh Strawn of Blacklist.