The Funny Story of the Palet Band: 'Never Without My Wife!'

The cancellation of Palet's concert tour over the obstruction of a female musician from performing on stage appears to be a union protest and a defense of women's equal rights. But when the group's past, its political record, and the relationship between its protest posture and its artistic credibility are considered together, more serious questions arise: Is this a principled stance, or an attempt to rebuild an image that was previously damaged?

According to the cultural reporter Safir Arjan, the Palette music group has announced that it will cancel all its tour performances in order to prevent the presence of the female musician of this group on the stage in some cities of Iran. The group wrote in its statement that it will not go on stage until all seven members have the same opportunity to perform. Undoubtedly, denying a musician a live performance because she is a woman is discriminatory, and objectionable is, in and of itself, defensible. But the problem is whether every protest decision should be praised as a brave and progressive action without examining its history, motivations and possible contradictions.

When did women become important to Paulette?

The main question still remains: why the presence of women in a group that has been active for years with a predominantly male composition, has now become one of the main axes of its protest identity? Is this change just the result of the natural evolution of the group members' views, or should it be examined in the context of changes in the music market, audience expectations, and the competition for the public image of artists? Why did this band, which was one of the most male-dominated bands for years, not even have a female member as a guest musician before, and suddenly women became important?

The thing is that this group did not have any female musicians in the past and if you look at the concerts of the previous years of Palet, you will see a combination of male hands on the stage. At the same time that Omid Nemati got in touch with Shagaig Sadeghian, an intermediate flute player, and eventually got married, this female musician was added to the group.

This question cannot be closed with a definitive answer about the personal motivations of the group members; But it can be raised as a question about the continuity of social and political positions of a music group. The defense of women's rights gains more credibility when traces of it can also be seen in the artist's history and performance, not just in the moment when a public controversy allows for greater visibility.

From this angle, it seems that this is a gesture to attract the middle class and the gray spectrum, who are the customers of these kinds of concerts, and it is more of a marketing move than a protest move. In the music industry, the public image of an artist is part of his commercial capital, and social gestures can also help rebuild this image. The question is, is Palet willing to pay the price of his position sustainably, or will this protest be limited to a high-profile statement and a few days of media attention?

To evaluate this issue, the performance of the group should be seen along the way. Does the support for female musicians become a continuous position? Does the group stand up to similar discrimination in situations with greater media or economic cost? And is this sensitivity seen in its artistic choices and collaborations?

Palette, a victim or greedy for credit?

Now let's assume that this group "really" intended to protest in this way? Is it reasonable to exclude a Mashhad audience band from live music, because one of its musicians is not allowed to perform? This criticism, as opposed to focusing on the personal motivations of the members, is a moral issue that may not be fundamentally defensible from the point of view of some and it smells more like a propaganda gesture; Especially, if a group's performance in a city faces such a restriction, it should not cause the group to cancel concerts in other cities that do not have this restriction.

It seems that this is a clumsy imitation of famous singers like Alireza Ghorbani, who is not the singer of this caricature group. This kind of protest model needs weight, credibility, and hindrance, and it comes to the likes of Shajarian and Ghorbani, not a group whose works do not even have birth certificates.

The fact is that the reputation of the Palette group went down after the re-performance of the song Cherikhai Fadaei Khalq with a poem by Saeed Sultanpour in 2016 in support of Hassan Rouhani, and now this group is trying to rebuild its image. This movement of the Palette group, like their post of support for Hassan Rouhani, may change in a few hours, or a few days, or a few months, and we will see this group perform again, because these kinds of events that have become a music band, are similar to deep-rooted movements such as the Chavush Center, the Shahnaz Group, the Arif Group, and the Shida Group, which do not have a meaningful thought and ideology behind them, and with a "Pakh" like Nader Fature Chi, they all move from their positions and make everything a one. They call it "misunderstanding".

A group that at some point entered the field by rereading a political work in the electoral space, cannot expect that any subsequent social action will be evaluated regardless of its history. The audience has the right to ask to what extent the political and social positions of a group are rooted and how much they change with the current conditions.

In the end, it's not just about the palette. In the cultural atmosphere of Iran, where the border between real protest, media show and art marketing has never been clear, it is not easy to judge the real motive of canceling the concert due to the exclusion of a female musician and the sincerity of such a claim - that too by a group whose marketing has been based on sentimentalist movements since the beginning - and the amount of time they are really willing to put on a concert for the sake of sweet money shows how honestly they have spoken.