Safir in the Bazaar of Words: A Journey Through Persian Hip-Hop, Poetry, and Philosophy
Introduction: A Corner for the Outsider’s Eye
Every Thursday night, Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri opens a space where Persian creative minds reflect on their craft, philosophy, and the cultural landscapes they inhabit. In this episode, the guest is Omid Safir—rapper, poet, and co-founder of the Melli music label. For Safir, hip-hop is not a stage for showmanship but a laboratory for meaning, a cultural marketplace where ideas, voices, and identities trade, clash, and transform.
Over two hours of conversation, Safir shared not only his artistic evolution—from underground roots in the group Cherik to his current “bazaar-style” philosophy—but also his deeply personal crossroads, philosophical leanings, and unshakable commitment to independence. This blog post unpacks that journey, weaving together his biography, anecdotes, and the larger implications of his work.
Phase One: Underground Beginnings
Safir’s story begins in adolescence. At sixteen, alongside friends, he co-founded Cherik (“Guerrilla”), a group that shaped early conversations in Persian rap. The underground phase was marked by secrecy, mystery, and a raw experimentation that felt both exhilarating and dangerous.
This wasn’t “underground” in the casual sense of being outside the mainstream. For Safir, underground meant a cultural indebtedness: like the barber shops, tattoo studios, or cafés that exist in society’s hidden corners, Persian hip-hop was carving out its own coded language. In that space, labels were less about branding and more about survival. “We built a scene that we could actually call underground,” he recalls. “It worked, it clicked.”
Yet even here, Safir’s focus wasn’t just rebellion. It was conceptual. “For us, the concept takes priority over wordplay, tone, or delivery,” he explains. Lyrics weren’t vehicles for self-promotion but vessels for collective messages. In Cherik, the group tried to “speak with one voice,” echoing the solidarity of a generation searching for meaning in chaos.
Phase Two: The Street as Classroom
After Cherik dissolved, Safir co-founded Melli with Saeed Dehghan. This second phase—the “street” stage—was less secretive and more grassroots. Here, life in Tehran itself became the syllabus. The clamor of traffic, the dialects of neighborhoods, the stories overheard in cafés and alleys—all of it filtered through Safir’s pen.
The group produced music that was both poetic and socially rooted. They believed in open doors: collaborating widely, inviting other artists into their process. “Everyone was equal,” Safir recalls. “Maybe someone focused on romance, maybe someone on politics, but the idea was to build a collective sound.”
Yet this openness wasn’t always reciprocated. Some peers distanced themselves, embracing ideological or stylistic silos. Safir found himself frustrated by how quickly labels—“mainstream,” “independent,” “underground”—became weapons of division. To him, all rap was underground, all artists participants in the same bazaar of ideas.
Phase Three: The Bazaar
Today, at thirty, Safir describes his work as “bazaar-style.” By this he doesn’t mean commercialized, but rather pluralistic. Like Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, his vision of art is a place where diverse people and voices coexist—trading stories, challenging each other, and forming unexpected connections.
He even staged this metaphor in his Master’s thesis, writing a play where each character spoke a different dialect yet still understood one another. The bazaar is not chaos; it’s structured diversity, a microcosm of society.
But the bazaar metaphor is also a critique. Safir is wary of ideology being smuggled into rap by commercial or political interests—developers using artists to sell real estate, for instance. Independence remains central to his identity. “Everyone should have personal independence,” he insists, “and together those voices can create harmony.”
The Observer’s Eye
Safir often calls himself “the eye from the outside.” He doesn’t cast himself as protagonist but as witness, watching others’ pain and translating it into art. Three pivotal traumas define this stance:
- A lonely hospital experience where patients sat without visitors.
- The death of a close friend he wishes he had stopped from going out that night.
- A moment of parental sorrow he feels guilty for causing.
Though these events weren’t directly his fault, Safir internalized them as burdens. “The pain of what happened to them feels like it’s sitting on my shoulders,” he confesses.
Instead of turning these memories into confessions, he filters them into poetry. His track Catharsis opens with:
“Death, standing behind the door, fell in love with life when it saw me.”
For him, art is not therapy but translation—the transformation of raw experience into cultural product. “Our mind is like a catalyst,” he says. “Raw material goes in; a product comes out. I take ‘A,’ turn it into ‘C,’ and now a group of people understands it.”
Between Literature and Rap
Safir’s artistic depth comes not only from street life but also from his academic background. He studied Dramatic Literature at university, and his grounding in classical Persian poetry—from Shamloo and Golchin Gilani to Sana’i and ‘Iraqi—infuses his rap with unusual richness.
His early lyrics were criticized as too complex, too literary, too disconnected from average listeners. But Safir rejects the idea that accessibility requires dilution. Instead, he rebranded—choosing to present his content in simpler, more colloquial forms while keeping its depth intact.
He compares it to serving a drink: “Before, it was like putting a milkshake in a lightbulb—quirky but off-putting. Now I just pour it into a simple glass. Same content, just easier to recognize.”
Independence and Collaboration
Despite valuing independence, Safir embraces collaboration when it feels authentic. He describes it as stepping into another artist’s framework while still being himself. Recent projects, like his work with Aida Shahghasemi, showcase his willingness to experiment while remaining rooted in his identity.
But collaboration has limits. Safir resists opportunism, refusing to lend his voice to ideological manipulation or empty trends. True collaboration, for him, requires human connection and shared curiosity, not mere convenience.
The Blueprint: Path Over Legacy
Perhaps the most striking part of Safir’s philosophy is his ambivalence toward legacy. Unlike many artists obsessed with being remembered, he insists, “It doesn’t matter if my name lasts. The path should last.”
He draws parallels with Rumi and Khayyam, whose names survive only because their work endures. What matters, he argues, is not personal immortality but leaving reference points for future creators. His career, then, is a blueprint—a roadmap of experiments, albums, and collaborations that future artists might build upon.
The Farmer and the Bazaar: Safir’s Analogies
Throughout the interview, Safir leans on metaphors to explain his process. Two stand out:
- The Farmer: A good farmer doesn’t just walk the streets; he plants well, sows carefully, and harvests meaning. From life’s soil—whether gritty street fights or subtle cultural codes—he extracts values, ethics, and stories worth passing on.
- The Bazaar: His current phase likens rap to a marketplace of voices, dialects, and trades. Just as the bazaar is a hub of cultural exchange, his music seeks to absorb diverse influences and translate them into unified expression.
Together, these analogies reveal a vision of art as both labor and commerce: planting seeds of experience, harvesting meaning, and offering it for exchange in the cultural marketplace.
Persian Rap as the Last Medium
Why, then, does Safir stick with rap? Why not theater, literature, or film? His answer is striking: rap is the last functional medium in restrictive cultural conditions. Just as mysticism once allowed Persian poets to evade censorship and speak profound truths, rap today offers a language of freedom.
“If I could, I’d make films or even code programs that generate emotion in real time,” he admits. “But rap still works—it’s the escape route.”
Safir’s Humanism
At its core, Safir’s work is profoundly humanist. He observes people not as caricatures but as full beings, internalizing their behaviors, joys, and flaws. Sometimes he envies their goodness; other times he suffers from their darkness. But always, he transforms them into poetry.
His songs like Ādam (Human) and recent collaborations highlight this duality: both dark and hopeful, skeptical yet compassionate. “People matter a lot to me,” he says. “There’s a lot of humanism in my work.”
Conclusion: Safir’s Anti-Mainstream Legacy
Safir refuses to be trapped by labels—mainstream, underground, commercial. He rejects ideological manipulation, resists opportunism, and insists on authenticity. His art is not about chasing trends or preserving a name but about documenting a path: an evolving body of work that bridges Persian classical poetry with contemporary urban experience.
In this sense, Safir embodies both tradition and rupture, continuity and resistance. He is the observer’s eye, the farmer, the bazaar merchant, and above all, the catalyst transforming raw social material into cultural poetry.
Whether or not his name survives, his path—and the questions it raises about meaning, independence, and cultural renewal—will remain reference points for Persian hip-hop and beyond.
