Baraye

After the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, a young woman arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly who died in morality police custody, Iranians on social media began posting their reasons for protesting. Each post started with the same word, baraye, meaning "for" or "because of". Shervin Hajipour took those tweets and built a song from them, one verse per tweet. The result reads like a list of a country's frustrations: women's and children's rights, refugees and animals, pollution, poverty, theocracy, corruption, freedom of speech, ending with the protest slogan Woman, Life, Freedom. In the video Hajipour sings into a fixed camera in a room, while screenshots of the original tweets appear with each line, crediting their authors. He posted it on Instagram on 28 September 2022. It drew about 40 million views in less than two days, before he was arrested on 29 September and the song was taken down. He was released on bail on 4 October. By then nobody could take it back. "Baraye" was sung in schools, universities and streets in Iran and around the world, played in the French Senate, read aloud in translation in the Senate of Canada and heard outside the stadium at the England v Iran World Cup match. It became the most covered protest song in Iran's history. In February 2023 it won the first Grammy for Best Song for Social Change, and Hajipour, after months of silence, posted two words: we won. It endures as a song written, in a real sense, by thousands of people.