موسیقی پاپ به‌مثابه کنش معناساز در زندگی روزمرۀ دختران جوان بابل

Introduction: Pop music has an ordinary but persistent presence in the everyday lives of young people in contemporary Iran. It is heard in bedrooms, homes, cars, taxis, cafés, workplaces, mobile phones, playlists, and social media feeds. Because this presence is familiar, it is often reduced to entertainment, media consumption, or personal taste. Yet ordinary listening may become part of emotional life, memory, bodily response, social interaction, spatial experience, and self-understanding. This article examines these processes among young women in Babol, a non-metropolitan city in northern Iran. Rather than asking how much pop music is consumed, it asks how pop music becomes meaningful in daily life and how this meaning is shaped by gender, family expectations, urban space, digital media, and local cultural conditions.
Literature Review: Studies of everyday music listening have shown that music can regulate affect, structure time, accompany routine activity, and participate in identity formation. Other studies have examined taste, self-presentation, gender, fandom, and digital platforms. However, much of this literature isolates one dimension of musical life: emotion regulation, textual representation, platform use, youth taste, or media consumption. Fewer studies show how these dimensions converge in lived experience, especially among young women in non-metropolitan Iranian settings. Many Iranian studies have examined music through surveys, media analysis, adolescent samples, lyrical content, or broad discussions of consumption and morality. Less attention has been paid to how young women make meaning through music in relation to body, memory, family, digital media, public judgment, and the city itself. This article addresses that gap by placing meaning-making at the centre of analysis.
Methodology: The article is based on a qualitative study with an ethnographic orientation. Here, “ethnographic” does not refer to classical long-term residence in the field, but to a context-sensitive inquiry that combines in-depth interviews, field observation, analytic memo-writing, and thick description. The field of research is Babol, a layered auditory environment where local judgments, family relations, youth culture, digital media, and informal sound practices coexist.
The main data were collected through eleven in-depth semi-structured interviews with women aged eighteen to thirty living in Babol. Purposeful and gradual sampling was used to include participants with different educational, occupational, marital, familial, and digital backgrounds. Interviews lasted between sixty and ninety minutes and focused on listening situations, emotion, memory, the body, family relations, friendship, playlists, social media, urban movement, and experiences of judgment. Field notes, contextual observations, and analytic reflections were also recorded.
Data collection and analysis proceeded simultaneously. Thematic adequacy was reached when later interviews, especially the tenth and eleventh, no longer generated new main themes. The analysis followed the six-phase model of thematic analysis: familiarization with the data, initial coding, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and writing the report. The themes were interpreted in relation to Babol’s auditory field, gendered experience, family life, urban movement, and digital mediation.
Findings: The findings show that pop music becomes meaningful at several interconnected levels. First, at the level of affect, memory, and the body, music helps participants regulate mood, create calm, release emotion, and express feelings indirectly. Songs may be linked to heartbreak, longing, family memories, travel, solitude, or imagined futures. Music also appears in embodied responses such as humming, dancing, crying, movement, or sensing rhythm while working, commuting, driving, or resting.
Second, music participates in the making of privacy and personal space. A bedroom, headphones, mobile phone, car, or a short passage through the city can become a temporary emotional territory. Privacy is therefore not always a fixed physical condition; it is often produced through listening. A car ride may become a moving refuge, and a song heard during sewing or study may organize inner rhythm and emotional continuity.
Third, pop music has relational and digital significance. It moves between family members, friends, spouses, social media stories, shared clips, short videos, and carefully arranged playlists. A playlist is not merely an archive of songs; it may become a condensed portrait of the self: emotional, calm, nostalgic, selective, modern, or distinct. Songs used in stories or posts also frame mood and manage what can be shown about the self without explicit declaration.
Fourth, music is gendered through audibility and visibility. The issue is not simply that girls and boys have different tastes, but that young women often face unequal possibilities for making listening public. Headphones, low-volume listening, selective sharing, caution in taxis, family boundaries, and sensitivity to judgment show that gender enters musical life through the management of exposure. Finally, Babol emerges as a multilayered auditory field. The city shapes how music is heard, hidden, displayed, repeated, and interpreted.
Conclusion: The article concludes that pop music in the everyday lives of young women in Babol should be understood as a situated and relational practice of meaning-making, not merely as entertainment, media exposure, or youth taste. Meaning is produced in the relationship among music, listener, body, memory, space, media, family, friends, gender, and urban context. The study shows that affect, self-representation, digital life, gender, and the city are interconnected dimensions of meaning-making. It also shows that non-metropolitan cities are important sites for understanding contemporary musical culture. Pop music is therefore one of the informal languages through which young women narrate emotion, sustain memory, produce privacy, negotiate judgment, relate to others, and inhabit the city.