|
In the spring of 2003, as the nation slouched towards the mother of all
strategic blunders in Iraq, I was working as a producer for Fuse, a new rival to
MTV. The mood in the country was ugly. Clear Channel, the conglomerate which
owns 1,700 radio stations, had issued a banned song list which included John
Lennon’s Imagine. Dixie Chicks CDs were being burned in large patriotic pyres.
One of the only mainstream bands to put it on the line was the eclectic metal
band System of a Down, whose hit song Boom rang out:
Boom, boom, boom, boom,
Every time you drop the bomb,
You kill the God your child has born.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
The band produced an unapologetic antiwar music video for Boom with Michael
Moore, who at the time was finishing up Fahrenheit 9/11. Shot at the massive
antiwar protests held around the world in February 2003, the video inter-cut
protesters decrying the looming invasion with scenes of death and destruction.
It was a well-produced, stirringly populist video for a popular song. But MTV
and Fuse refused to play it. A Fuse executive told me that the network declined
to play the video because the U.S. Army was a major sponsor of the channel – the
people in ad sales didn’t want to piss off the generals.
Despite everything I know about how this screwed up country works, I was
stunned. It was eerie to see how one middle manager in ad sales could so
casually squelch such important dissent at such a critical time in our nation’s
history. The scariest part is the military didn’t have to lift a finger.
The video eventually got on the air, but only after the war had started. The
experience didn’t stop the band from continuing to speak out. As Serj Tankian,
System’s lead singer, recently told me in an
interview for Air America Radio, “Nothing’s made us think about muzzling
ourselves. We say and do whatever is in our hearts.”
Today, System is hotter than ever. In 2004, they recorded two albums Mezmerize
and Hypnotize. Mezmerize was released in the United States and Europe in May and
quickly exploded to the top of the charts, the group’s second consecutive number
one debut.
The second part of the two-CD set, Hypnotize, was released last month. Reviews
have been mixed. Rolling Stone wrote “There is no getting around it: System of a
Down nearly made the no-contest hard-rock album of 2005. Instead, they have
released a double album, Mezmerize/Hypnotize, in six-month chunks—two separate
records that each fall shy of pulverizing perfection and appear to be
conceptually bound by little more than speed, fuzz and nonstop bile.”
Nevertheless, the album hit number one last week on the Billboard charts.
Hypnotize continues the band’s assault on the Bush administration and consumer
culture. In Attack, Tankian sings: “For today we will take the body parts… put
‘em up on the wall and bring the dark thereafter.” The song concludes, “We’re
the prophetic generation of bottled water, bottled water/ Causing populations to
die, to die, to die.”
As the war rages in Iraq and the administration’s approval ratings drop to close
to 30%, dissent is no longer a dirty word. But war isn’t the band’s only
political stand. In fact, there’s an issue that cut cuts even closer to home.
All members of System of a Down are of Armenian descent and have been pushing
for years for the U.S. Congress to issue a statement condemning the Turkish
slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923.
The soft-spoken Tankian told me, “Whoever is living in the diaspora outside of
Armenia their only reason for living is having a survivor grandfather, as is my
case, as is the case with the other guys in the band. We all grew up hearing the
stories. So this is important for their memories for them. Right before I left
LA, I promised my grandfather, who is 97, that I’d get ahold of Dennis Hastert
and talk to him about it.”
Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is the speaker of the House and chair of the
influential International Relations Committee. In September, the committee
overwhelmingly approved legislation recognizing the Armenian Genocide, despite
objections from both Turkey and the Bush Administration. Even though the
genocide came at the hands of the now defunct Ottoman Empire, successive Turkish
governments have steadfastly denied the killings were anything other than the
legitimate squashing of an ethnic rebellion in a time of war.
Despite his previous public support for the measure in 2000, Rep. Hastert has
twice prevented the Armenian Genocide legislation from coming to a full vote in
the House. Most assume the speaker is simply following the lead of the White
House, which doesn’t want to make already strained U.S.-Turkey relations any
worse.
But there’s other, more insidious, theories. Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI
translator, has alleged that Rep. Hastert may have received tens of thousands of
dollars of secret payments from Turkish officials in exchange for political
favors and information. Edmonds told Vanity Fair magazine that she gave
confidential testimony about the payments to congressional staffers, the
Inspector General and members of the 9/11 Commission. Edmonds says that she
heard of the payments while listening to FBI wiretaps of Turkish officials who
were under surveillance by the FBI.
Rep. Hastert had denied the charges.
Tankian is undaunted in keeping his promise to his grandfather. While in Chicago
for a tour date, he led a protest with the band and several hundred supporters
in front of Hastert’s district offices (watch video of the protest
here). When I
asked Tankian why he thought it was proving so difficult to get a seemingly
straight-forward recognition of a historical fact passed through Congress, he
replied, “We have the same enemies of a lot of good and just causes. We have the
military industrial complex, the Bush administration and a lot of corporate
interests who have aligned themselves to a key NATO ally that they sell a lot of
weapons and products to. They don’t want it to come out – these are the
apologists for Turkey’s Armenian genocide.”
By Anthony Lappé
Anthony Lappé is GNN's Executive Editor. He's written for The New York Times,
Details, New York, Paper, The Fader and Vice, among many others. He has worked
as a producer for MTV, Fuse and WTN. He is the co-author of GNN's True Lies and
the producer of their Iraq doc.
Posted in
Gnn.tv
|
