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All four of my grandparents survived the Armenian Genocide. My parents met in Beirut, where I was born. We lived there until I was seven, when we fled the civil war in Lebanon and emigrated to California. I couldn’t speak English well, didn’t understand the culture, and grew up in a community near Los Angeles that was heavily populated with Armenian-Americans. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like an immigrant, an outsider, than I did that day on the phone with Howard Stern.
Sad ):
I was an activist long before I was an artist and I have never wanted to be one of those vacant souls
who speaks to millions but talks to no one.
On the boat with him was a group of teenage Armenian girls. When some Turkish sailors noticed the girls, they approached menacingly and cornered them. Fearing rape or worse, the girls, one after another, threw themselves over the side of the ferry into the rushing waters of the Euphrates, choosing death by drowning over leaving their fates to the Turks.
For Stepan and Vartouhi, malnutrition would cause them to go blind for two years before their eyesight began to return. When Stepan’s grandmother died, the Turks would not allow her to be buried, so his mother and another woman wrapped her in a shroud and tossed her into the Euphrates.
Despite the suffering that my family, and millions of other families, endured, what is perhaps even more painful is the fact that entire nations—most notably, Turkey, the perpetrators of the Genocide itself—deny to this day that it ever happened in the first place, sweeping my people’s history under the rug. Throughout modern-day Turkey, remnants of Armenian life and culture, like my grandfather’s village of Efkere, have been destroyed, discarded, and allowed to disintegrate into nothingness. If genocide is ultimately an act of erasure, denial is its final, comprehensive deed.
Certainly, the story of Stepan’s suffering, and that of all my relatives and the Armenian people in general, now lives on in me, his descendant—it runs through my veins, breathes within my lungs, beats as one with my heart. And as a recipient of this testimony, I feel a duty—and an honor—to continue fighting for recognition of the Genocide that my people lived through.
In my personal quest for truth, justice, and the path of righteousness, I tend to listen to everyone but ultimately stick to my gut.
Where was I from? I mean, in a very technical sense, yes, I was born in Lebanon. But it never felt like where I was from.
“He cursed the Prophet Mohammed!” Khatchadour’s boss, a devout Muslim, was disturbed to hear this. “Is it true?” he asked my dad. “It is,” my father admitted, “but only after he’d cursed Jesus.” He looked at Khatchadour, raised his arm, and swiftly slapped him across the face. Then he asked my dad’s tormentor to step forward. When he did, the other boy got slapped, too. “Okay, that’s it! It’s all over! Now, everyone get the hell out of my shop. And you,” he said looking at my dad, “get back to work.”
avoiding violence and avoiding conflict are not the same thing. Even now, I think the former is probably healthy. The latter, not so much. But that can be a hard lesson to learn.
There will always be people who naively say we should focus more on the present and the future than the past. However, as I learned more about not just the history of the Armenian Genocide but also
the history of war throughout human civilization, a new realization dawned on me: if we as humans do not acknowledge and account for our shared history, we will be doomed to repeat it ad nauseum.
History does indeed repeat itself and “never again” is always yet again.
The report acknowledged that while most in the diaspora community recognized that terrorism alone wouldn’t solve their problems, “many Armenians have become convinced that, if it had not been for the use of violence, no one would be aware of Armenian grievances.” That old phrase, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” feels particularly apt here.
What does a realistic vision of justice look like? What is permissible in the quest for it? Is violence ever necessary to achieve political goals? Can you support someone’s goals without endorsing their means of achieving them?
To me, Hawaii was a straightforward case of colonialism run amok in the service of capitalistic greed. The US government was an occupying power in a land whose people didn’t want it to be there in the first place.
As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
The truth was worth standing up for. Confrontation might not be fun, but it could
be endured for the gre...
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The last few years of my life had been so busy, so frantic, so noisy. My mind had often been a reflection of exactly that: busy, frantic, noisy. Sometimes what the mind and body need most is deprivation—fasting—the removal of all those stimuli.
Essentially, the more I meditated, the easier it was for me to see the inherent good in people. Everyone is born pure, and it’s the very act of living—fighting for our survival—that beats the purity and goodness out of us. We’re all on the same journey together, different parts of a greater organism. So, if I’m out honking at some guy who just cut me off on the 405, that guy who just cut me off is also me. I’ve been there, I’ve done the same thing, so why heap my scorn on him? How is that serving either of us?
Inevitably, my outlook on life itself began to change as all of these new ideas took root. “Civilization is Over!” became my eco-political axiom. For ten thousand years starting with the agricultural revolution, humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers, placing huge amounts of species into extinction over food competition. And yet, there’s a glaring irony here: even though we grow more food than we need, we haven’t been able to rid the world of hunger because the distribution of this food is based on privilege. The accelerated rate of destruction of natural resources on this planet
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I’d recently learned about Buddhist sand mandalas, these intricate and beautiful pieces of art constructed by monks with colored sand. The most amazing part about them was that once they were finished, they’d quickly be destroyed or allowed to wash into the sea, vanishing without a trace. The destruction itself is in fact part of the artwork, a symbol that our time here on Earth is temporary, and its transience is what makes it so beautiful. It’s the process of making the art, the process of living itself, from which meaning, truth, and beauty are derived, not the product of that process. The
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In other words, you often need to do things wrong to learn how to do them right.
I’d been able to write about the prison-industrial complex, overpopulation, food insecurity, the protests at the Democratic National Convention, the failures of our education system, and my own spiritual rebirth, and then finesse all that into an album that was going to be released by one of the largest media and technology conglomerates in the world. That felt like a subversive triumph.
Much of the criticism directed at me and at System was also spiked with anti-immigrant rhetoric. We were portrayed as “the other,” not real Americans, even though we’d all grown up here. I was sometimes told that I should “Go back home!” Whenever I heard that, I would think, “Great. Where is that?” And also, “Unless you’re Native American, you can fuck off!”
The whole idea of treating art like it was a competitive sport, with winners and losers, was just so counter to my ethos. You really can’t rank art. One song or one album is not objectively better than another. Different people respond to different music differently. That’s the whole point. Grading art is like grading emotions.
Symbolism is powerful, and it’s imperative to try to make positive change where possible. If we can’t even envision the peaceful world we hope to live in, we have no chance of achieving it. If we fail at making small gestures, we won’t have the courage to try big ones. And if you’re not using your microphone, your stage, and all the clout that comes with it to try to make some sort
of real impact in this world, then what the fuck are you doing and who are you?
Not too long after all this went down, Ahmet died after tripping backstage at a Rolling Stones show. Shortly after his death, Harut Sassounian, an Armenian journalist, published a story in which he wrote that Ahmet had reached out to him a few years earlier to disavow his previous Genocide denial. Ahmet told Sassounian the same thing he’d told me—that he couldn’t go public with this because it would make him a target for Turkish extremists—so Sassounian had waited until his death to reveal it. I’m not sure if it makes me happy to
know that Ahmet was apparently genuine in what he’d told me that day on the phone and wasn’t just trying to close a deal, or if it makes me sad that he felt like it wasn’t safe for him to speak the truth. Maybe a little of both.
For one stretch of our US tour, I’m pretty sure our bus driver was on crack. He’d regularly wake us up yelling to himself while he was driving, shouting things like “I’m gonna get you! I’m coming for you!” At one point, the bus slid into a ditch on a snowy road. At another, it broke down completely, and he just went outside and started kicking it. Trucker crack is apparently a hell of a drug.
So, while a coterie of aging, formally clad classical musicians were struggling to follow along with the arrangements, long-haired yahoos in black concert t-shirts pressed themselves forward toward the front row, double-fisting beers, pounding on the stage, and shouting for us to play “Sugar” and “Chop Suey!” It was like one group came thinking they’d be playing Wagner to retirees, and the other came expecting the mosh pit at Ozzfest. After the show, my piano player came off, shaking his head in disbelief, muttering “They’re just uncivilized!”
For an encore that night, I came out and performed an Armenian folk song called “Bari Arakeel” on acoustic guitar. It was a song that I used to sing with my father back in Beirut when I was a kid, and it got as big a reaction as anything I played that night. As the audience sang along, I realized that
there was something in that theater, in that country, that I couldn’t replicate anywhere else in the world. I was being fully seen for who I was, for who my ancestors were, for where I came from, for what I cared about. It was a feeling that was certainly worth enduring alcoholic crew members and overeager security guards to experience, and one that, as soon as the show ended and we flew on to the next destination, I was immediately eager to feel again.
Just because you’re a rock star or you’re on tour, you don’t get a hall pass from me: I am too and manage to respond, always. Artists shouldn’t be given immunity from basic etiquette. It only encourages the egotistical monstrosity sometimes brewing within.
My passivity only led to anger and resentment. What I thought was spiritual evolution was really just a lingering inclination to avoid confrontation.
If we might have a chance to educate people about something they’d otherwise never get a chance to learn about without leaving the country, that seemed like a pretty powerful argument for engagement. And what better time to do it than on a tour specifically designed to spotlight the Genocide the Turks had perpetrated? It felt audacious. Going to Turkey to play in 2015, at the centennial of the Genocide, was daring the children of the perpetrators and all of the denialists, daring the Turkish government, to react, as the grandchildren of their horrible ethnic cleansing would be in their face,
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We’d grown up an ocean apart from most of the people in the square that night, but there was no mistaking that we were one with them. These were our people.
People don’t usually change unless they’re forced to.
However, in 2019, both houses of the US Congress passed a resolution making recognition of the Armenian Genocide official US policy. On April 24, 2021, Joe Biden became the first American president to formally acknowledge the Genocide while in office.
