Mixtape Reflections: Naqoyqatsi: Life As War

           

It was early April 2016, when Azeri forces instigated a blitzkrieg against the unsuspecting border villages in the Republic of Artsakh. I had just been in Artsakh less than a year earlier. I had met people who lost family in their war for independence in the early 1990’s; I had been to their war museums, I had even been taken up to the trenches at the ceasefire line. Even though I was in the US at the time, this brief four-day war shook me to the very core. I had to take time away from social media as it became bombarded with graphic images. The US media tends to censor gore out of their news coverage, but Armenia does no such thing. The image of an elderly couple, slaughtered in their homes in their sleep after Azeri soldiers snuck into their home in the middle of the night, is forever etched into my psyche. And I did what I often do when I need a coping mechanism. I made a mixtape, this time about the horrors of war. And now, with the United States invading Iran, I felt like returning to this tape. It’s not a mixtape I listen to often, but it is there when I need it. I am troubled by the prospect of war with Iran for many reasons. I bear no ill will to Iran or its people, and believe the United States is the definite aggressor, working at the behest of its allies. And I detest war. There’s never a good reason for it. Self-defense, maybe, but then there’s no good reason for the aggressor to be attacking.

Naqoyqatsi is a Hopi word meaning “Life as War”; or in one interpretation, “civilized violence”. I guess one way you could interpret it is war or violence becoming routine. I don’t speak Hopi, so I can’t really say for sure. The name came to me after watching the Qatsi trilogy of films, which mainly consist of stock footage and images paired with orchestrations by Phillip Glass, focusing on some aspect of human society. Koyaanisqatsi, the first and most famous, is my favorite of them. Naqoyqatsi was the third and final film in the series, and you can read about it on Wikipedia if you like. The opening track to the mixtape is of course the theme song of that film. Listening to the orchestration gives you a mourning feeling, and a feeling of horror. The energy of war. 

Next, we have the two opening tracks from Hanzel und Gretyl’s 2003 album Uber Alles. I feel the need to stress this to those who give these tracks a listen: I don’t think the band Hanzel und Gretyl are neo-nazis; they’ve gone on the record stating that their music is a form of satire. But they’re still banned in Germany, perhaps because there are those might take their music non-ironically. I understand if someone has misgivings about their music. My own great-grandfather, a Jew living in Austria under Nazi rule, was shot and killed when he failed to pass their Aryan tests, and my grandfather Suren spent much of World War II as a prisoner of the Germans. These are blog posts for another time. These tracks to me symbolize the way governments beat the war drums and whip their citizens into a frenzy for war with propaganda. It’s the same in any country on Earth. Think about the techniques Germany used to prepare its citizens for World War II. How many of these techniques have you seen other countries use on their citizens? How many are being used right now?

From there we go to Voltaire’s song “Crusade”, in which a brave knight is radicalized into thinking dragons are evil, and he goes to slay one, only to find that the dragon was a mother protecting her young. Years later, his son is radicalized into believing that Muslims are evil and he wants to join the crusades; the father warns him to know his enemy. The song is about humanizing the so-called “enemy”, and its lesson is an important one. We’re all human beings. We are one. Why do we kill one another? Because we make the enemy into an “other”. We demonize and dehumanize them.

Rage Against the Machine’s “Darkness of Greed” speaks for itself mainly. Wars and genocides are committed by the rich to satisfy their greed. The poor are sent to their deaths so that the rich can fill their pockets. Genocide and war often go hand-in-hand. And they’re both caused by greed. As an Armenian, I know this only too well.  I’ve known this song for a long time, and I always felt a connection to it.

Next is System of a Down’s “Soldier Side”. They’re going to be on this tape a lot. A song from the soldier’s point of view, and that of their mothers watching them go off to war. Watching your friends die, the black hand of death always looming. “They were crying when their sons left, God is wearing black. He’s gone so far to find no hope, he’s never coming back.”

Voltaire returns to the tape with “Accordion Player”. It’s because lyrically I find it relates to both the previous and the next song. This song is actually a cover of a song by the somewhat lesser-known Julia Marcell. Both versions are good, but I chose this one for the bomb sound effects at the end of the song. It’s about an accordion player who didn’t want to be drafted into the war. He wanted to keep playing his songs. “Oh mother, I could die a hero, and bring glory to your home. But what would you do in a house full of glory if you had to live there alone?” What really gets me is when I was in Artsakh, I stayed in the home of a mother who lived alone in a house full of glory; her husband and son had fought against Azerbaijan in the early 1990’s. I’ll do an in-depth blog entry about my time in Artsakh at a later date. But this song really encapsulates my feelings on war.

The sounds of bombs and gunfire at the end of “Accordion Player” bleeds into Metallica’s “One”, a song which begins with sounds of war. Probably the most well-known song on the tape so far. This song was inspired by the book Johnny Got His Gun by Dolton Trumbo, a book about a soldier in World War One who had all of his limbs, his eyes, his lower jaw and his nose blown off by a bomb, leaving him blind and deaf, being kept alive in a hospital and wanting nothing more than to die. The insanity and horror of war. If everyone read this book there’s be a lot more anti-war sentiment in the world, let me tell you.

And One’s “Unter Meiner Uniform” (Under My Uniform) is in the same vein as the previous songs. The line that strikes me most translates to “Under my uniform, we can only die once.” I remember having this song in my head when I visited the Fallen Soldiers Museum in Stepanakert, Artsakh. The walls covered with portraits of fallen soldiers, old uniforms. A shrine to those who needlessly died; a war of self-defense on their part. The reasons behind any war, no matter which side is in the right or the wrong, who was the aggressor and who was the defender, do not change the costs much at all.

The faces of war.

Cradle of Filth’s “Sleepless”, a cover of a song by Anathema, captures the raw anger and despair behind those who suffer because of war in a way only black metal really can. “Surely without war, there would be no loss, hence no mourning, no grief, no pain, no misery. No sleepless nights missing the dead.”

Me at the monument to Sardarapat

Side B starts with the song “Sardarapat”, an Armenian anthem to the battle of Sardarapat in 1918. My own great uncle fought and died in this battle, in which the Turkish army attempted to invade Armenia and destroy the country once and for all. However, the Armenians were victorious, and declared their independence after pushing back the Turkish aggressors, ensuring that today there is still an Armenia on the map. Once again though, I put this song here not to glorify war. As glad as I am that the battle of Sardarapat turned out victorious for Armenia, it should never have happened in the first place. My great-uncle could have survived. Instead, my grandfather grew up an orphan. He was around 13 years old, with no living immediate family save for a sister; his father died sometime before of typhoid fever I believe, and the story is that his mother died of fright when she learned the Turks were invading the area they lived. War has cast a long, dark shadow on my family. Did you know psychological trauma can be inherited and passed down the generations? Explains a lot of these blog entries.

System of a Down’s song “War?” is a song I’ve actually already talked about on this blog, and appears on the mixtape for obvious reasons. Marilyn Manson’s “Cruci-Fiction in Space”, I believe, illustrates what drives humanity to the practice of war. “This is evolution: the monkey, the man, and the gun.” Is the gun the end result of our evolution, when we inevitably cause our own extinction with it? Time will tell. The next song, “Jihad” by The Kovenant”, is on the mixtape to represent religious wars of all sorts. Merely another justification for war put forth by the rich who profit from it. Killing is easier when God says it’s alright.

Ayria’s ”Friends and Enemies” is another song I’ve spoken of on this blog before. It makes me think about human nature, of what drives humanity to create “enemies”, of pacifism versus violence. Are people your enemies, or is it the philosophy they follow that is the enemy? Is it ever okay to retaliate? System of a Down’s “B.Y.O.B.” (Bring your own Bomb) poses the question “Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do we always send the poor?” The answer to that of course is obvious, but the question is something more people need to ask themselves. You’re not going to see Trump or any of his family at the frontlines in Iran, that’s for sure. No, it’s going to be the poor and the young, who joined the military because health insurance and college are kept expensive by the powers that be; done in lieu of the draft because that seems to make the masses too angry for some odd reason.

And One’s “Steine sind Steine” is about the endless colonialism engaged in by the higher powers. The same patterns followed throughout history. Translated lyrics include “first comes gold, then comes the world”, “first comes pride, then comes your land”. People are too historically illiterate to see the patterns. And they’re kept that way on purpose. If you’re over twenty years old you’ve already seen this play out in your lifetime with the farce that was the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t get why these idiotic armchair warriors who are actually for the invasion of Iran continue to be fooled.

Covenant’s “The Dark Conquest” is yet another song I’ve talked about on this blog before. A song about a dark lust for power, from the point of view of an overlord that has conquered an empire and left ruin in his wake. The album In Times Before the Light is mainly dark fantasy, but fantasy is always a reflection of reality. This song would be on the playlists of many tyrannical warlords throughout history, if they had playlists.

With the tape wrapping up, we return to Hanzel und Gretyl with the song “Auf Wiedersehen”. A song about ruin befalling a country on the losing side of a war, its pride in tatters, sounds of bombs falling in the background. Like Germany in 1945, and so many other countries throughout time. And the last song is by The Kovenant. ”Industrial Twilight”, is a song about nuclear apocalypse. Which of course, is the end game when it comes to war. It’s how this is all going to end up if we don’t put a stop to it. We’re only one world war away. “In nuclear war, all men will be cremated equal.”

At the end of the day, there’s nothing I can do about war beyond writing about it, and making mixtapes that only I am ever going to listen to. And, even though I hate that it’s happening, it really doesn’t affect my personal life beyond perhaps gas prices, at least until the nukes start flying. I think I’m too old to be drafted, should it ever come to that. I’d probably be a poor fit for the military anyway. Yet it depresses me anyway. I’m too empathetic for my own good. But I can only control what I can control. I can take care of my wife and kid (and hope there’s not a war going on when he’s 18), and I can work on my novels. Anything else is beyond my control.

There are more songs I could have put on the mix, but the tape was only 90 minutes. Fortunately and somewhat surprisingly, I was able to find all of these songs on Spotify (although “Unter Meiner Uniform”, even though I found it, wasn’t playing for some weird reason, so I‘ll link that to YouTube), so now all of you can listen to the mix too. Go ahead and give it a listen, if you feel in the mood for a playlist with anti-war sentiment.

Naqoyqatsi:Life As War – Spotify Playlist   

Side A

Phillip Glass – Naqoyqatsi

Hanzel und Gretyl – Overture

Hanzel und Gretyl – Third Reich from the Sun

Voltaire – Crusade

Rage Against the Machine – Darkness of Greed

System of a Down – Soldier Side

Voltaire – Accordion Player

Metallica – One

And One – Unter Meiner Uniform

Cradle of Filth – Sleepless

Side B

Sardarapat

System of a Down – War?

Marilyn Manson – Cruci – Fiction in Space

The Kovenant – Jihad

Ayria – Friends and Enemies

System of a Down – B.Y.O.B.

And One – Steine sind Steine

Covenant – The Dark Conquest

Hanzel und Gretyl – Auf Wiedersehen

The Kovenant – Industrial Twilight

And yes I've been doing a lot of mixtape reflections as of late. I want my next blog entry to be about something else, but I don't have a topic yet. But I love talking about music, and have over 200 mixtapes from nearly 21 years of making them, so that's always going to be a common topic on this blog. So yes. Stay tuned.