Top 5 Songs of the Month ~ October 2023 ~

I’ve spent the last month or so grieving over the latest stage of the Armenian genocide, which was the complete destruction of Artsakh by Azerbaijan. I wrote a separate rant blog about that rather than vent here. 

And what music has been helping me cope with these dark days? Spoiler, a lot of it is dark. Listening to happy music just doesn’t work. Although I guess listening to nostalgic 90s alternative rock music helps a little. I’ve done a bit of that, working on my 90s YouTube playlist, a potent mix of alternative rock, grunge, nu-metal, black metal, a few guilty pleasures, and of course underground goth music, interspersed with Beavis and Butthead segments and a few MTV bumpers (most of which are on my 80s playlist). But I don’t want to do that constantly, and even that music isn’t necessarily “happy”. It works until “Disarm” by Smashing Pumpkins comes on and I start bawling. (Not actually, but it tugs  on the heartstrings. “I used to beee a little boy”. Yeah.)  Also just keeping my nose in books about ancient Egypt, studying their religion and teaching myself hieroglyphs, helps too. It’s a coping mechanism, escapism. 

I’ll be looking at songs of Octobers past as well. There are sure to be a few spooky selections from my top 3 picks in 2003, 2008, 2013 and 2018.

Cashiari ~ Oscura Noche

Not only is this a great Halloween song, it fits my mood perfectly. I first mentioned Cashiari last month, a Peruvian experimental dark-electro band. 

Blurpz ~ Escape

A Dutch coldwave track from 1983.

Day After ~ Ticking Away

Fearing ~ Scars

Das Kelzer ~ Light Grey

Antaios Nocturne ~ Don’t Forget to Smile

Top 3 Songs of October Over the Years

October 2003

1. Dimmu Borgir ~ Hybrid Stigmata

2. Kraftwerk ~ Vitamin

3. Dimmu Borgir ~ Alt Lys er Svonnet Hen

October 2008

1. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy ~ Save my Soul

2. Das Ich - Zuckerbrot und Peitsche

3. Aurelio Voltaire ~ Land of the Dead

October 2013

1. Ministry ~ I Wanted to Tell Her

2. Ayria ~ Big City Lullaby 

3. The Birthday Massacre ~ Blue

October 2018

1. Twin Tribes ~ Still in Still

2. Asylum Party ~ La Nuit

3. Lebanon Hanover ~ Sadness is Rebellion 

Some Last Words on Artsakh

 I’m going to go into diary-mode for a moment, and it’s going to get very dark, bare with me. I was originally going to write this on my Top Songs of the Month blog, but it got too long and dark. I’ve spent the last month or so grieving over the latest stage of the Armenian genocide, which was the complete destruction of Artsakh by Azerbaijan. Very sad to say, it kind of helps that I didn’t hold much hope for it after the 2020 war. I expected it to be wiped off the map eventually. Pessimism softens the blow. Like the Slow Danse with the Dead song “So Obnoxious” says, to be overly optimistic is the worst. Will the rest of Armenia follow? Since nobody seems to give a single shit about Armenia enough to help, or even just stop buying Azeri oil and gas and selling them weapons, it doesn’t look good. A lot of international fist shaking might happen, but nothing else of consequence. Imagine if one day Israel decided to just bulldoze all of Palestine, wipe it off the map and kill a bunch of people. It would be all over the news, people would be outraged. Israel might even face some kind of international consequences if it did that. Same thing happens to the Armenians, it’s chirping crickets. We suffer alone. If you read my blogs from around Fall 2020 you’ll see I’ve been through all this grief before, back then. That’s the only reason my depression isn’t as bad as it would be if this happened all at once. It feels like you’ve had a loved one on life support for three years, and they finally pulled the plug. You knew it was coming, you had three years to reach some sort of acceptance over it, but when it happens it’s still pretty devastating, no matter how much you prepared yourself. Plus I have other stuff going on in my personal life compounding the depression. Every time I start to feel a little better something else happens.

Only thing I can do, sadly, is look away, distract myself. Some might criticize me for that, but I don’t have the power to change anything by myself, so doom-scrolling about it just becomes self-punishing. I do care. I care too much. I’ve mostly stayed off Facebook, because I’m far too entrenched in the Armenian community to avoid seeing news about all the gruesome details. I can avoid it more easily on Reddit and YouTube (going to the Armenia subreddit right now would probably ruin my mood for weeks and be very self-destructive, so I unfollowed it). I plan on donating to help out the refugees whenever I have spare money to do so. It’s all I can do. That and wait for climate change to cause wet bulb in Baku and suffocate everyone. I looked it up, Azerbaijan is going down once climate change really kicks in, not to mention when their oil reserves dry up. Fuck them, they’ll get what’s coming to them. I hope a bunch of those goat-fuckers step on land mines in Artsakh. May the “Land of Fire” burn. That koombaya, “coexist” bullshit doesn’t work in the real world. You can’t coexist with people who literally want to kill you. Yeah I know not every Azeri is a bad person, but the very few who disagree with what their genocidal fascist government is doing sure aren’t doing anything to stop them. You could try to use that logic against the US and blame every American citizen for the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but at least there were people protesting those wars, unlike in Azerbaijan. Their silence is complicity. Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say about that subject. I must avoid thinking about it to even function, but at least I got it off my chest.