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Revolutionary Suicide
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Zariadris
Zariadris
286 posts

Edited May 30, 2013, 15:56
Re: Revolutionary Suicide - The Armenian Genocide
May 30, 2013, 15:50
With regard to Julian's creative integrity and revolutionary bona fides:

How many artists have the heart, and the balls, to write a song about - indeed called - The Armenian Genocide? Just the fact that Julian cares enough to take this on is incredible. As the ghost of Hrant Dink or any Turkish dissident can tell you, to speak these truths in Turkey, where talk of genocide is strictly verboten, is an act of Revolutionary Suicide alone. Apart from it's personal significance for me (full disclosure: I'm an Armenian, among other things), I find it to be as brilliant musically as it is lyrically, with an expansive sound, built on simple busker's chords and an ambulatory rhythm (as of the walkers walking), that unfurls like a tapestry on a scaffold. It is full of subtle ideas and an instrumentation of rich sonic textures that shape-shifts over 15 cinematic minutes: an apocalyptic, epic narrative as played by a rhapsode straggling alongside a column of deportees, colliding the brightness of a camp fire song with incisive, visionary words in the vein of A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall.

Ultimately, the song rests on the soundness, and cohesiveness, of it's moral and musical convictions, unlike so many other attempts to make art of this or any other tragedy that merely pass off juvenile rage as emotion, aping a darkness that can't be seen. As a friend once told me, writing about the genocide is like staring at the sun. One can only know it indirectly, through what it's black light illuminates, refracted in the eyes of the living, not the dead: one can only glimpse it's irrational truths, as in mystic poetry, through a paradox. For all it's melodic sweetness and mellotron warmth, The Armenian Genocide flashes it's high beams into hell, revealing as much as the listener's mind is able, or willing, to see.

Julian is the Real fucking Deal. I can't think of any other artists working right now that are as fearless and independent. I cannot think of anyone else who would have even thought of writing this, let alone pulling it off. I can't thank him enough for sticking his long neck so far out of our collective tortoise shell and creating a work of such beauty, power and substance. I doff my fez to him.
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