Serj Tankian “Has Zero Respect” for Imagine Dragons and It’s Not Because They Suck
If there’s any modern rock band that probably deserves all of the ire they get from people these days, it’s gotta be Imagine Dragons. I mean, listen to their music. As it turns out, System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian agrees, but for a completely different reason — they refused to cancel a show in Azerbaijan while that country was committing an ethnic cleansing of Armenians.
The issue between Tankian and that band cropped up last year when Imagine Dragons was supposed to play Azerbaijan’s capital Baku. Tankian warned at the time that the band’s performance could be seen as a mistake, as it could “help whitewash the dictatorial regime’s image.” At the time, AP news reported that a former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court had warned that Azerbaijan was preparing a full-scale genocide against ethnic Armenians in its Nagorno-Karabakh region.
In his letter, Tankian warned that committing to the show despite what was going on in the region would “have a negative impact on your brand as well. I’m confident that you can decipher all the facts for yourselves to decide whether to cancel your concert.”
Tankian wasn’t the only musician to call for the concert’s cancellation, as Roger Waters, Brian Eno, and Thurston Moore all equally pushed for Imagine Dragons to pull out of the show. The letter said that performing in Baku “can only help the government of Azerbaijan cover up its crimes.” Unfortunately, the band never responded to the letters or criticisms and played the show anyway.
As a result, Tankian said in his interview with Metal Hammer that he was disappointed in how Imagine Dragons handled things.
“Look, I’m not a judge for people to tell bands where to play, or where not to play. You have other artists playing in very questionable kingdoms, run by one person, where people don’t have a lot of human rights, and I get that they’re doing it for money, that they’re artists, that they’re entertaining, all of that. But when there’s a government that’s about to commit ethnic cleansing, when Azerbaijan was starving the 120,000 Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, and not allowing any food or medicine in… you know, as an artist, if I found that out, there is no fucking way I could have gone and played that show. But some artists do. And I don’t know what to say about those artists. I don’t respect them as human beings. Fuck their art, they’re not good human beings, as far as I’m concerned.
“If you are that blind to justice that you will go play a show in a country that’s starving another country, illegally, according to the International Court of Justice, according to what Amnesty International is saying, what Human Rights Watch is saying… Ff you still go and play that country, I don’t know what to say about you as a fucking human being. I don’t even care about your music. If you’re a bad human being, I don’t give a fuck. So that’s where I’m at with that. I have zero respect for those guys.”
