In a new social media post, System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian has doubled down on his criticism of Imagine Dragons.
Last September, Imagine Dragons performed in Baku, Azerbaijan, in spite of calls from Tankian and other musicians to cancel the concert. Tankian’s objections stemmed from Azerbaijan’s 2020 invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly ethnic-Armenian region of Azerbaijan also known as Artsakh; the Armenian-American artist saw performing in the country as an endorsement of its authoritarian government, which has carried out human rights abuses.
In an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this week, Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds defended the concerts. “I think that’s a really slippery slope,” he said. “I think the second you start to do that, there’s corrupt leaders and warmongers all over the world, and where do you draw the line?”
Tankian answered Reynolds on social media Thursday. “Respectfully, I draw the line at ethnic cleansing and genocide,” he wrote, citing two examples of Azerbaijan’s alleged human rights violations. “Azerbaijan’s dictatorship with popular support was already into a nine-month starvation blockade of Nagorno-Karabagh qualified as genocide by former [International Criminal Court] prosecutor [Luis Moreno Ocampo] when they decided to play Baku. Would they play in Nazi Germany? Why don’t they want to play in Russia? Because it’s not popular?”
“They support Ukraine but not Armenians of Artsakh?” he continued. “The only ‘slippery slope’ is the farce moral equivalency at the heart of this hypocritical attitude. I have nothing against this guy nor his band. I just hate artists being taken advantage of to whitewash genocidal dictatorships.”
A rep for Imagine Dragons did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
In June, Tankian told Metal Hammer he wouldn’t feel comfortable performing in a country whose government had been accused of the things Azerbaijan had been, per Amnesty International and the International Court of Justice. “If you still go and play that country, I don’t know what to say about you as a fucking human being,” he said. “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.”
Reynolds shrugged off Tankian’s words when asked specifically about them in the Rolling Stone interview. “I think I just said it: It’s a slippery slope, and I’m never going to deprive our fans of playing for them,” he said.
In 2020, System of a Down, whose members are all Armenian-American, regrouped to record two new songs to raise funds for Armenians affected by the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. “It’s a really horrible humanitarian catastrophe that needs to be addressed,” Tankian told Rolling Stone at the time.
