Free People.

As I was zooming past a well known university campus yesterday, I came across the student radio station. on the radio They were playing Arabic music and quite a nice one (a major surprise hearing ethnic music outside of major urban areas). You got a sense of liberty from it. The same kind of liberty that you get when listening to rock 'n' roll or rock in general. The singer was an Iraqi woman. The next song was a Palestinian man. It was constrained, sad and depressing.

The contrast between free people's music and chronically victimized people was striking.

The same can be said about Soviet era and post-Soviet Armenian music. We may complain about the lack of political freedoms under the banditocrats but the fact remains that Armenians are free people. And it is apparent from their music regardless of the genre.