Tech

Azerbaijan Dropped a Music Video Before Going to War With Armenia

Armenia and Azerbaijan show how a good music video can help drum up support for a war.
A man in military fatigues plays guitar in front of armored tanks for a music video released by Azerbaijan's State Border Service
Azerbaijan State Border Service

On September 27, Azerbaijan launched an attack on the disputed border region of Nagorno-Karabakh and rekindled a decade old conflict with Armenia. Azerbaijan launched artillery, air strikes, and deployed tanks and troops. It also dropped a music video.

The video shows soldiers performing with a wall of tanks and helicopters behind them. Footage of soldiers in dress uniform, tanks firing, helicopters deploying troops, and artillery barrages interspersed the performance. The song—"Atəş" or “Fire”—unfortunately, slaps. It’s catchy and the bass guitar reverberates through the footage, putting the viewer in a nationalist mood. Which is the point.

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“Fire” is a sequel of sorts, to a music video from 2018 starring some of the same performers.

Since late September, Azerbaijan and Armenia have been fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, a border region between the two countries. The most recent hostilities are just the most recent round of a conflict that’s been ongoing for decades. Aside from some skirmishes, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan was largely “frozen” since the late 1980s—a war over territory that had stopped without a formal resolution.

When a war like this goes unfinished, things can get a bit weird. Especially in the age of social media. In 2016, the Armenian military released its own music video about the conflict. 

Atəş is a new song, but it had been all over the Azerbaijan airwaves that summer. Singer Nərmin Kərimbəyova had been performing it on television shows in the run-up to the conflict. “They’re hypernationalist diss tracks,” Aram Shabanian, a graduate student of Non-Proliferation and Terrorism Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey told Motherboard in Twitter DMs. “A lot of militaries around the world have started pumping out really strange nationalistic music videos.”

Shabanian said that you can track the conflict in these music videos. “The Armenian video is significant in that it demonstrates a certain production value I don't think is native to Armenia,” he said. “I think the impact of the diaspora community—in particular those in Hollywood—is quite apparent in everything about the video.”

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He noted that the Azerbaijan video from 2018 is significant because it showcases Azerbaijan’s border security forces—the video is hosted on the border defense agencies YouTube channel. According to Shabnian, the border forces are slightly separated from the larger military. “The second video came out literally the morning the clashes started, at around the same time, and shows not only the suicide drones, but is far more militant in nature,” he said. “It reminds me of some of the videos that came out of the Balkans in the 1990s during the wars there.”

For Shabanian, the music videos are part of the texture of modern war. “I think it's probably part of the social media battleground that's emerging,” he said. “We saw it in Syria with FSA groups and custom intro logos on their videos and I think we're seeing that evolve into the war in Karabakh with both sides trying to control the information sphere.”

“Music videos are catchy and at times of big war all the big artists in a country are gonna make nationalistic music.”