Music Video
Serj released one of the videos on September 11, 2007, matching the video's War on Terrorism theme. The music video was directed by Tony Petrossian and was uploaded to YouTube on September 12, 2007. The video shows young children playing in a daycare center with their play imitating the War on Terrorism.
The video opens with a felt Homeland Security Advisory System scale (accompanied by a seal reading "U.S. Department of Playground Security"), followed by a young girl building two towers of blocks. A boy launches a toy airplane into the towers, knocking them down and upsetting the girl, and she is shown to want revenge.
Various scenes in the video refer to the War in Iraq: the children preparing for play war, a teddy bear being pulled down (referring to the symbolic pulling down of Saddam Hussein's statue), a presidential figure with a sign declaring "Mishin Akomplishd", an imitation of the capture of Saddam Hussein, a child in a cage reminiscent of one of the Kenneth Bigley hostage videos, the aforementioned collapse of the block towers, a child dressed and positioned in imitation of a published picture of Satar Jabar from the Abu Ghraib prison, and several children pulling another from a toy house to play execute him with a can of silly string (in reference to the Hamdania incident). A boy inside a toy car puts on goggles and is driven into a plastic ball pit wall to cause a burst of confetti, symbolic of the many suicide bombings at US Army checkpoints. The children performing acts similar to those of the US military are clearly distinguished by wearing helmets reminiscent of soldiers' helmets.
Meanwhile Serj, dressed in a top hat and suit, sings as they play. The video concludes as the children all look out the daycare window and solemnly watch a Marine Corps detail load a flag-draped casket into a hearse. Meanwhile, the dead Marine's grief-stricken parents are looking in horror and disbelief at the day care, after seeing what the children have done.
The video has also appeared on Much Music's Video On Trial.
Read more about this topic: Empty Walls
Famous quotes containing the words music and/or video:
“I fear I agree with your friend in not liking all sermons. Some of them, one has to confess, are rubbish: but then I release my attention from the preacher, and go ahead in any line of thought he may have started: and his after-eloquence acts as a kind of accompaniment—like music while one is reading poetry, which often, to me, adds to the effect.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)