Bedouine's Neon Summer Skin: A Family's Multiple Displacements
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- Bedouine (Azniv Korkejian) releases her fourth album, Neon Summer Skin, a departure from her early intimate style toward 1970s MOR pop influenced by Carole King, Elton John, and Todd Rundgren, with guests including the Lemon Twigs and Foxygen's Jonathan Rado.
- Korkejian's Armenian family lived on a US compound in Saudi Arabia until 1995, when, unsettled by the Gulf War's proximity, they won the green card lottery and relocated to Massachusetts, escaping the Syrian civil war that followed.
- The title track recreates a childhood memory of being taken to the pool — 'my only worry is being dragged away when the sun's setting' — which Korkejian frames as a picture of what it feels like to be safe, a luxury she connects to 'the children in Palestine and Lebanon, who are not afforded that right.'
- 'Canopies' retells how Korkejian's grandmother placed her mother in an Armenian-genocide orphanage to shield her from an abusive husband; its opening line — 'I loved you too much to keep you, so I committed a crime' — captures the sacrifice, Korkejian says.
- Korkejian's parents, who returned to Saudi Arabia after their kids left home, were forced to move to Armenia at retirement because non-Arabs cannot gain Saudi citizenship, a second displacement that inspired the album after her final 2019 visit.
- To promote the album, Korkejian plans to exhibit her parents' vintage photos from Syria and Lebanon, aiming to 'humanise' Middle Eastern people beyond stereotypes of violence or pity.
Why it matters: Korkejian's album is a personal counter-narrative to one-dimensional portrayals of Middle Eastern lives: each of her family's moves — Saudi Arabia to the US, then back to Saudi Arabia and finally to Armenia — was shaped by citizenship rules, war proximity, and the Armenian genocide's long shadow, with the Syrian civil war and the plight of Palestinian and Lebanese children explicitly invoked as context.
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