Were you born a bunny rabbit? (booklet plus code for online access to corresponding music)

Were You Born a Bunny Rabbit? takes its title from a televised news report in which a reporter volunteered to be waterboarded. In a near cartoonish parody of itself, a newscaster’s voiceover states that this method of torture can make anyone agree to anything while on the screen, an interrogator screams “were you born a bunny rabbit” at the drowning journalist. This question, and the journalists exclamations of “yes!”, serve as stand-ins for whatever actual false War on Terror intel was pulled from torture victims. Rostami, who was becoming politically aware in the early aughts during his high school years, remembers the corporate news media’s role in helping to lay the groundwork for public consent for wars in the Middle East but also their criticisms of militarism that didn’t intend to contextualize, let alone interrogate, the deeper motivations of Western Imperialism. The audience is not left with any insight on America’s political and corporate interests in the global south, but rather just a sad and uncomfortable feeling while imagining individuals held, without due process, in prisons like Guantanamo Bay being asked if they were born as bunny rabbits. The album is mostly constructed of cut-up and recontextualized media clips ranging from British reporting on the 1953 coup in Iran to reports as recent as the American bombings of Venezuelan ships and the collapse of a copper mine in the DRC in late 2025. The title quote “were you born a bunny rabbit?” appears on the opening track, “Dick Cheney is BRAT.” The title itself is taken from a meme mocking “Kamala is BRAT” after Dick Cheney’s endorsement of the Harris campaign in 2024. The track interweaves Sade’s lyrics from “Is it a
Crime?” throughout by using cut-up audio of Dick Cheney and lowbrow true crime shows to ask “is it… uh? Crime. That uh still. Love. You.”, along with amateur acapella renditions and a saccharin, breathy overperformance from a competitive reality TV show rendition of “Is It a Crime?” empty of any notion that Sade once sang it as a love song. This opening track moves back and forth between two interviews with Dick Cheney, one where he is defending America’s invasion of Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the other where Cheney speaks on the preciousness of life after surviving yet another heart attack. The song ends with cut-up clips of Dick Cheney stating that he doesn’t recall if anyone told him he was committing crimes against humanity or war crimes noting that “hard work never killed anyone” while a reality competition contestant belts the question “is it a crime?” alongside blaring dissonance. This sardonic approach runs throughout the quickly-paced 14 tracks of the 30 minute album. Rostami states “I hadn’t recorded much of anything for two years. I found it really hard to create work given the state of the world. I knew that when I eventually made something it had to be different than what I had been making. It was hard for me to relate to how music was the right medium for the moment.” What has come through in Rostami’s first album recorded in two years is a hectic, text-heavy work meant to be listened to back to front. The music itself, just like the news clips, are another collage element thrown in to create a circus of melodrama, escapist potpourri, high energy rhythm and sullen choral drones. All of this creates a manic space that emulates the experience of living in a world of non-stop and quickly moving media, horror and garbage soundbites. The full experience of the record is meant to leave the listener on the other side of the looking glass, reflecting on how the news media portrays and distorts our world in a way that acknowledges its own empty absurdity. Direct quotes like “Tonight the mood here is as dark as a desert skyline” from reporting on the Iraq war, or “…interpreted his Sphinx link statements, and kept in touch with him not through Allah, but through the telephone” from coverage on the 1979 Iranian Revolution, showcase how corporate media introduce their own poetic embellishments to paint the global south. Yet, bizarrely it’s done in ways that are a better fit for mockumentary than journalism. Alongside this, cut-ups of the media catchphrase “do you condemn…” are met with responses from wedding shows, reality TV and a royal wedding, a Christian Zionist demands that you read the lease so that you know God gave him the land of Palestine, prosperity gospel preachers brag about their mansions and the glory of God’s house while libertarian pundits claim that human rights come from God and that housing is not a human right, Peter Thiel goes on about the anti-Christ while a salesman tells us that his drone can “penetrate the skull and destroy the contents” and reporters defending Trump’s attacks against Venezuelan ships on unverified drug trafficking claims are intermixed with old ads peddling Oxycontin to create something like an awkward rambling breakup speech stammered out through fucboi America towards the world. Persian classical music often takes its lyrics from poetry. The album’s closer “A Meaningless Smile”, features President Trump reading English translations of poems by Rumi and Forugh Farrokhzad. As we encroach on a world where AI can be utilized by bad faith actors to create entirely fake but believable media, this track utilizes an AI Trump to say things we could never imagine him stating in our reality. As Trump takes on the words of Rumi, he tells us that he has brought us a mirror and when we look at ourselves, we are to think of him. Farrokhzad brings Trump into a completely different headspace as he recites feminist Iranian poetry, recalling experiences he could never know himself other than from the perspective of an antagonist as he states, “There is an alley where boys who once loved me still stand with the same tousled hair, thin necks, and scrawny legs, contemplating the innocent smiles of a young girl swept away one night by the wind.” The track ends with a real recording of Benjamin Netanyahu stating, “Woman, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” which came from a speech he made (in English) to the Iranian people after he bombed them. The phrase is borrowed from the Kurdish “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” which originated from the all-female militia, the YPJ, and was later popularized within Iran and the world after the killing of Jina “Mahsa” Amini. Netanyahu and Trump harken back to the pseudofeminism of the Bush years at the onset of the War on Terror as mouthpieces whose actions serve anything but emancipation. ‘Were You Born a Bunny Rabbit?’ circles around itself, tying together the lies we’ve heard alongside the truths we knew were there but no one would say.
About the Book:
The physical companion to the album is a small book of photography with images Rostami took during anti-genocide and anti-ICE protests in 2024 and 2025. The photographs are of local police and their surveillance mechanisms such as cameras and drones. The NYPD is the local arm that upholds and protects both national and international injustices. Anti-genocide protests in particular included scenarios where peaceful protesters were met with police at a ratio of 1:1. During one protest in particular the NYPD outnumbered peaceful protesters entirely. Officers stood guard with batons in hand, the Imperial Boomerang coming home as drones surveyed from the corners of every sky, Roman columns of courthouses serve as backdrops to a commander screaming orders through a blowhorn, and individual police placed themselves around Tesla Cybertrucks as gestures of bodily sacrifice to the “unthinkable” potential of petty vandalism. They would take a bullet for private property lest their lords pull out their rifles to hunt them like bunny rabbits in the carrot patch.