 The former lead singer of System of a Down shares his feelings of hope, inspiration and utter dejection about our current state of affairs.
When
Serj Tankian takes on political and social issues on his new solo album,
Elect the Dead, he doesn't mince words. In the most political song on the
album, "The Unthinking Majority," he writes about a hypocritical warmongering
government running a society controlled by antidepressants (in 2006, over 227
million antidepressant prescriptions were dispensed in the United States.):
We jackbooted goons are meant to symbolize mindless conformity or state-sanctioned terror or something. “It has to do with scale and people and power and other political ideas,” says director Jake Nava, citing touchstones like Stalinist propaganda art and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (influences less discernible in his recent opus, Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”). Some visors are emblazoned with words like CASH, HATE and BUY. Ours, for reasons beyond our understanding, says GOD. On the bridge, System of a Down’s four members assemble around a drum kit and amps. Drummer John Dolmayan stands behind the floor tom, singer Serj Tankian beside him, holding a cup of coffee. Guitarist-singer Daron Malakian is next in a black leather sports jacket, leather pants and sneakers, and bassist Shavo Odadjian crouches to his left, braided chinbeard swinging to and fro. “What are you?” he asks us when we meet him, dressed in our jumpsuit. “A goon,” we answer. “I know. But what are you playing?” Oh, that Shavo. As we line up on the bridge, a voice crackles on the loudspeaker, “OK! When you hear the music, begin your march.” Then, after four beeps, the buzzsaw intro to “B.Y.O.B.” kicks in and we start our parade. Marching to thrash requires a speedy gait recalling one of Monty Python’s Silly Walks. “Cut!” We reassemble to try another marching style. “OK!” The music starts again and off we go—“Hut! Hut! Hut!”—to the neo-metal madness. As we come marching up alongside Malakian, he leans to the mic and screams, “Why do we always send the poor?”, unleashing a fresh onslaught that castigates our president, denounces the military-industrial complex and imagines a crowd of revelers partying in the desert, blowing up the sunshine. This is the lead single from the first of two albums SOAD is releasing this year—Mezmerize now, Hypnotize in the fall—two stormy, baroque works of rage and avant-weirdness that touch on love, war, mind control, nationalism, faith, hubris and an experience at a celebrity baseball game. The song cuts. “Great!” crackles the loudspeaker. “Try it again!” If you’re new to the whole System of a Down phenomenon, a quick primer might be helpful. Imagine the “mamma mia” section of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” set to a Bulgarian wedding dance as played by Slayer and punctuated with a gaggle of vocal personal ads ranging from TV pitchmen to agitprop hucksters to death-metal growlers to a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer—basically, Gilbert and Sullivan at Ozzfest. Weird, right? Now imagine it selling five million copies. Blending an exotic array of influences in a powerful, personal way, System of a Down have turned a little ethnic art project into the most vital and avidly followed rock band in L.A. All four members of the band are Armenian, descendents of the large global diaspora of Eastern Europeans forced to flee the bloody, Turk-led ethnic cleansings of 1915–1923. Like most Armenians, System’s members have relatives scattered across the globe, many in the Middle East, with guitarist Malakian the only member born in the United States. This obviously affects their sound—which leans to harmonic-minor scales and Middle Eastern–sounding cadences—and makes them an unusually strong unit. Because they are, in the end, a strangely popular subculture of four. Serj Tankian may sing like a channel-surfing opera singer on meth, but the man who greets us at his door—holding back a bounding Husky—is almost hippie-ishly laid-back, a soft-spoken 37-year-old in jeans, a black long-sleeve T-shirt and socks. He is friendly and solicitous, speaking softly, with the faintest trace of a foreign accent. His long, vulpine face is framed by a point of moustache-less goatee and a springy mop of shoulder-length curls. Atop a nearby CD shelf, a boxed set of Slayer looms menacingly over racks of jazz discs by Miles, Monk, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday. The coffee table is stacked with books and issues of The Economist, The Nation and other magazines. Apparently, Tankian has about 80 IQ points on the average nü-metal vocalist. Instead of rocking the PlayStation, he reads books—usually three at once, with Noam Chomsky a favorite. Instead of delivering pizza, his pre–rock star day job was, he explains, “developing proprietary vertical industry modular accounting software.” (Rock on!) Having met in separate groups, System’s members started practicing together in Tankian’s warehouse space in 1995, far from the gaggle of Sunset Strip. But they’d always lived quiety separate lives from most Californians. Tankian, for one, was born in Beirut, a word synonymous to most Americans with “urban war zone.” He was 8 years old when his family moved, but it’s not the kind of childhood you forget. “One thing I can say confidently is that if you’ve ever heard bombs fall in a city, you will have a different sensitivity to dropping bombs on a city,” he says. By Chris Norris, Blender, June 2005
System of a Down talk talk more politics and even more metal in the new issue of Blender on newsstands now!
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